I know most of the comments here are already and will continue to be along the lines of "they're two different things requiring two different skill sets", which

I know most of the comments here are already and will continue to be along the lines of "they're two different things requiring two different skill sets", which I agree with. But my first breakout indie game[0] was directly inspired by my Introduction To Computation course I took in my first year of CompSci at the University of Sussex. The lecturer (who was fantastic, though I forget his name 10 years on) walked us through Finite State Automata, and part of the course homework was, with pen and paper, designing finite state automata that would 'consume' strings of tokens. All pretty abstract, but drawing these circles for the state nodes and directional lines to consume the tokens, all terminating at the right end state... was really fun! They were good, solid, old-fashioned puzzles, just as much as Sodoku or something like that. I made a mental note that it might make a good video game, and four/five years later I published The Cat Machine on Steam. All it is is those same finite-state automata puzzles, wrapped in a very cat-heavy abstraction. Different coloured cats are the different tokens, the 'islands' are the states, and as the player you draw train tracks between them all to consume x number of cat-train sequences. At the end the cats all sing a congratulatory meow song. I'm pretty sure everyone just thinks its a whimsical, coloruful puzzle game but I've tricked thousands of people into doing a large chunk of 'Intro To Computer Science' homework without ever realising it! I think there's plenty of room in CompSci for a dozen more puzzle games that quite directly lift the outline of puzzles out of a textbook and into a more accessible computer game space. I know I've for sure got a few more ideas - one day I'll sit down and make The Cat Machine 2 and incorporate them into a consumer friendly product. [0] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/