K: You talked some about how Blue Lacuna has mechanisms to make it easier for a player if they’re stuck – now I’m wondering if there were places where I was stuck and the game helped me out. How does that work?

AR: With the benefit of hindsight, I didn’t really take that stuff nearly far enough. There’s a terrible thing, and I hate that I was doing it with Blue Lacuna too – but there’s this terrible thing for authors where you feel like you don’t want to make your puzzles too easy and you don’t want to make it so people can skip your puzzles. In your head, you’re thinking “well what about all that hard work I put into making that puzzle?” It’s a terrible thing. I know authors, myself included, who need people to just come over and smack you upside the head and say, “No! Let people skip the damn puzzles!” because I definitely could have done more stuff with Lacuna. I should have taken story mode a lot farther because what story mode basically does is it just removes components from certain puzzles such that they’re a little easier. That’s one of the things that I wish I had done a little better. I think that there are a lot of people who selected story mode because they didn’t want to solve puzzles and I kept the puzzles in there.