So, I have the player starting out in front of a large, hideous structure with stairs leading down. From this starting area, the northwest leads to a ravine with a colleague you can ask questions or tell him things. The area around the structure are dense woods with no other buildings around.

South of the starting area is a cliff base.

Going down into the structure brings you to a hallway which connects to a circular room with an altar and an alcove. Going into the alcove, you see it is covered with roots and examining the roots reveals a lever that moves the altar revealing a stairway further down.

So, the room below, the "Dark Shrine", is bathed in a sort of sentient darkness that even prevents normal light from shining through. The darkness itself is not dangerous but it can cover up areas so you can't see them - in this case, a very deep hole on the floor that is fatal should you stumble into it.

You need to find this contraption that I call a Fulgurator to place on your normal lamp to Will (Will is my world's fancy way of saying 'enchant') the lantern into an even more powerful Emberlight (another fancy word for the stone within the lamp that acts as a lightsource) lantern.

I'm terrible with creating puzzles, so I'm trying to think.... Where should I place the Fulgurator. It has to be in one of the areas/rooms before you go down into "Dark Shrine". I don't want to make it too easy to find, either. In fact, when you find the Fulgurator, it's called a 'contraption' since your character doesn't know what it's used for until you talk to your colleague by the ravine.

I want to be somewhat clever but at the same time keep to logic. So in other words, I don't want the contraption just laying on the ground by the cliff side or sitting in the circular altar room in plain site.

TL;DR: I want to hide a mechanism that enchants a lantern. I want it in a logical place but also not too easy to find.

Any suggestions on making it harder to find?

Random thoughts...

First, given your setup, you don't have many places to hide something. Just an observation.

There are a couple of interesting things to me: your colleague and the altar.

Suggestion 1:
Have your colleague tell you how to get the contraption. How you get him to tell you, I don't know. But he would tell you to do something like "go to room X and do this", where "this" is something a person might not think to do. Or ever think to do.

Suggestion 2:
Hide it in plain sight. Don't call it a contraption. Maybe it appears as a chalice with odd runes markings on the altar. If you take it to your colleague, he tells you "Hey, you found the Fulgurator! If you press the runes in this sequence, you can upgrade your lamp." etc. Or you place it inside the lamp with the light source, that sort of thing.

Suggestion 3:
Have a book on the altar. Reading the book, you find it contains descriptions of/prayers to the various gods who could be prayed to at that altar. One of them is the the "god of light". If you pray to this god (by name) at the altar, then the contraption falls from somewhere above.

Off the top of my head (well, after some thought)...

Can't believe I forgot to mention the description of the contraption in my post.

Anyways, it looks like a skeletal hand. Basically, a mechanical skeletal hand. When it's used, it grips on to the lantern. So I need to figure out where to put a mechanical skeletal hand (black in color) about the size of an average lantern.

Oh, there's no gods of light that can be brought forth at that altar.

I was just thinking outside the box... lol

If it looks like a skeletal hand, then perhaps there can be a statue/engraving on/in a wall somewhere. When you look closely at the stone figure, you see that the hand looks... odd. As if it doesn't match properly. In fact, it looks skeletal. You find you can remove the hand from the statue/figure. But what is it good for...?

kind of stating the obvious here, but anyways:

for puzzle ideas, just play a lot of games (quest and~or non-quest games) with puzzles. See how other people do them. I haven't played many quest games yet, but as for two NES games with good puzzles that I really like are Maniac Mansion and Shadowgate.

(obviously there's an abundant list of many many many more puzzle games that are out there as examples you can use~study...)

HegemonKhan wrote:kind of stating the obvious here, but anyways:

for puzzle ideas, just play a lot of games (quest and~or non-quest games) with puzzles. See how other people do them. I haven't played many quest games yet, but as for two NES games with good puzzles that I really like are Maniac Mansion and Shadowgate.

(obviously there's an abundant list of many many many more puzzle games that are out there as examples you can use~study...)

Also Dejavu and Uninvited were also good games in my opinion, although very clunky for the NES. They do not have a way to move the pointer around as easily as I thought they should. Although I think they fixed that in the Game Boy versions... hitting Select I think made it jump to the next category or something instead of that long slow crawl across the screen...

Anyway, more to the point, you should have family and friends player test it first, before posting or at the very least announce it is for player testing if you need feed back on the puzzles. Maybe even keep the puzzles separate from the main game, as in post the puzzles in question separately so when people player test them, you are not giving away much and then you can also tweak the puzzles just a bit for either better playability or so those who had played before can still play something new or not to give the secrets away too quickly. Game makers do that all the time.

Also I thought about making my own thread, but I might as well use yours. Remember this is all text based or assuming yours is anyway. How you describe something, someone else may not catch those particular clues or cues. Playing a picture game, at least more to me, is easier to understand then reading a large chunk of text or a very peculiar worded small one and trying to figure out all the different ways of doing things in your particular game... Some games are confusing or straight up mind blowing and I generally skip over those if I have to fight with the interface itself. But I would think having the beginning of the game with the easiest puzzles and have it gradually get harder, as was discussed in another thread, would be the best thing. And I liked Jay's 2nd suggestion the best out of his three, but of course do what ever makes sense to you and your game world.

as been stated here or in other threads:

the hardest part of the game, at least in terms of puzzles, should be the middle of the game, and here's why:

hard puzzles at beginning: no one wants to play your game, as if they're immediately stuck trying to figure out a puzzle before getting much progression in the game, they're turned off, and will find another game that they can actually play (get far into it).

hard puzzles at the end: unless you're talking about the last boss of the game (or if that boss or beating the game, requires you to complete a final puzzle), which we aren't (well, not about a non-puzzle boss, anyways), people want to beat the game, to see the ending, and also, they're probably already extremely fatigued of doing puzzles throughout the game already (N64's Zelda: Ocarina of Time: I got sick of doing their complicated dungeons near the end of the game... stopped at the desert~time dungeon... haven't beat it, the game, yet, lol).

If beating the game (or the last boss of the game) requires completing a final puzzle, this can be okay, though you don't want it so hard, as people will want to be able to complete the game, after spending so much time on it to get to the end (though you don't want it so easy too, as that is a big let down, you want it to be a challenge to beat the game, but you want to be able to beat it too).

thus having the hardest puzzles at the middle of the game, is best, because: you've generated enough intimacy of them with the game, that they're interested in playing out the entire game, but nor have they burnt out either yet.

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the other option, probably the best option, is to simply have all puzzles (or the hardest ones anways) be completely optional, separated from the game progression.

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lastly, a game should have help and~or instructions, especially as to what typed-in input commands exist and~or different things to try in the game.

heck, you could even have a progressive help system, which will ultimately tell you how to do a puzzle or whatever, so people can use it to complete the game~puzzle, if they're just completely stumped.