For our assignment, we interpreted the theme ‘borders’ as borders between worlds. The real world, and a paper world. You play as Dukie, a little doddle detective who ends up doing the real detective’s job. Dukie must delve into the detective’s notebook to solve a murder mystery case. On his journey he meets suspects and witnesses, who he must gather evidence from and find out who committed the crime. Once he has gathered all the evidence, he must leave the notebook world and fill out the detective’s case file, with the knowledge he obtained in the notebook.

For this project, Grace took on the coding, Emily did the detailed art pieces. I did the animations, game assets, and level design. I also did small bits of code (such as the refined character controller, animation triggers and some scene changing events).

I first started by making characters and props to decorate the world with. All my art and animations were made in procreate. I made 5 animations for Dukie, but we only ended up using 2. After placing the character into the game, and adding animations to the character script, I realised that the movement was done using translation. I had to redo this script to work with rigid body and vector 2D so that the player would be able to collide with objects in the scene. At this point we had a moving character with walking and idle animations. I then added the mechanic that allows Dukie to see footprints, but only when he’s close enough to them.

After I finished making all the assets, I began to build the notebook level with all these props. The world wasn’t too big, because Dukie moves slowly with his magnifying glass.  The level is broken down into 4 parts. Each part you find a different piece of information: -Weapon the crime was committed with.

-Handprint of the murderer.

-Culprit face sketches.

-Suspect Alibis.

I placed 7 different NPCs (on top of the 6 Grace placed) in different locations, and I modified Grace’s dialogue script to work with my NPCs. Each NPC provides you with a clue or different piece of information. I made sure it was important to talk to all NPCs, because they provide information necessary for the quiz at the end. 3 of these NPCs are witnesses, and the other 4 are suspects, so it’s important to consider that suspects may lie to protect themselves. The suspects designs were made by Emily, but I made my own doodle like versions for inside the notebook.

I also made the cutscenes for the start and end. These pretty much just consist of dialogue, and Dukie rising from the piece of paper he was drawn on. The animations were made in procreate, but I used Unity’s built in timeline functionality to assemble them together.

The games were still seaming a bit quiet though, so I used the default apple loops in GarageBand to make some jazzy tunes to play as you solve some crimes.

I’m really happy with how the game turned out, and I’m delighted with the aesthetic I pulled off with the doodle styled assets.