Murder Among Nobles
A narrative driven role-playing game for the PC | | A royal dinner party takes a murderous turn.
Overview
Summary: This is a roleplaying murder mystery where the player needs to interact with the characters in the game and search the level for clues to find who killed the king. All the characters have branching dialog and different dialog paths based on what stage you are at in the game or what quests the characters have given the player.
Software: Unity 2021.1.12f, Pixel Crushers Dialog System, Visual Studio 2022
Tags: Narrative Design, Game Writing, Level Design
Duties
Placed and laid out the characters and pick-ups in strategic positions around the level.
Mapped out the character relations and motivations in order to build a believable narrative for the murder mystery.
Scripted the dialogue for each character, the progressing player objectives, and the cut scenes at the beginning and end of the level.
Narrative Development
The narrative concept for this game was very much inspired by mystery narratives like Knives Out and ones about medieval stories like Hamlet. I had wanted to do a mystery for this project since I thought that would be a fun narrative to write and explore telling through using dialogue.
In order to construct the mystery and the motives of the characters, I mapped out their relations with each other. This helped me write the narrative of the game level as well as the context this level is taking place in.
Each of the characters have their own dialog trees that the player can run their when interacting with them. Some of the branches are accessed based on the player’s responses and other branches are blocked until the player has finished certain quests.
Before implementing these dialog trees in the level using the Pixel Crusher’s Dialog System, I drafted them out in a mind-mapping software so that I could better construct a cohesive narrative. Since the narrative is communicated mostly through each of the character’s dialog, the narrative threads in that dialog needed to line up in a believable way. Having all the dialog tries in one space and being able to see them altogether allowed me to ensure that the story I’m telling in this level is something that players can follow.
