Paper Trail Interview: Blending Storytelling and Spatial Puzzles Through Folds

Hey! My name’s Henry Hoffman, and I’m one of the two brothers who founded the company and came up with the idea for Paper Trail. My primary role has been leading the project, doing all the mechanics and level design, as well as a bunch of generalist indie stuff like all the character art, sound design, writing and, well, publishing the game too!

One day, my brother and I decided we wanted to work on a game together. He comes from more of an illustration background, and I’ve done a bunch of indie game dev stuff in the past, making the game Hue and some others. We got to sketching out some different ideas on pieces of paper, which originally started as a side-scrolling platformer. We were surrounded by all these pieces of paper with half-drawn level ideas on the fronts and backs, and for some reason, we decided to fold one of these papers, and lo and behold, we discovered an interesting mechanic.

We originally experimented with folding a side-scroller, but quickly found the mechanic was limited by the perspective. We then tried with a top-down perspective, and this worked really well for folding paths that the player could walk on, but it was kind of boring looking at the tops of characters heads, so we created this kind of hybrid perspective, where characters and buildings are front facing, but the ground is top down. This allowed us to create these great escheresque puzzles where the worlds merge together, creating these seamless pathways between worlds.

Really this is just an evolution of the tactile nature of paper! Although we ultimately removed spinning and rotating, as players found it super disorienting when the world rotated.

There’s a whole host of weird and wonderful characters in the world of Paper Trail! From eel-fishermen, lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks, hermits, frog-catching kids, knicker-stealing bandits, archeologists, reprobates, and everything in between! Each character is unique to an environment, and they have their own little story. Sometimes this is divulged by talking to them, and other times, between environments, we have these foldable cutscenes, which also help tell their story! They may give you hints on how to progress, tutorial new mechanics, make silly folding jokes or generally cause trouble.

When we designed the core folding mechanic, it became quickly apparent that we needed to clearly communicate walkable and unwalkable areas, so there’s no ambiguity when folding and creating pathways. Interestingly, this kind of underpinned every environment design, as it’s so fundamental to the gameplay. The first environment is these caves, which have this walkable rock, and then these unwalkable voids of nothingness. The next is a swamp, which has this grass and wooden jetties, which are walkable, then unwalkable water. This is probably most apparent in the final city environment, where you have these flat, snowy walkable rooftops, and then these unwalkable, grungy, smoke-stained building facades.

After creating these clearly defined walkable and unwalkable areas, we then looked to create a strong, unique visual identity for each environment with a bespoke colour palette, architectural influences, fauna and of course, the characters!

Each environment brings its own unique set of new mechanics related to the world! You go into caves, and there are boulders, swamps have these draggable rafts, and treetops have these teleporting doors. This becomes most apparent when you get to the ruins environment and suddenly levels are no longer just rectangular pieces of paper –they come in all sorts of different shapes.

Each of these mechanics is introduced in these environments, but once introduced, they appear throughout the rest of the game! Of course these might not fit visually with a later environment, so you’d often a mechanic repurposed and reskinned. A game mechanic with different visuals and animations can often feel like an entirely new mechanic, so this allowed us a lot of variety in the game, even if functionally the same.

Managing the difficulty curve was probably the most difficult part of the game’s development. Firstly, we did absolutely loads of playtesting. The first time we playtested the game properly, players universally hated some of the mechanics, so we went back and redesigned entire worlds from scratch. This is actually super tricky, as every time you make changes to a mechanic, it affects every level that uses the mechanic afterwards! Then, after we fixed stuff, we’d go and playtest again… and again… and again. We did this until we were confident the difficulty curve was relatively smooth. Sometimes we’d have to redesign entire levels, other times we’d just have to just place a few bushes to make a route clearer.

Next, we added two pieces of critical functionality to assist the player. The first lets you see the reverse of the paper with the click of a button. This greatly helped players with solving the puzzles in their head, instead of having to remember what was behind each fold. The next was a carefully designed hint system that allows the player to see the sequence of folds required to solve a puzzle. Often, we’d find players would get ‘fold blindness’ and they repeatedly miss the fold placement required to progress. The hint system does a great job of assisting with this, without giving away the full solution.

The biggest challenge with designing progressively more difficult puzzles was knowing when to stop. Knowing when a puzzle was too hard. As a developer, you become very familiar with the mechanics and the complexity, so you often overlook how complex some of these designs can be to new players. Some of my favourite puzzles in the game utilize very few mechanics, and look simple to solve at first sight, but quickly the player starts to think they’re impossible – until they have an ‘aha’ moment. Creating these elegant moments of difficulty without complexity was always our goal, but it’s very hard to do well!

We’ve been delighted with all the feedback post-release! We’re sitting at a strong 80 on OpenCritic, 95% positive on Steam and 4.8 out of 5 on iOS and Android! I was a little worried going into launch as I knew the core paper-folding mechanic could be a bit divisive, but the late addition of a hint system seems to have massively improved the approachability of the game, and the reception really reflects that.

Paper Trail is out now on PC, PlayStation 4 & 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and the Netflix mobile app. Players can wishlist or buy Paper Trail on Steam. Happy folding!