SouthPaw Detective Agency

SouthPaw Detective Agency is a first person detective game. The player plays as Bell Blacktail, investigating the strange murder of Richard Ward. This was my first game I made.
Engine: GameMaker
Role: Sole Designer
Team Size: Solo Project
Platform: PC, Itch.io

Goals

  1. Make a Game
           This was my first foray into video game design. Through this project, I learned how to code, create basic art, and write for a video game. Overall, I think my strengths as a writer shine brightly through this project.
  2. Ambiguous Answers
           Something I wanted to keep in mind when writing for SouthPaw was that detectives don't always have 100% certainty. Sure, they can amass clues and even get a confession, but a detective will never be able to fully prove or disprove something. When writing, I tried to instill this feeling by having multiple potential people who caused the crime.
  3. Complex Characters
           Another thing I wanted to focus on was making my characters feel complex. There isn't one fully good or fully bad character, they all are humans who make choices and sometimes they make the wrong choice. I wanted to keep that in mind when writing.

Additional Images

Postmortem

What went well?

What went wrong?

What did I learn?
I made a game: At the beginning of this project, I had no knowledge of how to make a game. But through trail and error, I managed to write and script my own game. This is/was a huge achievement for me, especially given my lack of technical background.
It's not optimized: There is still a bevy of bugs, it doesn't support controller or the mouse, there are a number of technical issues. All of these things I recognize, and tried to mitigate during development.
The game development pipeline: Through this project, I was able to learn the full pipeline of game development.