An interactive detective story of murder, deception, and intrigue.
A Long Night was a solo project developed during my time at DigiPen. My personal goal in the project was to create something that could showcase my broad skillset. The game was programmed completely by myself, including a clever text reader that made writing content much easier. Every background and character illustration was also done by myself. I wrote all the dialogue, and also designed the gameplay.
Gameplay
Detective Quinn has many investigative tools at his disposal. Talk to a diverse cast of characters as you seek the truth. Follow different threads of conversation to reveal more options. Collect evidence, and present it to a character to illicit responses or do catch them in a lie. Observe the environment to draw conclusion and get a glimpse into the detective’s mind and character.
Flexible Text-Reader System
In order to save time putting my writing into the game, I developed a system that could read a text file dynamically, and put that writing into the game. The system has a variety of keywords and tags that enable effects and changes in game state, all read from the text file. This way, if a conversation needs to be edited for any reason, I can easily open the text file and make the necessary changes. The game will run without any additional coding, and with a few clicks in the unity editor. New tags and effects are easy to add too, and will be applied to any type of dialogue interaction, regardless of when it was written or where it’s been added. Below is a conversation I designed to show just some of what the system is capable of. Next to the video is the text that the game is reading to produce the resulting dialogue in the video.
Alright let's see what this baby can do.[0]
<p>First off, we can designate whether the player is talking...
Or if the character on screen is.
<p>Some conversations involve more than two characters-
<2>We've got that handled too.
<p>There are a few tools for emphasizing dialogue.
Yeah we can change the size! ^^[0]
<p>That was unnecessarily loud.!^
What was that?[2]
<p>Oh, nothing.
By the way, all this emoting I've been doing, that's handled by the system too.[1]
<p>Why don't we go over some of the more practical stuff?
Oh yeah, of course. We can display Images.||0||[2]
<p>Cute doodle. You do that by yourself?
Shut up man.[0]
Actually, It does sounds too.
Whatever you want to display you just designate it in the editor.
<p>Cool, that makes implementation easy.
No kidding.[1]
There are also some gameplay tools, like updating inventory,+2+
And updating journal entries.@1
<p>Gee, is that all.
No actually, if you want to, you can add a splash of <color=red>color</color> to your dialogue.[2]
<p>What a great system!
tell me about it![0]