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Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 (2025)
Content Designer
Strange Scaffold
Summary
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is a match-3 RPG in the vein of Puzzle Quest with a unique meta horror-comedy story. The player can explore different narrative branches while overcoming a variety of challenges, all represented by bespoke match-3 puzzles. As a content designer, designing and iterating on these puzzles was my main role on the team. I designed about half the puzzles in the game, splitting the work with lead developer Colin McInerney. I also assisted with programming, taking on debugging tickets and solving problems, especially closer to the game's launch.
Challenge — Match 3 Everything
One of the main hooks of CRDM3 is its use of match-3 puzzles to represent a wide variety of wacky scenarios. Whereas in most puzzle RPGs puzzles are primarily used as an abstraction of combat, in CRDM3 a puzzle might represent an attempt to tear yourself away from a computer screen, eat a bunch of diamonds, or even just process your own feelings of existential dread. Designing puzzles that felt like a fitting abstraction of these scenarios was an exercise in developing a design vocabulary. An early design lever was finding what made encounters feel more chaotic vs strategic and calculating. Over the course of development, I found ways I could modify encounters to create a pacing that matched the game's fiction, and Colin and I began to develop patterns of what particular matching symbols would communicate to the player. This work ensured that, even through heavy abstraction, encounter could feel connected to and representative of the story the game was telling.
Challenge — Built in Layers
CRDM3 has had an interesting development history. Before I joined the team, the game had already been cancelled and rebooted twice. This tumultuous road to release was the main inspiration behind the final game's narrative. It's the tale of a game that desperately wants to exist. The history of the game is also reflected in its codebase, built in multiple layers created to support vastly different visions of the final product. A good chunk of my work involved navigating these layers and making them work for the game the team was making in the present.
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