The moon shines as the midnight wind blows through the half-opened window. A stern figure sits in a brown leather chair and lights up a cigar. A rustle of newspaper and a gleam in the figure’s eye… A new case has presented itself, and it’s detective is ready.
Patty “Pat” Irvin sweeps out of his chair and collects his things. His thirst for solving crime is about to be sated.
What is “What?!”?
My Roles: Co-producer, narrative systems programmer and designer, lead writer, and UI animator on a team of eight.
Engine: Unity (C#) with Google Sheets integration in 2023. Uses FMOD for audio.
What?! is a single-player mystery game that focuses on a compact world and unconventional solutions. Players take on the role of Pat Irvin, a ditzy private investigator struggling to maintain his family business. There are five full cases, each of which evolves upon existing gameplay in unexpected ways. It was developed in three months for the NYU Game Center’s Major Studio: Spring course.
The team: Miles, Isabellie, Leena, Joon, Cathy, Darcy, Emily, and Yunfei. Music by Malachi. With special thanks to Justin and Teresa.
Process
Design Documentation
Implementation and Iteration
I was in charge of the entire narrative system, including the dialogue parsing script, UI, and narrative flow. I also picked up several other necessary tasks, such as team organization, level layout, and debugging.
I handled the entire dialogue system, from programming the CSV reader to animating the text boxes. It was a really challenging but rewarding process. This was entirely done through spreadsheet manipulation and data parsing. Working from the ground up allowed me to fine tune a wholly customizable dialogue system that fit our needs, rather than trying to force a tool that had too many bells and whistles for our purposes. Everyone was able to request features they wanted to see in terms of the narrative outputs, and I could add them just as easily. My work on this system has gone on to influence many of my collaborators at the NYU Game Center. They often reference my parsing scripts and come to me for help when trying to figure out the best “spreadsheet logic” for anything from level design to project management.
UI Animation was done with the built-in Unity animator and was tied in with the code for the dialogue. For the tutorial text, it fires as soon as the first room is entered. For every dialogue box, text slides up when interacted with and can be double-tapped to speed up the display. Conditions can be met to get special lines of dialogue, as well.
In terms of management, I had to come in and take up the helm towards the end of development. Our project manager had fallen ill and needed some time before she got back to business. I did my best to keep us all on track during a stressful period of development. I was keeping up lines of communication and documenting all of our meetings, tasks, and playtest feedback in our sprint spreadsheets, developer documentation, and feature logs. We were able to finish the writing of our final level, polish up the environments in all the cases, and plan our university showcase set-up by the end of the last sprint.
Overall, it taught me to be very prepared for everything. Suddenly being in charge of a team of seven people was certainly a shock; but when our manager was able work, she came back in and started right up as if she never left. It was a very smooth transition process and I kept everything running and on-time during one of the rockiest parts of our development. I’m very proud of everyone during that time and I’m glad that I was able to take care of things in a way that kept my team level-headed and stress-free.