Mischief Cat Projects

2018

Mischief Cat is an indie game studio created by my good friend Jose Castorena, focused on creating a series of puzzle game RPGs set in the world of Detective Evi Dents. Together with a talented group of friends, we are preparing to independently launch Evi Dents: Mastermind Detective, a Professor Layton inspired story using Mastermind puzzles as the primary gameplay.

Chock full of puns, whimsical dialog, and brain teaser challenges, we hope to develop Evi and a whole cast of other colorful characters into a fun suite of puzzle games. Our latest venture is a Sudoku game featuring Yuu, a character from Mastermind's storyline who becomes Evi's apprentice gumshoe. We are also looking into Picross and other puzzle genres for the next installment of Evi and her friends.

Evi Dents Mastermind Detective

For the UI style of these games, we very much wanted to emulate the old timey mystery style and warm color palette of the Professor Layton series of games. I used lots of art deco and Victorian style flourishes that could be easily duplicated and added to UI elements to help give them a fun vintage flair. I color coded menus and ranks for easy reference.

Splash Screen, story cutscene, and Main Menu for Evi Dents: Mastermind Detective

Three gameplay modes: Professor's Challenge (daily puzzle), Story mode with chapter select, and Quick Play

Submenus: Stats, Perks (store with permanent boosts), and Achievements

Mastermind game screens. You can tell what rank you'll be getting by the background color of your current turn.

Logo design for Mastermind Detective. The story takes place in an inventor's mansion, hence the gear motif

Yuu + Me: Sudoku

We reused many assets from Evi Dents: Mastermind Detective for this project, which made designing and building the prefabs for this game very quick and easy. The story and theming of this game is centered on Evi's apprentice, Yuu, so I chose some more whimsical elements, as well bug collecting motifs which are Yuu's hobby.

During Evi Dents: Mastermind Detective, Yuu become's Evi's detective apprentice

I framed the different difficulty settings as books to reinforce Yuu's apprenticeship theme

Game screen, Pause Menu, and Results screen

Logo design for You and Me Sudoku. The character Yuu is a bug enthusiast, hence the bug collecting motifs