Jump’s Halloween Challenge: The Empty Frame
Jump’s superstar animator, Tom Holmes is a self-confessed Halloween fanatic and a very cunning creator of virtual scavenger-hunt games.
For the last three years Tom has been entertaining the Jump team in the month run-up to Halloween – with an online sleuthing adventure, scattered with teasing riddles and puzzles.
The game he devised this year was called The Empty Frame and challenged everyone to work out which of the 25 pictures hanging in the abandoned Morwood Gallery contained the name of the Summoning Art.
A new clue was released each week but the team only had until midnight on 31st October to solve the mystery.
Tom Holmes – Senior Animator and Jump Gamesmaster:
What was the inspiration for The Empty Frame?
“I like the elimination mechanics in games like Guess Who and Cluedo. There’s something satisfying about knowing the answer is within a set of finite possibilities—you just have to figure out which one. It feels like it’s more engaging than an open-ended structure where, at the start, you have no clue at all. I find creepy and unsettling artwork fascinating to look at too.”
When did you start working on it?
“I start thinking of ideas around April / May, and as and when I have some ideas and free time I do a little bit of work on it leading up to the start of October.”
How do you go about creating it?
“The biggest challenge in creating The Empty Frame was designing the elimination process to ensure that players had to solve each clue completely in order to arrive at the correct answer in the end. It was no good if a player could skip clues 1 and 2, only to have clue 3 eliminate all the artworks that clues 1 and 2 were meant to filter out.
This is where I focused my attention first. Along with this I had to consider how many artworks to feature. I wanted enough that guessing would be difficult but not so many that the elimination process would feel overwhelming. Twenty-five seemed like the right balance, allowing for roughly five eliminations each week. Next I designed and built the gallery in Cinema4D and planned where each artwork would go. I then, with the assistance of AI, created 25 artworks with various attributes that would be integral to the game’s clues.
When the artworks were positioned, I placed 3D cameras throughout the gallery and rendered multiple ‘views’ that players could switch between during gameplay, creating a nearly navigable scene. Using HTML and JavaScript, I set up the gallery to allow players to explore the gallery as a whole and each of the artworks in isolation. Once all the assets were created, I started writing the backstory to give the game context. From here all was left was coming up with the weekly challenges that would provide a total of 5 clues that would, week by week, whittle 25 artworks down to just 1.”
Where does your love for spooky games / Halloween come from?
“I’ve loved Halloween ever since I was a kid—I used to love dressing up and going to scary events where the chilly air was thick with fake fog illuminated by green and orange floodlights. It’s the theatrical nature of it all! I’m also a big fan of strange and scary stories and films. I get creatively fuelled by the dark, creepy, and unsettling. Combine that with my love of puzzles and games, and there you have it.”
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The winner of Tom’s game this year was Jump’s quiz genius, Becky Clacey – who amazingly and mightily impressively has won all three years running. Becky is currently on maternity leave so it’s also super impressive she had any time to work on the quiz at all. Although it was probably at 1am / 3am / 5am each night while tending to her little one.
Congratulations Becky, yet again a very worthy winner!
And a huge thank you to our spooky Gamesmaster Tom – for yet again bringing some online scary fun to Jump throughout October.
One of Tom’s previous creations was ‘Cawthorne’s Curse’ which you can read more about here.
