3D Crossword
The 3D crossword puzzle on Coral Island serves as an optional mental reprieve, offering players a break from their usual activities while still engaging their minds in a meaningful way. Unlike traditional crosswords, which test vocabulary and lateral thinking, this puzzle challenges spatial reasoning and visualization, making it a unique cognitive exercise.
Its placement on Coral Island aligns with the island’s themes of creativity, problem-solving, and multidimensional thinking. The introductory text frames the puzzle as more than just a novelty—it highlights how engaging with different perspectives and approaches is valuable not just in architecture, but in island life itself. Just as architects must envision structures in three dimensions, players must adapt and think flexibly to navigate and thrive on Coral Island. The puzzle reinforces this philosophy, encouraging players to embrace challenges with curiosity rather than rigidity.
By positioning the puzzle as a lighthearted yet enriching activity, Coral Island fosters an environment where learning and play intertwine, making complex skills like spatial awareness and problem-solving feel approachable and fun.
When investigating the Residence Hall of Coral Island, players have the option of going into a separate room dedicated to a 3d puzzle. At that point, players can choose to either progress with the puzzle, or leave the puzzle and make another choice that progresses the story.
If they choose to progress with the 3d crossword, the instructions guide them to use the arrow keys to turn the cube, and to click on any side of the cube to input a letter.
This demonstrates that a player turning the puzzle looks like, and how entering letters on one side of the cube pastes that letter on all sides of the cube.
A nearly complete 3D puzzle!
Upon filling out all of the cubes in the 3d crossword, players are rewarded with another sticker for their notebook (trophy system).
What did prototyping and playtesting look like?
Fun fact! It turns out that prototyping something that is 3d on paper is quite difficult, and using markers on legos felt destructive, so I ended up using Minecraft to prototype viewing 3d lettered cubes from various perspectives.
I then took this crossword layout, and used HTML for structure, CSS for styling and layout, and JavaScript for dynamic interaction.
In this iteration, after players click on one of the cubes, a pop-up appears prompting them to type in a letter. Afterwards, they are told via another pop-up whether their answer was correct. This process was done away with with playtester feedback, as the pop-ups were too disruptive, and receiving feedback did not feel akin to how normal crosswords function.
Once I had each of the word clues in place, I was able to start playtesting. Immediately, I was able to identify specific words & clues that clearly did not fit the theme of the puzzle and clues that were too difficult:
1. Latin for “head”
2. Mafdet, Bastet, Sckhmet
3. Cartographer to navigator
4. A builder’s software
5. Chemotherapy with pressurized aerosol
6. Makes faint sounds
Iteration on iteration was made, including features such as the ability to use checkboxes to keep track of completed crossword clues, a revision of off-theme words, and tweeks to make the cube more responsive to mouse clicks.