An indie, volunteer VR horror/puzzle game made by a group of local game developers in Lexington, Kentucky (RunJumpDev), “Mortimer’s Mansion” was created over a span of several months in the year of 2016, and is scheduled to be presented at this year’s LexPlay gaming convention at the end of October of 2016.  I was tasked with various jobs, one including designing and creating a specific, themed puzzle (out of many) for the game.

These are the last set of models I created from scratch (both meshes and textures), and were eventually used in game we have been creating.  I have yet to actually speak about this puzzle in particular, so let’s do just that!

In the beginning, each puzzle our team were to create needed to fit into a specific time in Mortimer’s life, growing up from a weird kid to an absolute mad man.  My puzzle, in particular, was supposed to represent the time of his life where he began to really delve into the aspect of perfecting and even creating new life.  Right away I knew that I wanted to create something that had to do with the creation of a chimera (or multiple chimeras, if possible).  I began to draw out the puzzle on Photoshop, and came up with a puzzle that included three specimen bodies (each were of a different species: like hamster, snake, and kiwi bird), and a variation of different taxidermy animal pieces one would have to match with the bodies (that were actually placed in dissection pans, held down by dissection pins).  At first, the hamster only needed a tail (in which you’d have to figure out of three tails, which would fit), the kiwi bird needed new arms and a tail (which in this case had to do with making the kiwi bird fly, hence putting the wings and tail feathers of other birds would suffice), and then the snake was going to need arms, legs, and also a tail (which for this specimen, it obviously would need more pieces attached than the other bodies.

To make a long story short, we eventually had to trim down the three specimens to only one (the snake was the victor), and try to focus on making the puzzle more succinct, yet still engaging.  I feel it turned out wonderful and I can’t wait for people at this year’s LexPlay to also enjoy what I (and the others) have created!

An indie, volunteer VR horror/puzzle game made by a group of local game developers in Lexington, Kentucky (RunJumpDev), “Mortimer’s Mansion” was created over a span of several months in the year of 2016, and is scheduled to be presented at this year’s LexPlay gaming convention at the end of October of 2016.  I was tasked with various jobs, one including designing and creating a specific, themed puzzle (out of many) for the game.

As the project went along, we gained people and ideas, and eventually had to trim away some ideas because some of said people had left for various reasons, as well; but the core team of about 8 people or so held firm and fought through the entirety of the game production process.  We first started with a game that would take place in various rooms throughout a mansion, involving a player and about 6 “playable NPCs” that would be played by real people and would physically interact with the person with the Vive headset on.  We came to find out that was a bit ambitious, and scaled it down to a 6-player, 12-puzzle, 60 minute experience in a single room (a wing of a giant library), with a hidden room that would eventually open for the players at one point in the game.  This version, too, had to be trimmed down a tad, which made it into the final version we’ll be presenting at this year’s video game convention called LexPlay; where the game is now a single-player, 15 minute, 4-random-puzzle experience that will also add back some narrative that we had lost in the 2nd version.

In the next (and last) post about these models, I’ll explain some of the puzzles that made it into final version, and more specifically about the puzzle that I created and have been posting about!