Meet Your Maker: Vilma, Cluehound // Interview

Meet Vilma from Finland-based puzzle magazine company Cluehound. She shares some insight into the design process behind her murder mystery magazines, keeping gameplay strictly offline and what is coming in the not-so-distant future. Let’s get to it…

Can you start by telling me a little about yourself? Do you work alone or are you part of a team?

Hi! I’m Vilma from Finland. I’ve been creating Cluehound puzzle magazines for three years now as a passion project in my free time while working on mobile games as my day job. I live in Helsinki with my husband, Johannes, and we often spend our evenings and weekends working together on the next magazine. I made the first two magazines by myself, but Johannes has been more involved in the latest ones, helping me write the story and designing some of the puzzles.

Have you always been a fan of puzzles?

I grew up reading Nancy Drew books and playing detective board games. I loved solving the mini mysteries in Donald Duck magazines and reading ‘choose your own adventure’ books. In the 90s, I didn’t know that making games could be a career!

Where did the idea for Cluehound come from?

I love narrative puzzle games, but they often have digital components and lots of moving parts, and it’s not easy to casually take them out and play if you don’t have a designated space. I really enjoy playing and creating fully offline experiences. I love the fact that you don’t need any information outside of the magazine.

The core idea of Cluehound magazines was to create something where you can solve a murder anywhere by yourself or with a small group while being completely offline. There are no loose objects and no need for cutting or destroying the magazine. I wanted it to be in a magazine format so you can solve it on a train ride or picnic without getting your phone or laptop out. Since people often spend a huge part of their day looking at their phone or computer screen, this offers an opportunity to do something completely different. The magazines are also perfect for busy people who want to solve one puzzle at a time, leave it on the coffee table, and come back later since there is no time limit.

What is your process for designing a puzzle magazine?

I often start with the theme. The second magazine, for example, is about a rose competition, so I first gathered a lot of information about roses: the symbolic meaning of rose colours, different types of roses, attempts to breed black roses, the history of rose competitions, and stories of real-life people dying from infections after being pricked by a rose. This is a great opportunity to come up with puzzles and a story for the magazine. For the last two magazines, I worked together with my husband, and we both created a lot of puzzles and started matching them with different points in the storyline.

Each magazine has 13-15 puzzles, so we try to come up with the same number of interesting locations and story elements. Then, I do the layout and background art and print a test version (without hints and solutions) for 10-20 trusted testers. They give honest feedback and tell us where they got stuck, what was too easy or too confusing, and catch most of the spelling errors and mistakes. At this point, we often still tweak the puzzles and sometimes change one completely.

You’ve released four puzzle magazines so far, which is no mean feat! Murder At Shrike Bay is your latest release – do you feel that the way you approach a project has changed much from when you first started?

While working on the first magazine, Beyond the Veil, I was still designing the system—like how you move forward, whether it’s linear or if you jump back and forth between pages, etc. I have been working as a game artist for over 10 years, but I didn’t have much experience as a game designer, so it was a learning experience for me. I think I’ve learned to balance the puzzles and connect them with the story better in the later magazines. We also received a lot of feedback on all of the puzzles, which helped us make even better ones for future magazines.

Are you content with the magazine format or do you think you’ll want to explore another medium in future?

I would love to create a real-life escape room murder mystery one day, as I have many ideas for puzzles that would work better when you can physically touch and manipulate the objects. I was also really inspired by an old Finnish murder mystery game that included CDs where you could ‘call’ the suspects and interview them by listening to audio tracks. Creating something like this could be really fun!

What is your favourite play-at-home experience?

I was really impressed by The Morrison Game Factory by PostCurious. The puzzles were so clever, and the story was amazing!

You recently partnered with The Detective Society to make your games more accessible in the UK… how did this come about?

Our partnership with The Detective Society began when we connected through a Facebook group for puzzle game creators. We are very happy to have our magazines included in the impressive lineup of partner games. It is a great opportunity for us, as it will remove the barrier for UK customers to order magazines without extra shipping time and customs fees. I also believe that our industry is still relatively small, so it’s a win-win for the creators to unite our efforts and bring these games into the hands of more players. I hope Cluehound can also partner with some US companies in the future, as it is currently quite costly to order our magazines from overseas.

This can’t be the last we’ve seen of Cluehound; can you tease any plans for the future?

We are currently working on the fifth Cluehound magazine, which will hopefully be ready by November. This year, we’ve been selling the magazines at a couple of live events in Finland, and it was great to be able to talk with our customers face-to-face. I’m definitely looking into doing more of these events in the near future, including outside of Finland. I’m really excited about what the future holds for Cluehound!

Thank you!

Thanks to Vilma for the insight into the world of puzzle magazines. I’ve played all four of them and they’ve improved with every release. I can’t wait for magazine number five!

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