Hidden Object Adventure Thriller
- Gamedesign & Production
- Involvement: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
- Release: 2011
Campfire Legends: The Last Act, the third and last part of the Campfire Legends trilogy, a hidden object adventure with a thrilling story.
After helping out with testing the second part I was asked to develop the third part, which had to tie the story of the previous parts together. This game definitely was a challenge to develop.
What made the Campfire Legends series stand out from the competition was the fact that the hidden objects that the players were looking for made sense in their context and were all integrated into the puzzles and the story. A typical example is the phone puzzle in the beginning of the game, where the protagonist just crashed her car and desperately want to make a phone call. During the crash, her phone broke in several pieces and we need to find the phone and puzzle the pieces back together, before we can make the call.
The Last Act was also the first game where I was directly involved with developing the story, collaborating and directing the writer., making sure we told everything in such a way that it allowed us to mix it with gameplay.
But what I found especially challenging was the fact that I was directing the Absolutist team far away in the Ukraine and the writer on the other side of the world in the US, from our studio in the Netherlands. I had lead a team earlier while working at Playlogic, but having a team offsite required me to adopt a producer side next to the creative director and game designer side.
To facilitate a smooth process I made sure I documented my designs effectively and clearly. After I tested the previous part, I had a list of improvements that needed to be developed and changed to the underlying system, which I made sure was also documented in a flowchart before development began. I sketched all environments and created an interactive presentation, so the developers could “play the game” and “walk” through the environment in PowerPoint. All puzzles were paper prototyped and eventually I made videos of harder to explain features of the game, which the team in the Ukraine found to work out perfectly.
All in all, there were a lot of “firsts” in this project which taught me a great deal, about story, tension, puzzle design and leading the production and managing colleagues overseas.
Tj'ièn 