Dracula: Love Kills · Sherlock Holmes & Hound of Baskervilles

Two hidden-object games at Frogwares — both linear narrative puzzlers, end-to-end design work from concept to puzzle.

After Deep Shadows this was a step into a more structured studio. The work ran almost in reverse: instead of opening the editor to shape the game by tuning numbers, design here lived first as a document, and the editor came later.

What I worked on

• Concept and pre-production. The starting point for each title — plot, setting, key story beats, recurring characters, the puzzle types we’d lean on. Ran them through approval, iterated, locked.
• Game design documents. Full GDDs for each game.
• Prescript spreadsheets. Every scene, every event, every dialogue line laid out step by step in Excel — what the player sees, what happens next, what triggers what. Hidden-object games are linear by construction, which makes one-row-per-event manageable. Scripters used the sheets to drive the game logic.
• Puzzle design. The individual mini-games — mechanic, objective, failure state, reward.

What I took from it

After Deep Shadows where nothing was written down, the change of approach was the lesson: documents force decisions early, and Excel turns out to be a surprisingly good design tool when your game is linear.