Senior Project - Obsideo

Big Fish Games is the world's leading online destination for casual games and interactive entertainment. Based in Seattle, Washington, Big Fish Games offers "A New Game Every Day!", driving over a million downloads per day and 25 million unique visitors per month at their online portal, BigFishGames.com. Big Fish Games Studios develops and publishes some of the industry's leading brands including Mystery Case Files, Hidden Expedition, Azada, and Fairway Solitaire.

With an eye on expanding the casual games market, Big Fish Games is committed to forming unique partnerships with developers and companies to help them create, distribute, and publish the best casual games to the masses. Combining their dedication to the casual games market and the opportunity to teach similarly passionate students the ins and outs of the game industry, Obsideo was one of Big Fish Games' first steps in partnering with the educational community.

The aim of this project was to supply a game prototype to address the problem of an age and gender gap in the adventure game genre by designing and creating a fully-functional mini-/mid-sized first-person adventure game for the PC. Haunted: Mystery at White Manor was based on the unknown ending of an historical tale about the lost treasure of Treasure Mountain, in which the player must solve a mysterious haunting of a 150-year-old mansion located in the Colorado foothills.

The project team was responsible for designing, developing, debugging and optimizing the proposed game, which was implemented for Windows with the capability of being expanded to Mac in the future. The Blender Game Engine was utilized due to its availability as Open Source software, its 3D modeling capabilities, and the various existing code and libraries for basic/common procedures and libraries contained within the game engine itself. This allowed the team to work on the programming aspects, using Python scripting, that were unique to this project.

Features of the game include an intuitive user interface, an interactive and traversable 3D environment, and three puzzles. Obsideo was designed to appeal to older teen and adult women by incorporating more challenging puzzles/clues and a robust plot and to compel the player to think in a more intellectual, logical, and unique manner. The goal was to produce a quality game prototype which has the potential to be expanded into both a marketable, full-sized game with a series of "haunted" storylines.