Hi all!

I’d like to talk a little about how I made a case/level for the game. It’s a heist in a museum in which Cleo has to figure out who did it and how (and for those of you who enjoy my Oddjobs games, yes I love museum heists enough to do them twice!). I wanted to write an “impossible” heist where no one even finds out that something was stolen. In fact, I wanted the security of the museum to be so tight that nothing ever could be stolen.

I did this in two stages. First, I thought about the perfect security system. I thought of all the ways someone could get into the museum and steal something and added a security measure that could stop it. Steal something after hours? Make sure the museum cannot be entered at night. Get a job as a guard and then steal something? The museum has a very strict screening process and they won’t let you work at the exhibition unless you’ve worked there for 15 years. You get the gist. So this is what I came up with: The museum could never be entered after hours, there would be no windows that you could climb through, the exhibition would be guarded day and night, the guards would be loyal and never help the thieves. Everyone and everything going in and out of the exhibition would be checked thoroughly. They’d have all sorts of metal detectors that could find anything suspicious even if you decided to swallow the stolen item. There would be weight sensors that set off an alarm if you so much as touched something.

Great! That was easy enough! In the second stage, however, I had to try and “become” the thief and figure out a way to bypass the security. This was a little like playing chess with myself. After all, I had already designed security measures for every way I could think of to steal something. This took me a while and I had to fight the urge to get rid of some of the safeguards I’d thought of or at least make them more lax. I felt this was the key to writing a satisfying mystery so taking the time to do it would be worth it. I won’t spoil exactly how I did it, of course, but I’ll just say crime is hard!

Now that I had written down a heist that I was happy with, it was time to draw the environment art. I hadn’t really thought about what was going to be stolen or why yet. I just wanted a random exhibition at a museum as the setting for the case. I chose an exhibition of artifacts from the Bronze Age on a whim. I started looking up Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations and made up my own Mesopotamian-inspired civilization of Elir. I thought about what the Elirians were like, what they did all day, the objects they used, what gods they worshipped, what games they played. I even came up with an Elirian creation myth - “Nim”, the sleeping goddess dreamed into existence, “Kur”, the god of imagination and “Kum”, the goddess of creation. Kur and Kum together made “Inkir” who created the world. Here’s a depiction of the world’s creation:

Once I’d decided on what the exhibition was going to be, I started looking up real world artifacts from that period. The Met Museum has an excellent database where you can look at and use images of thousands of public-domain artworks as part of its Open Access Initiative.

I found a really neat Egyptian game from 1814–1805 B.C. called Game of Hounds and Jackals and used it to create my own game of hares and foxes. Just for fun I made up a set of rules that were a combination of rules from Hounds and Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.

I thought these animal-shaped weights looked adorable, so I made my own:

For some reason, I felt drawn to items with animals on them so when I came across the Lyres of Ur I knew I had to make my own version.

And finally, my favorite of all was the complaint letter to Ea-nasir. This is the oldest complaint letter in the world, written to a copper merchant by a disgruntled customer who was sold poor-quality copper. It has inspired many a meme and its very own subreddit. So, of course, I couldn’t help but take a dig at Ea-nasir’s poor quality copper myself. The clay tablets also include letters between Elirians and tell stories of death, seduction and triumph.

So why did I spend so much time on this? Well, I thought it was a lot of fun thinking about a civilization that existed thousands of years ago, for one. But more importantly, I’ve discovered that giving a more detailed backstory to my characters and objects helps me design more organic puzzles. Just thinking about the Elirians gave me ideas for at least three new puzzles that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I really hope you enjoy visiting this exhibition as much as I enjoyed creating it.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!