Haiku Games' Adventure Escape Mysteries Series
Role: Game Designer at Haiku Games (puzzle design, narrative design)
Games: Haunted Hunt, Cursed Crown, Trapmaker 2, Pirate's Treasure, and The Covenant.
Play Haunted Hunt: iOS or Android
Play Adventure Escape Mysteries: iOS or Android
For each of these 2D adventure games I wrote the overall story, designed the puzzles and gameplay in Photoshop, designed new mechanic systems (shapeshift, magic, and character sacrifice choices), and wrote art + developer specs.
Haunted Hunt - Puzzle Design
In Haunted Hunt, the player can shapeshift into different animals - each with a unique mechanic for puzzle solving. In Chapter 5 the player can switch between human and cat forms, applying a greenish, grayscale "cat vision" overlay to the 2D environment. This reveals ghosts and other hidden items, including several ghostly gears needed for this clock repair puzzle. The player must line up the color segments to win, but the ghostly gears are only visible in cat form - where the color information from the human view is lost.
Human view
Cat view
I prototyped this puzzle in Photoshop by creating linked color and grayscale layers for each gear so they could be dragged together. Overlay layers were then toggled to simulate the cat and human vision filters. This helped us validate that the puzzle was the appropriate difficulty for the middle of the game (chapter 5 of 8) before committing to final art from RetroStyle Games.
Cursed Crown - New Features
In Cursed Crown, Princess Nimue lives in a fantasy world. She learns that a poisonous miasma is about to overtake her kingdom. Meet a living tree, discover how to cast magical spells, and decide the fate of your kingdom. Can Nimue make the hard choices needed to save her people?
New Magic System: The player can cast spells on objects in the world to progress and learn lore. There are 6 spells that the player collects by solving spell book puzzles throughout their journey: Remove Rust, Grow Plants, Speak with Animals, Freeze Water, X-ray Vision, and Sleep. Each was designed to make the player feel powerful and clever while minimizing development resources.
Flower is larger
Casting the Grow Spell
New Choices System: In chapters without spell books, the player must make difficult choices that have immediate and long term consequences. Choices leverage the player's connection with game characters, their sense of morality, and a chance to visually change the player character. These choices branch into 8 unique endings.
