The Making of Claire Darksage and the Accursed Objects
Origins
Claire Darksage and the Accursed Objects is a game we began working on in Christmas 2023. As a small studio (just 2+1 people), it was a significant undertaking. We wanted to create a hidden object game and had the idea of asking players to look for objects in two categories, which we thought was a cool twist. We’ve always been fond of the fantasy genre, which we explored extensively in our DragonScales series (a tile-matching/puzzle series of seven games developed from 2014 to 2021), most of which are very story-heavy. So, that’s the origin.
Claire Darksage
If you’ve played our DragonScales games, you’ll likely notice plenty of references. The surname “Darksage,” for instance, belongs to the main antagonist of DragonScales 2: Beneath a Bloodstained Moon. For us, the name Darksage represents the dark magic of DragonScales, also defined by other characters like Archmage Cedric and Spektr. Since we were going to have two categories of objects, we chose a name that balanced light and darkness (“Claire”) and set the categories in the hidden object scenes to “Light” and “Darkness.”
Story
The story went through several revisions. Originally, Claire was much older, and the character Lucinda did not exist. In a sense, Claire was originally like Lucinda: the boss of the academy who was going to save the kingdom alongside her fairy. We thought making Claire younger would appeal to a broader audience. (We won’t be sharing the original design of Claire to avoid traumatizing players who like her current design 😊) Claire’s design is based on the heroine archetype of Zarya, the protagonist of the DragonScales 4-6 games. Fabio and Buddy weren’t in the original story either, but the journey felt empty without accompanying characters. This meant we had to add them as battle cards, but we think that turned out great!
When writing the story, we always kept our main audience in mind, and we knew we might face some backlash because the story could be too long for them. A friend suggested a great solution: providing summaries after each completed area. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to implement this, but we’d like to explore the idea in future games. We also had an incredible team of proofreaders who fixed even the smallest details of grammar and punctuation!
Tiska
This isn’t the first time we’ve included fairy characters. In Suddenly Meow 2 (a game from 2022), we had Tim help two fairies. However, those fairies had sweeter personalities. We wanted to explore something new: a more aggressive fairy, not your typical one. I like how Tiska evolved after several iterations (in the beginning, she was still “too good”). One thing we regret is not having more time to implement “Tiska’s Notes” more extensively. Currently, there are some notes in the Help section that record useful information the player receives during the adventure, but we wanted this feature to be more useful. Time was running out due to a submission deadline for our main publisher, so we had to leave that out.
Things (Almost) Nobody Will Notice
According to the story, Claire is cursed, and the curse takes a toll on her. In battles, when she attacks, you’ll notice her hand has a red tint. Later, after the curse is broken, you’ll see that her hand is no longer red-tinted (you can see this in the Coliseum battles). It’s just a little detail. Also, did you try clicking the wrong area on the map when Tiska asks you to go to a specific location?
More References to DragonScales
The battle memory/cards against the minstrels use images of our dragons from DragonScales. Some of the challengers in the Coliseum are also foes from DragonScales. The entire structure of the Coliseum itself is inspired by DragonScales 2.
About the Objects in the HO Scenes
The objects used come from mixed sources. Some are from our older games (like the Spooky Dwellers‘ hidden object scenes), some are from asset collections, some were rendered with AI, and some are from pictures of objects in our own home (such as the scissors and turner we use everyday in our kitchen 😊).
Dragons
You’ll notice that the opening scene shows several dragons. One of them is the red dragon you fight. We originally wanted a battle against each dragon, but we simply didn’t have time for the reasons mentioned above.
Logo and Map
We spent a lot of time on this, more than wisely, we think. We wanted to implement small details, like the dagger and golden skulls in the logo, and the shadows for the dotted lines on the map. The original names for the map areas were too plain, but thankfully, a friend suggested we fix them.
Battles
The battles are totally original, designed specifically for this game. They are essentially simple: you just have to locate at least two contiguous symbols and click them. This loads up Claire’s adrenaline; when it’s maxed out, you can pick cards. Balancing the battles, taking into account the three difficulty modes plus the story and Coliseum battles, was also a hard task. Of course, behind this simple mechanic lies a layer of complexity, demanding that you plan your card strategy and target the most valuable symbols on the board.
Beta Testing
We are super thankful to our team of beta testers, who spent many hours and days refining the game with us. The number of tickets and reports we processed during that time is the stuff of true legend.
We hope our future games can go even further beyond! Thank you!
