Jefferson Misfit

A text-based adventure game where players can understand the effects of unjust societal prejudices against high schoolers.

As the developer on this project, I created the backend pipelines, developed the game interface in Unity, and oversaw the QA tests and bug fixes.

We, as a group, decided to construct our game narrative based on L.A. noir movies like Chinatown (Polanski, 1974) and focus on the theme of inevitability often found in these movies. Firstly, the struggle of being trapped in a societal system or facing prejudice social expectations were conflicts that we felt would be retable amongst all people. Secondly, we felt it would be interesting to subvert the player’s free-will found in traditional visual novels and choose-your-adventure games and simulate the hardships people face trying to break from a pre existing system, in our case, the game system. Thirdly, we felt that creating a prototype with a linear storyline would allow us to focus on developing interesting interactive and player input mechanics within the visual novel space.

For the style, we wanted to design our game based on old 8-bit, computer terminal games. We felt that the visual limitations of this style (i.e. minimal UI and use of ASCII characters) would allow us to explore different ways of designing spaces with limited resources. We also felt this style would narrow the scope of our idea, allowing us to explore different uses of sound and text rather than spend time creating a broad range of other assets. When researching this style, we tried to explore different text-based puzzle games and include some of these game mechanics into our prototype. One game we took inspiration from was a puzzle investigation mobile game called DEVICE 6 (Flesser & Gardebäck, 2017). In this game, players swipe back and forth between scenes and paragraphs searching for clues in text or illustrations to solve mysteries in the narrative. We felt the idea of hiding text clues in images and allowing the player to go back and forth between different story sections could enhance the player experience during our noir-style detective scenes.