Link to Play
Description
Morrisville is a murder mystery exploration RPG. Explore a small town in the American southwest, grill your friends and neighbors for leads, and find clues and pick them up, all in order to figure out who killed your spouse, and why … before it's too late.
The player’s goal is to find out who the murderer is before they’re killed. We hope to draw the player in by providing them with an interesting and compelling mystery that they will want to solve. Furthermore, we have attempted to create characters and motives that will help create an investment in the person playing our game.
Details
Role: Designer and Programmer
Contributions
For the development of Morrisville, I created: The ability to pick up and inspect items in 360 degress located throughout the game. The dialogue/story flag system (this dynamically keeps track of the player's decisions and progress and determines journal notes, dialogue outcomes and end story decision options). The player movement system. And I contributed to the dynamic dialogue tree, the simple animation and roaming states of the NPCs, as well as the base design for the game.
The Process
Morrisville was developed as the final project for my Game Programming class, and was a fun way to implement the specific design specifications that were place upon us. For this game, we decided to go with an atypical approach to the more action slanted design requirements by creating a heavily dialogue focused murder mystery game, taking inspiration from various visual novels and games like Disco Elysium. We decided on our core mechanic of a branching dialogue tree, and were planning on implementing multiple characters, to allow for multiple playthoughs in the future for the player to see the story from different perspectives. The functionality required for this plan was implemented, however, we were not able to produce the chunk of story and dialogue for multiple characters before the end of the project's deadline.