Mac Goes Back

Mac Goes Back was a 2019 USC IMGD thesis project by Rudi Vanzin that I was a programmer and designer for. Mac Goes Back is a puzzle/adventure game that attempts to accurately represent archeology. In it you play as Mac, an archeologist, as she works at a dig site to piece together a story from the distant past.

I prototyped several minigames during production, and ultimately developed a digging minigame and a jigsaw puzzle system that each made it into the final product. Implementing the jigsaw puzzle was fairly straightforward, as I’d done something before and there weren’t any big design questions.

Digging was a different story. Mac Goes Back is an archeological game, so digging was a fairly important activity to get right. I built several prototypes that tried to recreate digging. It’s inherently a fairly physical experience, so I started with a prototype that tried to actual recreate the physical experience of digging with physics. That was a bit too chaotic though, for a game that is supposed to feel very grounded. Next I tried a 3D minigame, where clods of dirt faded as you scrubbed at them with the mouse. This was definitely better in terms of fitting the tone of the game, but still didn’t fit the bill. My final, successful attempt was a 2D approach that tried to recreate the perspective of the digger, letting them dig away layers of dirt with a small shovel to find buried artifacts.