Inspiration
Murder mysteries are fun- but what if they were educational too? Mysteries always engage one’s problem solving skills, and adding more fun yet challenging problems could step up one’s critical thinking skills. That is why we created an innovative murder mystery challenge: The Puzzle of the Poisoned Pupil. The Puzzle of the Poisoned Pupil is an interactive game in which the user has to solve a special Academies-themed murder mystery by unlocking and deciphering various clues. Our game is an original mystery game created in Unity with a special twist.
What it does
After the initial starting screen, there is a text scene which describes the backstory of the mystery. It includes important information on the victim and suspects. The main scene is a bulletin board which has 8 different clues to help the user determine the murderer. Once the user clicks on it, it takes them to a deciphering page, in which one must solve the cipher to unlock the clue. After the cipher is unlocked, the user unlocks the clue, which can help them determine who the murderer is. The user can go back to the main menu by clicking the home button in the bottom right hand corner. The Puzzle of the Poisoned Pupil also has an integrated notebook feature in which the user can take notes and record their thoughts.
How we built it
We used Unity for the game’s UI and C# for the game's backend. We created our sprites and screens in Procreate and Canva which made our game more aesthetically pleasing.
Challenges we ran into
There were multiple challenges that we ran into while designing this game, but one time consuming challenge was figuring out how to connect the screens with unity features and transitioning between the notes screen and bulletin board.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
There were many aspects of our project that we are proud of, but the accomplishment that we were most pleased with would be the notes feature of our game. Utilizing text input in Unity was a skill our team had to learn with the time we had, and we are glad we could understand and learn this attribute of Unity. Additionally, we are extremely proud of our storyline for our murder mystery as well as developing and constructing all the clues necessary to solve it.
What we learned
Throughout the entirety of this project, none of our team members new much about Unity and we had a huge learning curve and developed a much better understanding of the engine as well as C#. We learnt a wide range of new skills such as implementing input and output text, button functionalities, and programming in C#.
What's next for The Puzzle of the Poisoned Pupil
In the future we would plan to add more ciphers and decryptions to increase and enforce the educational aspect of the game. We would also like to include more clues and suspects to further engage the audience as well as incorporating more suspects into the storyline in order to make the game more interesting and detailed. Furthermore, we would plan to design more levels with additional mysteries with different complexity levels.
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