Hi, I’m in the process of creating a puzzle game (think something like a Rubik’s cube). The puzzle is solvable since the shuffling is comprised of random (but legal) actions. However, even in the simplest mode of the game I personally struggle to solve it after like 5 shuffling actions, and I’m completely lost if I shuffle it fully (~20).

In puzzle games attempts I’ve done before, although the game looked hard at first glance, after a few tries I usually ended up finding a simple trick which “bypassed” the supposed complexity and turned it trivial.

I’ve added the possibility of deciding the number of shuffles in case it’s actually too hard to approach, but I’m afraid I’m overthinking it and maybe I’m just really dumb, and perhaps like in the other cases, I simply haven’t found the “trick” yet.

I short, how do you go about deciding the difficulty for something like this? To give you the same analogy, assume you’re the creator of the Rubik’s cube, how would you go about deciding whether it should be a cube or a pyramid, if it should have 9 elements per face or 16? That sort of thing.

I could try to solve it by brute force, but I’m not sure it would give any meaningful hints