Broken Manor

Broken Manor is a first-person exploration mystery game. Playing as Clarissa VanDamm, players explore the VanDamm Manor 20 years after it has been abandoned following her father’s death. Solve puzzles to unlock new areas, new items and flashbacks of Clarissa’s final night at the VanDamm Manor. Solve the mystery of Lawrence vanDamm’s murder but pay attention, the narrative will change based on what items and flashbacks the player encounters, unlocking multiple endings.

Broken Manor was my Senior Capstone project. My primary roles were lead designer, character artist and animator.

Play Broken Manor on Itch.io

You can see the character art I did here – Broken Manor Cast

Game Flow

Much time was spent discussing how we wanted the player to move through the manor. We wanted to make sure players got a chance to see the narrative and not just stumble onto an ending without knowing why Lawrence VanDamm was murdered. Early on, it was decided that the manor was to have a lot of doors, so we could litteraly lock content until a puzzle was completed or a key was found. I structured these “locks” so that the player must witness the primary motive to why Lawrence was murdered before the can reach an ending. To insure this would work we created a Minimum Viable Path (MVP) as the least amount of content the player could see before getting an ending. We then used that to branch off our additional endings and content.

Narrative Game, not a Puzzle Game

We wanted Broken Manor to be enjoyed for its story and didn’t want players to get stumped or frustrated by a puzzle they couldn’t figure out. Therefore most of the puzzles are ordering objects or bringing Object A to Object B. But with this simple structure I didn’t want players to feel that they were doing pointless task in order to have “gameplay”. I tried to center every puzzle around an object that is used in it’s associated flashback. Racking que balls will show you to character’s playing pool, or lighting a cigar will show someone smoking that cigar. So while these puzzles maybe simple, the player feels their actions have a direct effect on the game.