Haven

Game Designer | Puzzle Designer

Haven mini documentary created post-run by UChicago's College

Welcome to Haven!

Haven is a web-based visual novel-style multiplayer roleplaying game designed over the summer of 2024 for the University of Chicago. Haven sought to introduce incoming freshman to many of the new experiences and opportunities they would have as a student at the University of Chicago. This included compelling discussions and interactions with classmates, collaborative puzzle solving, educational minigames, managing a class schedule, and more! It was built from the ground up over the course of roughly 10 weeks, with the game rolling out gradually by chapters over three separate releases within that timeline.

The game takes place within Haven Academy, a lively solarpunk higher education university separated into four shoals, which represent the different aspects of learning. Artificial Island represents STEM fields, Oceanic Island represents the humanities, Tidal Island represents the political sciences, and Coral Island represents the arts. Each island is stylistically and thematically different, having their own UI elements, music, classroom design, font, and color palette.

Logistically, the game was split into 5 chapters released over three different release dates. Chapters 1 and 2 introduced players to the game and its world as a more singleplayer, narrative-driven experience, Chapter 3 is an open-world exploration of Haven Academy, and Chapters 4 and 5 served as a return-to-form conclusion for the players. Due to Chapter 3 being the bulk of the Puzzle Designer team's contribution, that is what I will be focusing on here.

What Did I Do?

Because of our small team, I filled a couple of different niches throughout the course of the game. I was hired as one of three people on the Puzzle Design team, but as the game evolved, my job shifted into more of a general Game Designer position. Eventually it went through another evolution and it was decided that music and sound design were a larger component than expected, so I additionally took on this role. This page will detail my experience as a Puzzle and Game Designer; please visit this page to view and hear my work as the composer and head sound designer.

A fellow Puzzle Team member and I prototyping a game based on gerrymandering

In total, Haven's puzzle designers were responsible for populating the world of Haven Academy with various puzzles and minigames that the players could interact with and solve either individually or collaboratively. In total, our team produced 37 puzzles and minigames, with another 12 designed by a full-time puzzle designer that was contracted and worked loosely with our team.

Our team designed two different types of puzzles and games: Island Puzzles, which could be found in and around the different islands, and were able to be completed at any time throughout the game, and Classroom Puzzles, which were puzzles that were meant to be done collaboratively in a classroom setting, and were scheduled to go live during certain times throughout the course of the game.

Our prototyping whiteboard wall, constructed roughly 1 week into the project. These boards were filled and refilled again and again.

Rapid Designing

Because so many puzzles and minigames needed to be designed for this game, every single day for the first couple of weeks was a shotgun of ideas that were discussed, iterated on, rapidly playtested, and then added to a list which would be later culled to keep the best ideas.

There were a couple of different metrics that we were looking for for a game, based on our narrative goals. We knew there were going to be a lot of them, so we wanted games that were fairly easy to understand but had deeper strategy. Our ideal game also had some kind of educational mechanic, as they would be placed within classroom settings or around this campus space. This led to puzzles based on concepts like combinatorics and gerrymandering. Finally, and most obviously, we were looking for our games to be plain old fun.

A pitch I made for a maze that needed to rotate to solve. Initially, walls would rotate together, but iterating on this concept, it became smoother and easier to understand for the walls to rotate on axes.

An initial physical prototype of the game, now named Mouse Maze. This was prototyped using a chessboard and generic wooden pieces, which were manually rotated. This test also introduced potential power-ups.

The finished, shipped version of Mouse Maze. The game shipped with 20 pre-generated levels that I hand-picked from a list of randomly generated ones, placing power-ups manually.

Constant Collaboration

With a team of 3 full-time adult staff and 12 student interns, this position required quite a bit of self-management. Additionally, all of the interns knew what the goal was, and though we all had our own set roles, there was a lot of encouragement to collaborate and interact with other roles. Puzzle Designers talked to the Narrative team to integrate their puzzles into the story, Programmers worked with Game Designers to bring a game concept to life, etc. One personal experience in this collaboration that really stood out to me was the development of the Nanoswarm Puzzle, found on the Artificial Island.

A design meeting between the Puzzle Team and the Programming Team

Each member of the Narrative Team was responsible for writing one of the four shoals. Around the fourth week of the internship, the writer for Artificial Island approached the Puzzle & Game Design Team because she had written a set of puzzles into the island and wanted to talk about what those would look like. Just having finished another project, I volunteered to jump on this.

