Uploaded January 2021 | Updated September 2026, 28 minutes ago
Puzzle Box Palace is a 3D puzzle game for Windows. It was developed over the course of six months in 2020 by a team of 12 graduate students at SMU Guildhall, for a total of roughly 200 hours of development time per person.
In Puzzle Box Palace, players are pulled into a magical puzzle box they received as a gift from their grandfather. Players progress through five increasingly complex puzzle rooms, returning to the puzzle box’s central room between each level. As players progress, they use the game’s puzzle mechanics to move and twist pieces of the puzzle box into place. The central room teaches players new mechanics before they enter each puzzle room, and then the puzzle rooms challenge players with logic puzzles, spatial reasoning puzzles, and observational puzzles. Players can also use light platforming skills to solve puzzles in creative ways as they navigate the puzzle box. Players can find pages of their grandfather’s letter scattered throughout the puzzle box, piecing together their relationship with their grandfather as they move through the game.
Over the course of this project, the team learned skills for collaborating effectively in a development environment meant to emulate professional industry settings. They additionally learned to communicate ideas across disciplines so as to collectively shape the direction of the game, worked through disagreements and differing opinions in a productive manner, and practiced using Agile development techniques in order to develop the game iteratively in a short timeframe. The Art team learned about communicating across disciplines in order to effectively identify how art assets and decisions fit within the larger context of the game as a whole. The Level Design team learned about the importance of maintaining constant streams of communication, especially with regards to interdisciplinary dependencies, and learned to playtest more effectively in order to more quickly catch bugs and issues resulting from unanticipated player behaviors. The Programming team learned the value of spending time planning and designing as fully as possible prior to implementation, so that challenging problems can be isolated and solved first, and also learned the importance of accounting for polish tasks early in the process as opposed to leaving those items until the end of the project.
Puzzle Box Palace is a 3D puzzle game for Windows. It was developed over the course of six months in 2020 by a team of 12 graduate students at SMU Guildhall, for a total of roughly 200 hours of development time per person.
In Puzzle Box Palace, players are pulled into a magical puzzle box they received as a gift from their grandfather. Players progress through five increasingly complex puzzle rooms, returning to the puzzle box’s central room between each level. As players progress, they use the game’s puzzle mechanics to move and twist pieces of the puzzle box into place. The central room teaches players new mechanics before they enter each puzzle room, and then the puzzle rooms challenge players with logic puzzles, spatial reasoning puzzles, and observational puzzles. Players can also use light platforming skills to solve puzzles in creative ways as they navigate the puzzle box. Players can find pages of their grandfather’s letter scattered throughout the puzzle box, piecing together their relationship with their grandfather as they move through the game.
Over the course of this project, the team learned skills for collaborating effectively in a development environment meant to emulate professional industry settings. They additionally learned to communicate ideas across disciplines so as to collectively shape the direction of the game, worked through disagreements and differing opinions in a productive manner, and practiced using Agile development techniques in order to develop the game iteratively in a short timeframe. The Art team learned about communicating across disciplines in order to effectively identify how art assets and decisions fit within the larger context of the game as a whole. The Level Design team learned about the importance of maintaining constant streams of communication, especially with regards to interdisciplinary dependencies, and learned to playtest more effectively in order to more quickly catch bugs and issues resulting from unanticipated player behaviors. The Programming team learned the value of spending time planning and designing as fully as possible prior to implementation, so that challenging problems can be isolated and solved first, and also learned the importance of accounting for polish tasks early in the process as opposed to leaving those items until the end of the project.
