My Letterbox
This is a story of my personal experiences of restarting a new game project with a new idea I’m quite excited about.
Letterboxing combines two hobbies I am interested in and adds a bit more I’m quite excited about. Orienteering + Geocaching with a dash of puzzles and mystery. You are given a starting point and are told a series of clues to help you navigate your way to the final hidden cache. It’s a real life treasure hunt! And it’s been around since the mid 1800’s, well before GPS obviously. It also adds a unique element of rubber stamps that I can see being very useful in my game presentation.
Image from Letterboxing.org
Now imagine you arrive at a cabin with a puzzle you need to solve to find the location of a letterbox, somewhere in the surrounding woods. In order to solve the puzzle you need to collect clues by solving a series of smaller puzzles to find other letterboxes. Like an escape room, there may be multiple puzzles to solve before you can progress to the next phase and ultimately to find the final solution and final box. Dozens of Letterboxes and other things to discover in the wilderness… Some might require following pictorial clues like a treasure map, or you’re given coordinates and need to use orienteering skills to get there accurately. That’s the pitch which has got me motivated! I recently finished Blue Prince and I absolutely loved the way they handled puzzles and progression. Truly inspiring game.
Conveniently enough, FABs free asset for the month happened to be a cabin in the woods (image at the top)… what a serendipitous start!
I began my development by trying to put together some new letterbox related tech. Firstly a box that I could interact with to open and a close. My first line trace! heh. Since these boxes will for the most part be hiding, I needed precision in the first person view when a player hovers over a box instead of using proximity colliders like I did with the orienteering checkpoints. With that working I made it so that the boxes contents would pop out on open so that you could interact with them. For now I thought they should just include 3 things. A logbook for your stamp to go on when you interact with it (and it will have stamps from other people that have done the course in the past which might be a useful clue). A stamp from the box to add to your logbook (also would make for a good potential clue for a larger puzzle). And a clue card that would hold any info for whatever puzzle I may have associated with that box. Obviously more could be added and it might be worthwhile to develop an interaction system but that is where I’m at so far.
Placeholder art of an open letterbox, clue card, stamp (axe) and journal.
My next step will be a stamp system that allows the player to add found stamps to their journal as well as browse the boxes journal and add their stamp.
I foresee a lot of puzzle making in my future and a lot of level design as well with interesting POIs that could be used in treasure maps. But mainly, I feel like I have a much better vision of the final product. One that sounds a whole heck of a lot more fun! Time to binge treasure hunt movies, play more puzzles games, do more escape rooms, and do some IRL letterboxing, geocaching, and orienteering!
Cheesy aside: In a way, developing this game is like my own letterbox. The journey will be filled with exciting twists and turns and hopefully in the end I will find what I am looking for and put a stamp on it.
