Hidden in Plain Sight: Making Hidden Object Scenes Fun to Play

You may think that creating a hidden object scene is all about cramming as many random objects into the image as possible, but there is a lot of craft that goes into making each image!

My name is Nadia, and I’m a game designer working on June’s Journey. My job consists in making sure our players get features and content they love and keep them engaged, including working on the many hidden object scenes that make the game so appealing to more than a million players.

A good hidden object scene must be first and foremost fun to play! As a game designer, my job is to ensure it is fun by planning each detail. There’s very little left to chance, and it is a lot of work that goes into making them fun!

In a nutshell, playing hidden object scenes should be easy enough to keep you engaged, but also, challenging enough so that you keep on trying, so it needs to be well balanced! We game designers spend a lot of time checking that the gameplay experience runs smoothly for everyone, and there are no sticky spots that will take away from the fun.

One of the main things we focus on is variety in the placement of the objects. Here is an example of a good balanced object placement. As you can see, there are items of different sizes, colors and shapes equally spread on the scene, which delivers a harmonic vibe.

And here’s an example of an object placement we would like to improve. There are too many blank spaces between objects, and sizes and shapes are not harmoniously distributed. Somehow, my brain has a hard time making sense of the way these objects are displayed. Everything just seems to be all over the place.

Variety and balance — that’s our mantra! But of course, there are other factors we check when we’re arranging scenes, and some of them are not purely visual, but conceptual. For example, we continuously ask ourselves: where will players think an object is likely to be placed in this scene?

Sometimes we might want to meet the player’s expectations, but if you keep on playing and mastering a scene, they might end up anticipating a bit too much where the objects will appear, and that’s not fun! That’s why we also try to match their mastery on the scene with a higher difficulty, and for that, one of the things we do is placing objects in unexpected locations.

Would you have ever imagined you’d find a dollar bill where we hid it here?

Hopefully, these small variations will surprise you in a positive way. As you can imagine, it’s also fun for us to think about it and plan!

Finally, if you’ve played a couple of hidden object scenes, you probably realize that there are some objects that appear very often in different scenes, although they’re placed in different ways each time. These are a bit like old friends for us — objects we see around us all the time in our day to day life, so we hope will make players feel more immersed into the world we’re building.

Here’s a list with the top five objects you’ll find more often in June’s Journey. Have you noticed these objects often appear in the hidden object scenes?

1. Umbrella
2. Hat
3. Butterfly
4. Gloves
5. Bell

Thanks for reading everyone! It was fun to share. Until next time!

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