In various ways, I almost push into the face of the player that they must search things. Because to find the Peep, which is the ultimate goal of the game, you must search for it.
Hiding it is easy, but you can only do it after you’ve fixed the game-breaking bug that you came to your office on a cold, rainy October night to fix, since your game ships in a few weeks, and that bug is causing some very real concern among the higher-ups, and you wrote that part of the game.
Basically, a dragon in the game is misbehaving. Badly. And it’s all somewhere in the stuff you wrote. So you are responsible for fixing it.
Reality?
Yes. Kinda. I certainly was not responsible for missing shipping a game, but I was responsible for creating a dragon in my current game and it was misbehaving. I was getting all sorts of bugs.
(For more on this, read the next part of this Dev Diary.)
So when you get into the office you have to fix your bug. But also while you’re at it, find the Peep(tm) that Mercer hid. And thanks to you hiding the Peep in Philip’s car in his driver-side sun visor, the rules now specify you have to hide the Peep in the target’s cubicle.
So you have to search your cubicle. But it’s not that hard. It’s in your drawer among all the junk, old cables, old adapters and broken computer equipment.
Then, when you find the Peep you have to hide it in Jessy’s cubicle. This ends the game.
But the game is not that easy. Of course.
You can’t hide the Peep before the Red Chamber sequence. And to get there you need to start working on the bug you came here to fix. That will trigger the Red Chamber sequence.
Only after you finish the Red Chamber sequence can you Put Peep and win the game.