This project was created as the final product of the course, Designing Treasure Hunts: An Earth Day Celebration, taught by game design professor Ira Fay. The goal of this course was to create an immersive and fun treasure hunt all themed around earth day, which is when we held the treasure hunt. I worked as a puzzle designer in a team of 21 people over the course of about 10 weeks. You are helping out the Phoenix Coalition, a group of environmentalists trying to rehabilitate the earth after it's been overused and depleted of resources (somewhat similar to the Pixar film, WALL-E). When you sign up, you are given the choice to take one of three paths, each marked with a theme and a color. The green path is themed around obtaining clean air, water, and a food supply. The blue path is meant to generate power and establish a source of renewable resources. The red path is to help endangered species of plants and animals repopulate and shed their endangered status. Each path consisted of seven puzzles and had the same starting and ending points. As a member of the puzzle design team, my job was to create my own puzzles for use in the treasure hunt, as well as curate and improve puzzles submitted by members of the class who were not part of the puzzle design team.

The task of designing a logo for the treasure hunt was given to Lyle Broughton and myself. The prompt given to us was to create an image of a phoenix coming out of a tree in order to tie in with the theme of the Phoenix Coalition. In the end, the logo that I designed was chosen for use in the treasure hunt and was added to most of the puzzles, advertising, and used as stickers meant to signify which path players were on.

Because of the size and structure of the class, each student was only allowed to have one puzzle in the final treasure hunt. This was my puzzle that I chose to put in the final treasure hunt, so it's the most developed of the puzzles that I made. For this puzzle, players would come across 12 flower tags along a wall that each have an image of a flower and a letter of the alphabet on them. There is a poster nearby that gives players some instructions on how to identify traits which only invasive flower species have. Upon eliminating all flowers from the list that have an invasive trait, the players are left with flowers D, E, and H, which can be rearranged into EDH. EDH stands for Emily Dickinson Hall, which is a well known structure at Hampshire College.

A puzzle that was never developed past the concept stage. The player is presented with a grid with letters in each corner and a few pipes scattered around. The pipes found on the grid have a red outline around them, which signifies that they can not be moved. On the top of the grid is the quantity of each type of pipe that you are given. You must create a pipeline that travels through all pipes. Once that is done, reading the letters from right to left along each section of the pipe spells out EMILYDICKINSONHALL, or Emily Dickinson Hall.

This puzzle also never made it past the concept stage, but it was more hypothetical and could not have a digital version easily made. We had a discussion in class that we could include some simple physical challenges as mental breaks in each route or as extra challenges to earn hints. This concept came out of that discussion. The general idea of this puzzle was to have players use some kind of tool to find objects in a small pool. The two ideas that stuck the most were using dark, murky water and using sand. The one with water would have players using small fishing poles with magnets on the end to fish out soda cans from the water to clean it up. To pass the challenge you would need to collect around 5 cans. The one with sand has practically the same idea, however the players would use shovels to dig for cans in the sand filled pool. In the end, no physical challenges were added, but I thought this would be a fun change of pace for players if we did end up using physical challenges to break up the puzzle flow in the treasure hunt.