For the design of the puzzle, she gave me a few parameters:
- There were 7 puzzles across the island, each of which coming with a piece of a puzzle which when assembled would come together to form an 8th meta-puzzle. This meant the puzzle needed to have seven segments and needed to be replicable but different each time.
- She didn't want the puzzle to have any text.
- She wanted the puzzle to involve colors in an interesting way as part of its solve.

Narratively, solving each of these puzzles would unlock a small swarm of a hivemind intelligent robot called the Nanoswarm which would help the player out in their navigation through the island.

The Nanoswarm Puzzle

In my initial design, I wanted to make something that seemed both visually interesting and something that could plausibly be found as the lock on a box. The restraint of seven segments led me to a hexagonal shape, having six trapezoidal segments and a smaller core in the middle. Adding color, I thought it could be interesting to have these outer nodes be different colors from each other, and the puzzle be to put them into their correct spots.

As for the mechanics of solving, I took inspiration from circuit connection puzzles. Being found throughout the island of the physical sciences, mathematics, and technology, I thought it would be fitting to have the nodes being connected through wires. The players would need to place each of the nodes so that a button could be pressed which would power and illuminate the internal hexagon face of the same color. The puzzle is completed after all of the internal faces had been illuminated.

With this in mind, I came back the next day with construction paper, markers, and scissors and got to work making physical prototypes. Pretty quickly, I ran into an issue, which was that if I just drew the lines randomly, the puzzle would be extremely easy because rather than being solved logically it would instead be reduced to a simple jigsaw. As I wanted a larger depth as well as a more unique experience, I solved this issue by measuring out spots on each of the nodes and their connection points to each other and to the puzzle's core.

After completing the first of these puzzles (top left), I took a picture of it to keep its solution and then scrambled it, waited a bit to forget the colors, and then attempted to solve it. Very quickly, I found out that this was nearly impossible to do correctly. Sometimes one line would make it all the way to the correct end but that didn't necessarily mean that all of the nodes were correct, and there was no way to solve it without stumbling into the correct solution.

I figured the lines were potentially too long, so I reduced the average length of each cable before reaching the core, and tried again (test A). This had the unintentional effect of changing the amount of points where cables actually went through. After playtesting this version, I figured out that I was able to solve the puzzle by matching where similar intersection points met as a starting point and then lining them up with each other and with the core in order to match the lines.

Test A a success, I iterated again with tests B and C (see above) to mess with the amount of connection points, taking into account the specific types of connections. To make puzzles easier, I could ensure that there was only one spot where a given node could connect to the core, and to make them harder, I could ensure that there were more similar connections than less. For example, in this finished version on the right, the red node could connect on its right with blue, orange, or green because they have a similar layout, and it could connect to the core where it currently is, as well as where blue is. This example is more difficult because there is no guaranteed position to start from. I found these playtests to be successful both when I tried them and when I had others on the team try them.

With the idea solidified, it was time to digitize it! Because we had so many things being developed at once, I designed all of the assets and hand-drew and scrambled each of the puzzles. The shapes seen in the finalized project were added as a secondary measure of identification for any colorblind puzzlers.

Please enjoy some extra pictures!

Haven was such a rewarding experience in so many different ways. As my first real large-scale project that I was part of, I learned a ton about the front-to-end process of developing a game. In total, the game consisted of 49 puzzles & minigames split over 5 chapters. We had over 1000 registered users, over 135,000 words of text, over 2600 sound files (which I was solely responsible for producing and managing), and a full-length game soundtrack consisting of 12 original tracks, which I composed.

This project allowed me to dip my toes into everything that I am interested in exploring along the process of game design. I made puzzles and minigames that I had never seen done before and carried them through the full process from impetus to implementation. I created environments with sound and wrote music for a real video game, not just the one in my head. I discussed game design, user interaction, marketing, and the process of a team project with incredibly smart and talented peers and professors and extracted lessons that I carry with me.

Haven allowed me to be part of a story that has helped and stuck with players. It has been so awesome meeting the new first-years after working on this project and being able to tell them that I was involved in making one of their first bits of interaction with the university and hearing how much fun they had with it. It has truly been such a wondrous, delightful experience, and one I will take with me into all of my future projects.

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