Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter

A console and PC investigation adventure at Frogwares — five self-contained cases, vertically owned by individual designers. I ran two of the five.

The Sherlock Holmes line was Frogwares’ flagship. Devil’s Daughter pushed the franchise harder on cinematic quality and broadened the platform reach to PC, PS4, and Xbox One. The case-based structure made full vertical ownership possible: one designer concept-to-production per case.

What I worked on

• Two of five cases, end-to-end. Full game design — features, puzzles, investigation logic, pacing, balance — for both crime cases I owned.
• Narrative and system design. Character beats, dialogue structure, what the player sees in each scene, what each clue does, how deductions resolve into a verdict.
• Prescript spreadsheets. Same approach as the earlier Frogwares hidden-object work, scaled up for full investigation flow — every event, every dialogue line, every state change, in order. Scripters used the sheets to build the gameplay logic.
• Production planning and management. Running each case’s production through art, scripting, animation, and audio — tracking dependencies, unblocking, shipping.

What I took from it

Owning a vertical case (design and production both) is a different shape of work from owning systems across a whole game. The design quality is bounded by your own taste; the schedule is bounded by your ability to keep five other disciplines moving in parallel. The first format scales horizontally; the second scales vertically. You need to be comfortable with both before stepping into lead work.