EXIT: Trial of the Griffin

Description

The second digital adaptation of the award-winning "EXIT - The Game" board game series for iOS, Android and Steam. In this escape room experience, players will be called for aid to the haunted castle Greifenstein and unravel a mystery surrounding the countess. Twenty unique multi-layered puzzles make for four to six hours of gameplay.

My Contribution

• Puzzle Iteration I joined the team around the 50% mark of production. At this point most of the puzzles already existed on paper or even in-engine. I was tasked with polishing and iterating those puzzles. For this I played through each puzzle (or its documentation) and paid close attention especially to elements that might make the puzzle confusing or harder in unintended ways. In the next step I created solutions for the found problems and proposed them to the team. In the later stages of the project I organized and executed playtest sessions with external playtesters and used my observations and their feedback to further fine-tune the puzzle experience.
• Puzzle Design Some puzzles needed a major rework. In these cases I got to create puzzles basically from scratch. The position within the linear game progression was always set so I had to create for a given target difficulty. Additional constraints like specific items or game mechanics to use were given by the story or previous/next puzzle in line. Two examples of puzzles that were mainly created by me can be found in the linked video clips.
  • The objective of the skulls and bones puzzle is to put each skull and bone piece on the wall into the right orientation. The journal page is used to translate the numbers on the mechanical skull item into the correct answer. An additional puzzle layer is that the bottom left slot of the mechanical skull shows multiple symbols. Here the player needs to do some simple addition to get on the right track.
  • The second puzzle shown is named "Castle Tour" and has multiple layers. It is placed near the end of the game and we wanted the player to revisit all locations they have uncovered while playing. On the ouija board a hidden icon indicates where the player needs to go next. If all locations are visited in the correct order, the puzzle is solved. At one point the player will need to find out the name of a ghost to unlock a direct connection between two locations. The name of the ghost reveals itself in fragments when examining an amulet that was given to the player at the beginning of the puzzle.
• QA In the final phase of production, when all puzzles were done and polished, I spent my time hunting for bugs and documenting detailed reproduction steps.