PROJECT HAVEN ACADEMY
Project Haven Academy was a multimedia role-playing game emphasizing themes of open discourse, free expression, and engaging with diverse perspectives designed by a team of 20 put together by the Weston Game Lab.
Access to Haven Academy is restricted to students from the University of Chicago. Please email admissions@uchicago.edu to access the game.
What is Haven Academy?
Haven Academy is a fictional university composed of four shoals that house four distinct disciplines:
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The Oceanic Shoal of Humanities
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The Tidal Shoal of Social Sciences
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The Coral Shoal of the Arts
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and The Artificial Shoal of Physical Science
The idea for a fictional school being used to orient incoming freshmen was born by the Creative Directors of the project, Ashlyn Sparrow and Patrick Jagoda, and was approved by representatives of the University of Chicago's Academic Discourse Initiative, Dr. Leila Brammer and Dr. Christopher Wild. The project then started with a very open-ended prompt: How can we use a game to promote and educate students about freedom of expression? Our team of student interns and faculty spent the first week fleshing out what the game would actually look like and ended it by establishing a PROJECT PHILOSOPHY.
PROJECT
PHILOSOPHY
As a group, we finalized design principles that informed our process in the pre-production and production phases.
"The games our audience plays must be collaborative, requiring multiple viewpoints to solve the puzzle. Different views and skills should be utilized for the greater purpose of dissensus and discussion. The project should also be orienting folx to campus life."
Pre-Production Phase
As the lead puzzle designer on the puzzle team consisting of five interns, I helped create academic themes that could be shaped into puzzles.
We planned to create 8 class puzzles available according to a schedule to simulate undergraduate classes and 12 open-world puzzles to create further interaction with the narrative and world-building.
We started by using whiteboards to see what ideas could be connected and workshopped, frequently collaborating to get different perspectives. Some examples of these brainstorming sessions can be seen on the left. When we felt that a puzzle had materialized, we then compiled our ideas, mechanics, and plans into a massive Google Doc before we started production on any puzzle prototypes.
Next, we went into the production phase. In this phase, we created rapid prototypes of our puzzles, then playtested them with other interns on the team to get criticism and feedback. To give a thorough look at our production process, let's zoom in on one specific example: the Chemistry puzzle.
Production Phase
WHITEBOARD BRAINSTORMING
I knew that I wanted to create a Chemistry themed puzzle, but the subject was too broad. I pinpointed a few different chemistry tools where information could be hidden, and began brainstorming puzzle steps from there.
Here are some walkthroughs of other puzzles I worked on, including class and open-world puzzles:
Another aspect of Haven Academy I contributed to was creating stickers and assets for other puzzles, including 12 puzzles designed by Sandor Weisz. Each sticker was meant to be an achievement the player could proudly display in their handbook that was only possible after passing a certain part of the story or solving a puzzle. Here is a sample of some stickers I created:
Post-Production Phase
Finally, after the puzzles were completed and playtested, the programming team helped us polish our HTML/CSS/JS code by running it through a linter. Then w added its information to the backend, including what variables related to each puzzle should be saved to the backend.
During this process, we worked with the website's code on Github, which will be publicly accessible after Haven Academy's second run in Winter 2024.
Full List of Contributions
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Helped brainstorm themes and mechanics of 9 puzzles
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Illustrated ~70 final assets for various puzzles
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Created web prototypes for 13 puzzles
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Created final versions of the Zebra, Catalan Numbers, and Visual Arts Puzzles
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Ran team playtests for 8 puzzles
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Participated in 10 puzzle playtests
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Created final designs for 38 stickers
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Created sketches for 12 characters
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Wrote ~74k characters of code
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Commited 62 changes to the respository
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Created 21 pull requests
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Reported 13 issues