The Game

Project Checkmate put players in a noir detective fantasy. Players take on the role of Ellis Bishop, a classic detective and, wielding his trusty magnifying glass, they reveal clues hidden in the environment. They must find all the clues in order to solve the murder of the mayor!

The Team

Project Checkmate was my sophomore game production project at DigiPen. We formed a team of five designers and were given two months to make a game. This was our first project in Unreal Engine and versioned under Perforce.

My Roles

I was the team's producer, secondary narrative designer and secondary gameplay programmer.

Production

This was the first project I worked on that forced me to deal with scope. We massively underestimated the amount of time that learning new tools would take up, and we also failed to budget for some of our classmates being absent due to health issues. We had originally planned this whole journey from the detective's office, through the mayor's mansion with fully voiced dialog and such, but by the end of the project we realized there was no way we could get all of this done. With a little creativity, we decided to limit our scope to a pseudo-tutorial experience that takes place entirely in the detective's office. We adapted the assets we had created as best as we could to our new scope, and while it wasn't quite the game any of us wanted to make, we finished it and learned a whole lot in the process.

Narrative

The game's narrative was limited. We originally thought we'd have a lot of capacity for writing since we had a dedicated narrative designer, but unfortunately the team took a hit due to some unforseen health issues and we ended up with a lot less capacity than we thought. That said, with the time I had to pick up the slack between my other roles, I thought I did a pretty good job of writing some compelling clues. They certainly weren't perfect and need a lot of iteration but it was pretty fun finding ways of tying together the information I wanted to present. I tried to make each hint tell something about the characters in the story, the events that took place and I tried to leave a few red herrings along the way. There's certainly room for improvement, but I have a fondness for where we arrived.

Tech

While I personally wasn't the biggest fan of the Unreal workflow, I did learn a whole lot about it and I think I'm a better developer for it. I built some pretty neat dialog systems and most of the game's UI, and it was interesting to see the Unreal paradigm for building user interfaces.