Kieran Flaherty, Puzzle Designer and owner of Mystery Unfolds
I have always loved puzzles and things of a mysterious and cryptic nature; jigsaws, word games, riddles, escape rooms, etc.
~15 years of graphic design, product management, one psych degree, and a lot of puzzling later, have left me with a very particular set of skills - skills that make me an ideal puzzle designer for people like you.
The Road to Puzzle Designer
I grew up reading a lot of books, and playing a lot of word games, puzzles, and eventually video games, before I discovered “The Secret of Monkey Island” – a quirky, lateral-thinking puzzle-solving adventure game where you played an aspiring pirate. I replayed that game and its sequels a hundred times over and explored every inch of them, every puzzle, every narrative morsel. I loved it.
I loved the care and the detail and the depth that had gone into it and something started brewing inside me to want to create those types of experiences for others.
After school, I studied graphic and web design. I wasn’t making games, but I was creating these fun, interactive experiences in all sorts of mediums. I worked at that for 10 years, expanded into experience design and product management, completed a psychology degree, and dabbled in gamification - the application of game-based thinking to design.
So, by 30, I still love puzzles, games, narratives, and engaging immersive experiences, but built upon that is a mountain of technical design knowledge on creating experiences that achieve a goal - that communicate ideas, motivate behaviours, or conjure emotional responses. The scene was set.
The Puzzle Card is Born
Fast forward to 2016. It was the night before a friend’s birthday party and the gift I had ordered him online had not yet arrived. I didn’t want to turn up to the party empty-handed so I thought at the least, I should make him a card. He might not even have to know that his present hadn’t arrived yet.
I made him a card with a crude puzzle inside; requiring him to answer several trivia questions, unjumble a word, and find some text written on the back (the most challenging aspect surprisingly). Solving the clues spelled out a shortened url that he could follow to show him a picture of what I had ordered him.
He was instantly intrigued by the card and (after being told off by his girlfriend for trying to solve it while he had guests) agreed to solve it later. After several confused, hilarious, and eventually triumphant messages back and forth, he finally solved it and his gift arrived the day after.
He thought the card was fun, he had a great time solving it, and he enjoyed the back and forth with me giving him hints or poking fun at him for going down the wrong track. For a few years, I played around with the idea, producing multiple cards and similar experiences. Every time I got great results. I could see that puzzles contained excitement, tension, and a delayed gratification that makes them super engaging.
The concept of the puzzle card was born and several years later, Mystery Unfolds.
Interested in Kieran as a thought leader in the puzzle space? Follow or connect with him on LinkedIn…