Years ago, I was first transitioning into game development full time, I had lunch with my friend and collaborator Spencer. Spencer runs an indie studio, YYT Games. Naturally, the conversation turned to game ideas. I can’t help myself. I like to bounce ideas off people, which is why my nickname is Bounce House*.
I have a deep affection for scavenger hunt movies. The best and most iconic example is It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World, a madcap action comedy from the 1960s with a host of stars, including the greatly under appreciated comic genius Phil Silvers. But I’ve seen a lot of scavenger hunt movies, from the delightful Midnight Madness to the bonkersful Million Dollar Movie – both starring Eddie Deezen! The latter is a movie-length commercial for Glad trash bags. The million dollars is in a trash bag, you see!
For a long time, I’ve wanted to make a scavenger hunt game. My working premise was Clue meets the classic noir D.O.A.. Eight strangers have dinner together in a mansion. The host, who harbors secret resentment towards all his guests, informs them that they have all been poisoned. There’s one antidote vial in the mansion. They’ll have to be the first to solve a scavenger hunt to get it and survive the night!
I shared it with Spencer, who thought it was a fun narrative premise. (I first developed the idea as a comic book.) But as a commercial game, he saw problems. A player could watch a streamer solve the clues, then have no reason to buy it for themselves. There’s little replay value once you solve all the clues. You would have to write a vast amount of clues for a multi-hour experience. It was a smart analysis. Though I still thought, a little stubbornly, that players would find a scavenger hunt fun. I just needed the right project.
In January, Gwen Katz surprised me. We competed and won the public domain game jam together in 2025 with a Marx Brothers game, but we hadn’t ever discussed returning to the jam. I had a lot of fun working with Gwen on Cocoanut Hotel. I was stunned that she wanted to complete our silly hotel simulator despite her house burning down in the middle of the jam. She showed remarkable dedication to her craft.
I wasn’t sure if re-entering the jam would bring up old trauma. When she asked me if I wanted to compete again, I was excited. Gwen explained that she wanted to complete this jam without the drama. I was knee-deep in preparation for the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter and needed to focus on that… but I couldn’t help myself. The lure of the public domain was too strong.
The rule of the jam is you have to use an IP going into the public domain in January. We batted around a few ideas, but admittedly, I had a strong sense of what I wanted to do. Two prominent detectives were entering the public domain, Nancy Drew and Miss Marple. So I pitched a scavenger hunt game. Spencer was right that “scavenger hunt” is a difficult sell in today’s commercial gaming landscape, despite the genre feeling innately game-y. But for a game jam? Who cares? This game would be free. The stakes are low. Just design something fun to make!
I had not yet read the Nancy Drew books. Gwen knew them and said a scavenger hunt was very much Nancy’s vibe. We decided the player would be Nancy, wandering a house looking for clues inside objects. After a certain number of correct guesses, Nancy wins! But if she stumbled, a rival would get the win. From Gwen’s perspective as a programmer, this was a much simpler project to scope for a jam than a business simulator. As we came to realize, a proper sim requires building and fine-turning systems meant to emulate real-life factors. There are lots of fiddly details and tweaking formulas. With limited time to playtest, that’s not ideal. But a game where the core mechanic was pointing and clicking on objects to see dialogue? Gwen said piece of cake. So we got to jamming!
The most challenging part of development from my perspective was sourcing artwork. The spirit of the jam is repurposing public domain works, so we wanted authentic period illustrations. The classic illustrations in Nancy Drew books gave us neither static pictures of rooms with clickable objects nor straight-on visual novel-esque illustrations of Nancy and other characters for our intro and outro sequences. So we had to dig deep into the bowels of the Internet Archive. After extensive PDF diving, Gwen found the rooms we used in books about interior design. I found the character portraits in a Sears clothing ad. We did use the iconic Nancy Drew silhouette illustration from the books for the title screen.
Gwen built out the structure of the game in Godot. At one point, we talked about a Myst-like system where Nancy would walk through the house in a first person view, but static room illustrations from a single angle didn’t support that. So we came up with the idea of a map in the UI. Nancy could click on the map to travel from room to room. During a playtest, I realized that we needed to show the object names when mousing over a clickable object. Otherwise the player might get a clue intended to lead the player to a regular chair, and they might click on a subtly different rocking chair instead. Overall, Gwen nailed the look and game feel early in the project.
I wanted the clues to be clever in an old school way. So the puzzles matched the feel of the period. I decided the clues would rhyme and be written from the perspective of the objects themselves. A cross between Tin Pan Alley songwriting and “What Am I?” type riddles. The process was very straightforward. Gwen and I looked at the room art and listed the prominent and interesting objects (shoutout to the decanter and the dust trap). She made a CSV file. I wrote clues for every object in the CSV, giving them a hardness rating so we could scale the clues with difficulty. We decided to make a lot of objects clickable and keep track of which clues the player solved in previous games. That way it would take a few play throughs for the player to reach the end of the content.
The clues and story came to me quickly. I let the ghost of “Carolyn Keene” guide my hands on the keyboard, though my modern sense of humor peaks through. Particularly in the losing state, when Nancy just trails off mid-sentence and runs out of the house. You’re public domain now, Nancy Drew. Things are gonna get weird for you!
The biggest frustration with the project had nothing to do with the project. I was simultaneously writing the clues and story for Nancy Drew while building the website for the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter. The Nancy Drew project felt fun and enriching. The ALL-CARDS page felt like a marketing chore and it was gobbling up my free time. At one point, I told Amanda that I started Equip Story to work on projects like Nancy Drew. Now I couldn’t devote myself fully to it because I was trying to sell a book. Isn’t that the kind of capitalistic enterprise I was supposed to be moving away from? Amanda reminded me that Equip Story is a journey of creative experimentation. The idea is to figure out what works for me in a project. Very true. This conversation was my first hint that Kickstarter wasn’t going to be fun.
We beat the deadline for the jam, but that was a forgone conclusion. We were making changes to Cocoanut Hotel up to the last minute, but The House Hunter Mystery came out with time to spare. Once again, Gwen proved a great creative collaborator. I’m happy with how the game turned out, and that I finally got to make a proper scavenger hunt game. We got an honorable mention in the jam, which was very nice. I didn’t have any ego wrapped up in winning. There were so many positive comments on the Itch.io page! Players called the game “delightful,” saying they played through it multiple times, and a few of the clues were satisfyingly tricky. (I gave stuck players an extra hint to help them finish.) One player made a database to keep track of the answers. A YouTuber recorded a half hour Let’s Play, which was a big surprise. Even though he lost the game several times in a row, he still had a good time. A more polished version of the game would’ve had a hint system, but this wasn’t a polished game. It was a jam, and a fun one at that. Thanks, Nancy!
🎲 Your Turn: Did you play The House Hunter Mystery? What did you think? Have you ever participated in a game jam or an art competition? How’d it go? Any thoughts on Eddie Deezen? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or hit the orange button below to leave a comment.
*No one has ever called me that, and no one ever should.
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