Hitchhiker is a mystery game set along lost highways, where your goal is to solve the puzzle of your own backstory. As a hitchhiker with no memory or destination, you catch a series of rides across a strange and beautiful landscape, tracking the mysterious disappearance of a person close to you. Your drivers range from stoic farmers to off-duty waitresses, and each one has a story to tell. Clues appear, alliances emerge, and nothing is quite what it seems.

The production of Hitchhiker started at the same time as I joined Mad About Pandas as a Game Design Intern. While the narrative was already pretty much set in stone, I helped the Creative Director to envision the themes of the story through gameplay design and was in charge of maintaining and creating the game design wiki. The second half of the production I was responsible for putting all of the narrative into a dialogue and event graph, using FlowCanvas inside Unity. Keeping track of the pacing, triggering actions at the correct time as well as keeping an overall focus of how each ride came together became my main tasks, which ultimately lead me to become the Game Design Director of the studio in 2020.

A summary of my responsibilities:

• Creating and maintaining a game design wiki
• Puzzle design, from conception to overseeing implementation in Unity
• Creating several pitch documents as well as copy writing
• Creating, populating and maintaining narrative and event graphs in Unity
• Bugfixes and design iteration according to QA and playtest feedback