Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

Tutorial Design

We redesigned our first-time user experience not long after release in order to clarify some features where we saw players having trouble. I redesigned the entire tutorial flow from the ground up, (with extensive player flows drawn out in Visio,) and wrote the text that players would see.

Of course, most players end up just skipping past text without reading it anyway, so we had to make sure that the required actions in the tutorial taught them well enough on their own.

Oh, and I named the little floating robot S.A.M. as a way to make my mark on the game. I honestly can't remember what the acronym stood for at this point, but I remember it being appropriately tortured. (Secret Agent Machine? Something like that.)

Case Selection

The most complicated new feature of Carmen was the Case Grid, where players selected a case to play. The goal was to give players some reason to return to the game on a schedule, by letting them see what cases were coming up.

As time progressed, new cases would move to the top, where they were color-coded by difficulty. (Blue was easiest, and red was hardest.) Cases had their rewards clearly visible, so players aiming for a specific reward could be sure to come back at the right time.

Players also had a limited selection of cases they could save for later, so they could come back and grab a case that had moved to the top, even if they didn't have the time to play it right then. As they leveled up, they unlocked more slots for saved cases.

The Case Resolution screen, which you can see in the above-right image, went through a ton of iteration. Originally it stretched across multiple screens, highlighting each aspect of the case in turn, but ultimately was distilled down to a single screen.

At launch, all of our cases were procedurally generated, creating a completely randomized suspect each time, with different loot and a different location. This represented the player nabbing the lowly grunts of the V.I.L.E. organization. The best part of this is that it would occasionally pull names from the player's Facebook friends list, so players would be chasing down and imprisoning their friends.

Not long after launch, we released our first story chapter, letting player go after Carmen's inner circle.

Story Campaign

Our first major release for Carmen was our campaign mode. This was a series of cases intended to be gradually unlocked over a long period of time, as players collected the in-game currency and experience necessary to start them.

The campaign was divided into four distinct acts, with five cases in each. Each case resulted in the player capturing one of Carmen's main crew. A fifth act consisted of a single, more difficult case, in which the player chased down Carmen herself.

The story, told piecemeal throughout the four acts, ultimately revealed that Carmen was working to assemble a time machine. We contracted third-party writers to handle the massive amount of clue text required for the game, (though I did a full pass on their deliverables,) all text for the campaign was my work.

Each case in the campaign began with a briefing from the Chief, and I wrote all of her dialogue. Anyone familiar with the Carmen Sandiego game show from the 90s probably sees that we based our Chief on Lynne Thigpen's portrayal from that show, and I tried to make my dialogue match her performance.

Just as each case started with a briefing from the Chief, each case ended with the interrogation of the captured V.I.L.E. hench-person. Again, I wrote the dialogue for each interrogation, which involved coming up with a unique character and style of speaking for 20 different characters.

The Jersey Shore TV show was popular at the time, and one of our henchwomen, Purses Galore, was definitely inspired by the human caricatures that appeared on it.

After winning the final case, the player was treated to a comic-book style animation showing Carmen retreating through a time portal and getting away once again. The plan was for our next big content release to have the player chasing down Carmen through time periods, (essentially a Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego? expansion,) but sadly, development on the game ended before we could follow through on those plans.

Carmen had especially good player retention and monetization percentages for a Facebook game, but our user base was growing far too slowly, and ultimately the game did not perform the way we'd hoped. Our contract with The Learning Company was prematurely cancelled, and Blue Fang shut down not long after.

I'm definitely proud of the game we put out. It's still, to this day, the most polished, stable project I've ever worked on. We had an extra month of development after The Oregon Trail was released, and we put it to good use.