The Story Behind Royal Chest
A personal project, a concrete idea about puzzle design, and plenty of features left on the cutting-room floor.
How it all started
I started with the chest-matching mechanic in January 2024, living in Fort Worth. The original idea was pretty specific: what if a puzzle game had exactly one action — matching symbols on the surface of a treasure chest — and asked you to solve spatial problems using only that gesture? Everything else, from the medieval look to the physical weight of each chest, grew out of that constraint over the following months.
By mid-2024 I had a working prototype with about 15 levels. I passed it around to friends, family, and a few strangers I met at a game design meetup in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. The feedback was blunt. Some levels felt arbitrary. The controls were confusing on small screens. The difficulty curve had a hard spike around level 8 that made several testers want to quit. Over the next three months I rebuilt the entire level sequence based on what those 12 people told me. It was a long process, but a necessary one: without that feedback, the game that exists today would look nothing like the one I had in my head.
What we do — and what we deliberately leave out
Royal Chest is a single-player, offline puzzle game. That is the whole scope. We build handcrafted treasure-chest match puzzles where you line up medieval symbols by rotating and dragging pieces on the chest surface. Our design time goes into level geometry, physics calibration, and difficulty pacing.
What we do not build: multiplayer, social features, leaderboards, daily challenges, achievement systems, or any kind of monetization mechanic. That is not a philosophical stand against those things — plenty of games use them well. For Royal Chest specifically, every retention feature I tested during development made the core puzzle experience worse. Players started optimizing for streaks instead of thinking about matches. Cutting those systems out let the puzzles breathe.
Our design methodology
Every Royal Chest level goes through a five-stage design process, and understanding that process probably tells you more about the game than any feature list.
The first stage is what I call the level's "spatial thesis." Before I open any design tools, I write down what kind of spatial insight the level should teach or reward. For level 14, the thesis was: "The player learns that matching symbols across two adjacent chests requires compensating for the shared weight between them." For level 38: "The player discovers that symbol alignment depends on the match angle, not just the state of the chest." Every level has a thesis, and if I cannot state it in a single sentence, the level does not move forward.
The second stage is the rough blockout. I place simple chests in the play space and define which faces carry which symbols. Nothing looks polished at this point — they are gray boxes with placeholder textures. I play through the puzzle myself several times, adjusting rotation axes and symbol placement until the solution path feels right. If I solve it too quickly, the level needs more complexity. If I cannot solve it consistently after five tries, the spatial thesis is probably unclear and I go back to stage one.
The third stage is physics calibration. Each chest gets a mass value that determines how it responds to player input. This is where the game gets its feel. A heavy chest with inertia will overshoot the angle you wanted if you drag too fast, while a light chest lets you make precise micro-adjustments but feels a bit loose on big turns. Getting the balance right takes more iteration than any other stage. For the final 48 levels, I tuned mass values an average of seven times per level before the physics felt right.
The fourth stage is external playtesting. I send the level to two or three testers from the original test group and collect written feedback: where they got stuck, what they tried first, and whether the solution felt earned or arbitrary. If more than one tester reports the same point of confusion, I redesign that section instead of adding a hint or tutorial.
The fifth stage is final polish: visual treatment, audio cues for when symbols match, and performance optimization. This stage is relatively quick because the gameplay is already locked in. We aim for a consistent 60fps on mid-range devices and test on hardware that is at least three years old.
This methodology is slow. It limits how many levels we can produce. But it means that when you play level 27, there is a specific spatial insight waiting for you, and the physics is calibrated so that discovering that insight feels satisfying instead of frustrating.
The team
Royal Chest is primarily a personal project with occasional contract help for art assets and sound design. Core design, programming, and level creation are handled by Jennifer Miller. Operations are based at Jennifer Miller (AeroStar), Sunset Blvd, Fort Worth, TX 40501, United States.
Update history
This page was last updated in July 2025 to reflect the current state of the project. Previous updates:
- March 2025 — Added the methodology section covering the five-stage design process
- January 2025 — Updated contact details and team information
- October 2024 — Page originally created with the origin story
If you have questions about our approach, you can reach me at jennifer.miller269@yahoo.com or use the contact page.