Game Programmer
Friday
A murder mystery detective game where you play as a detective and your partner, Friday, has been murdered. Collect evidence, interview witness, and make accusations to investigate her murder. The game was built by a team of 15 over a 6 month period using the Unity game engine.
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As one of the programmers on the team I specialized on the narrative based systems. Starting even slightly before the semester started, I got myself familiar with Yarn Spinner, an opensource tool by Secret Lab to help build narrative and dialogue. This provided the ability to write Yarn scripts, a language built for dialogue writing, and then have Yarn Spinner auto-compile the scripts in Unity and display the dialogue when the game is running. So, as I began development, I utilized Yarn Spinner as the backbone of our dialogue system, adding on top of it and adjusting certain things to get the dialogue to behave how we wanted it to. I also set up custom commands and functions to integrate the yarn scripts in with other systems of our game.
Sample Yarn script for the character Abby: here
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For instance, one of the other major systems I worked on and integrated with Yarn scripts was the journal system. One of the core features of the journal was the ability store the current line of dialogue to the journal. I set this up in the journal’s own script, but then I also had to add a command to Yarn that would mark any key text saved on the back end. The journal can also save items inspected. I set up everything needed for the journal to save item information once received, but I worked with another programmer to get the item information sent over to the journal. I also set up systems to be able to select, highlight, and remove journal entries.
Core journal script: here
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With the journal saving items and dialogue lines I then set up the capability for the player to interrogate NPCs to receive more information. To set this up I made adjustments to the journal scripts, but then set most of it up through the Yarn scripts
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Another major system I worked on was the tutorial system. As a programming team working with design, we structured out how the tutorial should work exactly and created the architecture for how to run it. From there I set up any portion of the tutorial that related with journal or narrative systems.
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