A Night for a Fright (DEMO)

This is a game in which I've written the primary outline of the story and dialogue for as part of my final group project in Story Game Dev, a class where we learned about games centered heavily around storytelling. Its final project involved a group visual novel. One of our group members wanted to wanted to make a murder mystery, and we agreed upon the ideas. I myself wanted to show I could do more than just level design.

To study up, we watched the 1985 movie, Clue, which was our main inspiration. It inspired the more open choice aspects of our story, though we initially wanted to have multiple endings. That got cut out for time purposes. More importantly, it's what let us decide on the tongue-in-cheek, somewhat silly tone of the visual novel, whilst maintaining serious elements. After some deliberation, we decided on going with a lot of food themed names, namely condiments on a sandwich. From pickles, to certain sauces, even the player's default name.

The writing process involved a bit of cross referencing the plot of Clue, and coming up with both personalities, as well as reasons each character would want to kill the victim. The discussions came as we were writing what the clues are, deciding the layout of the mansion via paper map, and deciding which people are most willing to resort to killing the victim. My favorite part was the dinner scene, where I was able to make some rather tense dialogue, given the context.

We also had to deal with things like the passage of time as the acts, and coursing the clues so that everything would seem logical and flow well with the story. I would write down everything in one document, breaking the story up by hours as the event happening in a night was similar to the movie. Then we would delegate on plot details and make edits so that our programmer could implement the final story into the game's code with our help. We playtested everything so that the story flows well and that any syntax issues in the document were out of the demo's launch. They also helped inform the artist of what to make and what backgrounds to acquire.

The hardest part to make was scale, as we had run out of time to build the full game, and had to down-scale into reducing everything to just the prologue and first chapter. But we did get something presentable. Our demo was well received, and I got along well with our group members. There were a lot of laughs as we saw the game being presented, from the tester's player names, to

This is a project that I wanna finish at a later date. I already finished the full script for it, and I think it would be nice to see that in the final game.