Initial Ideas

Project Management

As a [user role], I want [what do you want?] so that [how does this benefit you/the business.]

• As a player, I want to discover the murderer so that I can experience the satisfaction.
• As a player, I want a creepy experience so that I can have control.
• As a player, I want to learn more about the murderer so that I can satiate a curiosity.

Considering these players, we should make sure that the game caters to them by creating a satisfying murder that is challenging to solve, focusing on creating a creepy environment as well giving the murderer a compelling and potentially relatable motive. This will also create conflict in the player, and potentially make them think about the game when they aren’t playing it.

Looking at audience retention in players of point and click games, it is important to keep the dialogue interesting so that they don’t feel the need to skip through it. It is also important that, if a player does skip through dialogue, that they still have enough context to continue through the game smoothly. This can be aided by focusing on creating bold parts of dialogue to draw attention, as well as creating some sort of journal to remind the player of key points and goals. We could also think about adding a text history.

Crisis Project Management

Examples of risks to the project:

What is the true minimum viable product?

The true minimum viable product, in case of crisis, pertaining to me would mean I would make less backgrounds, probably focusing on the exterior of the mansion (establishing the context) and the basement (the most important place as it is the scene of the murder). Depending on the issue, I would also help with the other roles, especially programming. We would also simplify the narrative, narrow the use of tools and forgo any additions like adjustable brightness, text history, etc.

During a workshop, we were tasked with picking a recipe and trying to write every step in the process of making it as a team. We picked ramen, and the process we decided on is outlined below:

While the longest predicted time we had was 6 hours if it was made completely from scratch, we managed to figure out that the quickest time, working parallel as a team, we would be able to make it from scratch in around 3 hours, and in 20 minutes if we used some premade ingredients. This applies to our project especially, since this demonstrated the importance of planning and having multiple teammates working separately to create a viable product in the time permitted. This also highlighted the value of using some premade assets to assist us in creating our game if needed.

Background Sketches

These are the initial concept sketches based on the artwork in Maja’s GDD:

Since I wanted the game to scroll, this means that we can only see each room from one perspective. As I wanted to include more in the basement without it being one very long room, I thought it would make more sense to make it so that the player can turn and walk along the other side of the room. These sketches were very rough as I wanted to make sure that my teammates were happy with the direction before I got much further.