Gameplay

This page will be used to document gameplay changes, features, and to show our working out.

To begin, the game is a Murder Mystery themed Point and Click mixed with Visual novel. This is to play on our strengths, my art, and the Clients writing. Alomng the way I will need to master the used of switches, variables, if statements and branches if I want to allow for fail states and multiple endings. Coding is not my strongest skill, so the decision to use an engine I have personal experience with was the best option. I went with "Visual Novel Maker" as it allowed for "Hotspots" which are clickable elements on the screen and a built-in dialogue system and save states.

Early versions of the game used placeholder art for the background and dialogue system in order to focus on learning the engine. Dialogue is simple, but allowing the player to write their own name, and preparing so many global variables for what items have been picked up, let alone the inventory system which took an entire week to code. It was a big undertaking, but it was also very enjoyable to learn more about an engine I had used in the past.

The inventory is a screen that is accessible at any point in the game, a tutorial was designed where the player has to show the conductor his ticket before he can board the train, this allowed for a seemless tutorial that was diagetic to the world. Each icon has a "hotspot" or a clickable box which will give more information about the item you have collected. The inventory was tricky to code as the engine automatically moves onto the next scene if there is no dialogue, so I had to lock the screen to player input and implement a continuous "wait" loop that could only be broken if the player clicks on an item or the exit button seen on the top right.