Sugar Sleuths
Engine: Unity
Position: Lead Designer
Pre-Production
Sugar Sleuths was a school project that ran for 2 semesters.
I ended up being the lead designer for this project. However my design for this game was prompted by an instructor.
We started by playing the board game, Clue. As well as the SNES version. Then we played some side scrolling games. The idea was to have a Clue-type game with side scrolling elements to it.
After that, 3 designers, including my self compiled a document to spit ball ideas. That document is below
After that we all made our own separate design documents to propose different core mechanics for the game. Below is the document I created.
My proposal for the games mechanics is what we moved forward with, and I became the lead designer for the project. Our programmers started to assess the scope of the game, while the designers began to fine tune the mechanics
Paper Prototyping
We had some time before our programmers would have a digital prototype. So I created a paper prototype in the mean time to see how some of the mechanics would play out.
The map for the prototype is in a circle because the game itself would have one map that the player would move through by going left or right. No matter how far you walked you would just be going in a big circle.
The purpose of the game is to find out who the candy thief is. Unlike Clue, the players themselves could never be the culprit.
and this paper prototype was also set up so that every piece of information was public knowledge, as our game would not have the anonymity that clue has.
This prototype helped iron out some kinks in the design, and by this time I was also working on the Games GDD. But due to the speed at which we were going, the GDD ended up lacking a few technical aspects to it. That GDD is Below.
Several mechanics did not make it into the final game, some due to time restraints, others due to a conflict in design once put into the engine.
There were obstacles that could slow the player while they traveled, this was taken out as it extended the play time too long.
there was also a short rock paper scissors mini-game that was removed due to our programmers not having enough time to create that system.
Players were also having a hard time remembering all the clues they were given, so I added a journal in the pause menu that would save the last clue an NPC had given to the player.
Players would have to figure out witch NPC was lying as well as how the achieved the crime, by piecing together which clues they had were true.