The Adventures of Detective Badgers

Summary

The Adventures of Detective Badgers is a thrilling mansion murder mystery game based on the popular "Cluedo". The game takes place in the 1800s and puts the player in the aftermath of a mansion party gone wrong, the player will have explore and face multiple puzzles to get the truth. Who committed the act, where did it take place, and with what object?

The player is to walk in the shoes of the well experienced Detective Badgers, accompanied by his trusted partner Detective Robert.

Pre-Production

For the pre-production to this project, I had decided I wanted to break this down into 3 separate stages.

1. Gameplay

The whole idea for the gameplay was to essentially re-create the feeling of "Cluedo" but in a digital environment.

I had broken the original gameplay down into some specific points:

The killer, the weapon and the room are randomly chosen every game to give the user a fresh experience in each playthrough. (otherwise known as a "Rogue-like" mechanic)
The player may interact with objects and people to play puzzles, inspect objects, find clues, interrogate suspects, etc. This will help the user get more immersed into the game, thereby creating a tether between the gameplay and the player.
We want our characters voiced to create that extra layer of immersion and give them more personality, this will allow the player to create bonds with characters and feel emotions such as betrayal or relief when they're deemed the murderer or not.
The detective work was to have a similar feel to that of escape rooms. (Inspect fairly normal objects to find clues or a puzzle game, other things like locked doors locked behind progression walls, etc.)
Detective Robert (Detective Badger's partner) would occasionally give the player a hint to prevent them from getting stuck or frustrated on a particularly hard puzzle.
With all of these defined, we had to find a method of tying these together to create a rich and satisfying gameplay loop.

2. Artstyle

We had started developing our art style by brain storming some character designs. We wanted something simple yet compelling and were hugely inspired by a few pixel art games such as "Pokemon", as well as some fan-made styles for popular titles like "Dragon Ball".

Although, to begin with game assets, I first had to come up with some general ideas for the characters and give them some character before adapting them.

2.1. Detective Badgers

For Detective Badgers, I wanted the character to be on the younger side. This drove me to giving him fairly dark hair and some stubble.

The character was then given a dark grey trench coat with a green tie underneath as well as a fedora with a green band to match his tie.

2.2. Other characters

This was all the same for the party guests, so the same process was followed.

Characters:

Linda the maid: Seductive, has something for the master of the house.
Malcolm the problemed child: Snob, Crybaby, Throws frequent tantrums.
Christine the mother of Malcolm: Snob, Careless, Bad at parenting.
Christopher the trader: Rich, Rude, Only cares for his business and money.
Richard the journalist: Wants the best story, will do anything to get it.
Margret the Florist: Crazy, Loves flowers.

With the base of our characters created, I went ahead and applied the same style and shape to all following characters with some help from Ben Emdon. Although Dylan Barlow and Detective Robert weren't concepted, we already knew we wanted the same style for Robert as Detective Badgers except, with a grey band and tie as well as slightly different coloured hair and Dylan Barlow was based of a person named Dylan Ferro.

2.3. Environment

Now that we had concepted our characters, we needed to design a map for the game, we had previously determined that the game would take place in a house party within a mansion. We knew from previous discussions that we wanted to have the mansion contain a few types of rooms:

Games room
Kitchen
Dining room
Living room
Storage closet(s)
Bathroom(s)
Grand staircase
Foyer
Garage
Bedroom(s)
Greenhouse
This was the bare minimum for us. So we went head first into sketching up ideas for this mansion and the layout. After many failed attempts, we had settled with this

3. Vision for product

3.1. Target Audience

We were committed to building a game that was inclusive and respectful of all players, regardless of their background or experience level. We believed that by creating a diverse and compelling world, we could foster a sense of curiosity and empathy among our players, and help them to see the world in new and meaningful ways.

Overall, our vision was to create a single player game that was not only enjoyable and engaging for teenagers, but also promotes their personal growth and sense of self.

development

1. Detective Badgers

I had started throwing ideas onto a canvas until I had come up with this

2. Other characters

With the base of our characters created, I went ahead and applied the same style and shape to all following characters with some help from Ben Emdon. Although Dylan Barlow and Detective Robert weren't concepted, we already knew we wanted the same style for Robert as Detective Badgers except, with a grey band and tie as well as slightly different coloured hair and Dylan Barlow was based of a person named Dylan Ferro.

3. Environment

Now that we had a basic art vision for the game with some examples, we decided to try our hand at creating some sprites to create a room, starting with the Games room.

With this, we were confident and decided to leap at creating the assets for the rest of the mansion and setup an asset pipeline for the remaining sprites.

Ben Emdon: Environment/Room Sprites
William Castella-Bullen: Furniture/Object Sprites
Tyler Boundy: Quality Control & Final touches

While waiting for the sprites through the pipeline, I got into the programming.

4. Audio

Nobody on the team at the time had any experience with audio engineering and so that inexperience shun through to the assets produced.

We had some plans to do a ton of Sound effects, Background music and some Voice recording as all were key elements to the feel for the style of game we were hoping to make.

We didn't end up managing to make any sort of Background music worth noting and very little Sound effects but we did manage to arrange and participate in some audio recording sessions with some voice actors (including ourselves as well).

5. Mechanics

5.1. Interaction

Throughout the development of the experience, our goal was to maximize interactivity with various elements within the world, this ranges from non-playable characters (NPCs) to more silly things such as plant pots and toilets. We aimed to provide the players with the utmost freedom to shape their gameplay experience as they desire.

Moreover, to create a fully immersive environment, we gave unique backstories and personalities to all NPCs, each of whom is voiced. This approach adds a layer of depth to the growing narrative, enhancing the player's overall experience.

5.2. Roguelike Elements

We aimed to make every playthough of the game unique to maximize re-playability. By doing this, we had hoped the game would entertain a younger audience in the same fashion as popular titles such as "Hello Neighbor" or "60 Seconds!".

Elements such as the culprit, weapon and location would all be randomized to give the player a flesh experience.

5.3. Progress book

The progress book (log book) would log player progression throughout their time playing on that specific save. This would store information like what answers were given to particular questions by suspects as well as little handy notes to give the player hints in times of need.

The design of this book was to reflect a detectives notepad and act in a similar fashion to keep the player immersed in their experience even when given outside aid.

Reflection

Although the project turned out quite well at the time, it didn't quite achieve all the things we were hoping to achieve at the time.

We had organized a solid pipeline for asset generation and content implementation, Ben would create tiles for the map that he had sketched and pass them onto both me and Will. I would get them ready in engine while Will would use them as a base for designing and creating furniture assets for the rooms. All of this would get passed off to me, where I would implement them into the engine for testing.

Even though this pipeline was set, I feel as though a few things could have been changed here to maximize productivity.

I also feel as though we didn't spend enough time focusing on the stuff that mattered in pre-production and so, during the production phase, we had been tripping over our own feet to find and plan specific content.

In future, I would focus more on creating a project plan during pre-production, setting up some pipelines for productivity and expanding my efforts to other elements such as Class Diagrams for a Code-base structure as well as in-depth research to areas like Target Audience and other examples of similar content.