Chip Theory Games is a Minnesota based game design and publishing company that specializes in fantastic and immersive role-playing games, with a focus on high-quality components and compelling storytelling. They have a series of games called Too Many Bones, as part of which they have consistently incorporated surreptitious, clever, and highly engaging puzzles that build upon the lore of the world. While working on my own puzzle games for the Enigma Emporium, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the folks at Chip Theory by my business partner Logan. Together he and I worked on the puzzle progression for Splice & Dice, one of several expansions for Too Many Bones.

The deliverables produced over the course of this project included concept and reference images for the layout of the webpages and the rewards, alongside many assorted different documents clearly delineating all aspects of the puzzle progression, its solutions, how it functioned, etc.

Playing off of the principles of Splice & Dice as a whole, this puzzle sees players applying for the prestigious 'Gearloc Council Internship Program' via a series of riddles/poems. These poems chronicle the work of Nobulous, a character within the game who is performing bizarre scientific experiments involving splicing together different creatures. Each of the poems describes a horrific (or comical) creature crafted from bits and pieces of two others.

There are numerous riddles in the puzzle, each requiring two separate inputs to move on to the next. One input for each riddle can be derived from somewhere in the Too Many Bones universe (mostly from Splice & Dice, the game this puzzle was created for) and the second input comes from pop culture, trivial knowledge, or other Chip Theory games.

The actual mechanics are relatively simple - to begin with, players must discover the discreet entry point to the game by solving an initial puzzle. From there, players are interacting with a webpage that shows a series of incubation tanks (or specimen jars) in the background. As players successfully splice creatures the tanks fill one by one with the shadowy figures of the newly created beasties. This background is overlaid by the poem, along with a pair of input bars, and a 'Splice' button in-between the two. Players must correctly input both components before they may successfully splice, and proceed to the next page. Once all the splices have been completed, players are linked to the CTG webstore where they can acquire their rewards!