Weird example, but I think I ran into a version of this a while back while making Portal puzzles. If you haven't played Portal, it's a first-person puzzle game based around creating "portals" that warp you from one point to another, which is non-intuitive enough that figuring out how to do things that way is interesting and satisfying.
Anyway, the 2nd game had a puzzle-creator built in, so you could make up your own Portal puzzles, and I started playing around with it. Eventually after a few small-to-medium sized puzzles I decided to get ambitious and work on a really big one. So I did, starting out with a novel (to me at least) way of using the portal mechanic that I hadn't seen in the original games. After a couple hours of working on it I took a step back and thought "This is way too obvious, I need to make everything more difficult," so I did. A couple hours later: "No, still too obvious. More difficulty." Rinse and repeat.
Finally I showed it to my roommate, who couldn't even get past the first stage. I was like "No it's easy, look, you just do this and this and this and..." He gave me a look of absolute withering contempt and walked out of the room.
I rediscovered the puzzle again recently, several years after building it. Even though I remembered the basic principles that it was built on, it still took me like 6 hours to solve it. I don't think it was that obvious after all.
Oh my god I feel like everything I write is obvious thank you so much for writing this
Weird example, but I think I ran into a version of this a while back while making Portal puzzles. If you haven't played Portal, it's a first-person puzzle game based around creating "portals" that warp you from one point to another, which is non-intuitive enough that figuring out how to do things that way is interesting and satisfying.
Anyway, the 2nd game had a puzzle-creator built in, so you could make up your own Portal puzzles, and I started playing around with it. Eventually after a few small-to-medium sized puzzles I decided to get ambitious and work on a really big one. So I did, starting out with a novel (to me at least) way of using the portal mechanic that I hadn't seen in the original games. After a couple hours of working on it I took a step back and thought "This is way too obvious, I need to make everything more difficult," so I did. A couple hours later: "No, still too obvious. More difficulty." Rinse and repeat.
Finally I showed it to my roommate, who couldn't even get past the first stage. I was like "No it's easy, look, you just do this and this and this and..." He gave me a look of absolute withering contempt and walked out of the room.
I rediscovered the puzzle again recently, several years after building it. Even though I remembered the basic principles that it was built on, it still took me like 6 hours to solve it. I don't think it was that obvious after all.
I don’t think this is particularly worth watching but it was what popped into my head so ... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ePyOsgkzg
Your writing keeps saving mine. Thank you for this.