Toy Design

Our idea is a mystery box series, in which the boxes are puzzles in themselves. The users have to solve riddles, find clues, figure out brain teasers, experience an entire journey, until they reach the goal, the main concept, the answer.

The goal of the box is to try to unlock the box - get to the center, the next clue. Once the user has retrieved the clue, they can move on to the next level, i.e. the next box. The series will increase in difficulty and will cover different types of puzzles and riddles, making it a real detective process, where the user will collect clues, and artifacts along the way, until they build the final collectible toy.

Different Concepts

We have different ideas of how the users can unlock the series of boxes:

1) Puzzle is self-contained on the box
2) Puzzle is on-line which will reveal a code/combination to open the box
3) Non-traditional keys that open the box

We will need to research what people would enjoy more.

Once the box is unlocked, we have two different ideas of how to continue the journey:

1) The box itself becomes a piece of a larger puzzle
2) There is an item, or a part of a toy, in the box that is another piece to another larger puzzle

Age Groups

We are targeting different age groups by having different levels and goals for these box-series. These are our intial ideas for the levels:

1) Increasing difficulty
2) Age appropriate
3) Educational
4) Themed

Roadblock

Our major problem is creating a story behind the puzzle-box journey, in order to create a context for the process. Why would people want to conquer these puzzles? What would motivate them? What kind of toy, or constructable object, would people of different age groups want to try to collect?

Research

These are different toys, puzzles, games on the market that could be relevant to our idea:

Our goal is to construct a toy through the process of collecting artifacts from the series of puzzle-boxes; similar to the idea of the Voltron toy, which is composed of smaller toys: