Thicket
APRIL 2025 //Thicket is a story-driven puzzle game in which you play as a druid using the help of your animal companions to find the secrets of a dying forest.
ABOUT THE GAME //Thicket was made as part of the Traditional Game Design course at the University of Utah. With a team of about 6 students, this project was created in one semester.
Credits:
Game Design: Rulon Adams / @Rulyguy
Programmers: Bodie Criswell, Max Morris
Artists: Courtney Humpherys, Emma McLaughlin, Deb Mendoza Pineda
PUZZLE DESIGN //To make use of our many artists and talented programmers, we decided to create a story game with a focus on art, with a variety of complicated mechanics. We ended up going for a puzzle game to accomplish this, which I was happy with, as I hadn’t had much of a chance to work on my puzzle design before this.
I wanted to create a game where you needed to be careful about the order you accomplished tasks in, otherwise, you would get stuck and have to reset. To accomplish this goal, we decided on having multiple animals along with the druid that you could switch between, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You would need to think about which animal was doing what and when; otherwise you might get stuck or lost.
I took a lot of inspiration from Portal, as it seems to be designed similarly, and the puzzles in that game are some of the best I’ve ever played. I had to plan out the levels on paper before blocking them out and handing them off to artists to be decorated. This workflow worked very well, in my opinion.
STORY & WRITING //Because of the amount of artists we had, we wanted to tell our story through animated cutscenes. I was very worried throughout development that this was not feasible, but our artists got all the work done, and it looked great. Our story went through many different iterations as the semester started to reach the end and we needed to scope down the project to have a cohesive experience.
The writing (and development as a whole) was a collaborative project between the entire team, with no one as the lead in any aspect. While this would be hard for some teams, I think our team did a great job making it work because we were all driven and passionate about the project.
