Game can be played here:
https://ed.icivics.org/games/investigation-declaration
Introduction
A game developed with iCivics where the player takes on the role of a time traveling investigator that acquires information from various people, places, and items throughout time and pieces it together to figure out how ideas spread across the globe over time.
Gameplay
Platforms: Android, iOS, WebGL (on website)
2D UI dialogue focused game where player acts as an investigator traveling through different times to different locations around the world to find information as it pertains to three core ideas: Social Contract, State Sovereignty, and Natural Rights. As the player collects this information, they use it to fill out the blanks in an informative document centered around one of these core ideas, highlighting how this idea spread between these two different times and places.
My Work
Team: Producer, Game Designer, UIUX Designer/Engineer, Lead Engineer (myself), 2D Artist, support Game Engineer, Senior Engineer (game architecture consultation)
We created a memento-like data system that integrated with some pre-existing company systems to support tracking player data, and saving that data from one session to the next.
I built an object container that could nicely format paragraphs of text while fitting UI elements throughout for the Mad Libs style documents.
We created a dynamic camera system using the Unity Cinemachine plugin that easily allowed UIUX to create many different camera view points in each unique location to zoom in and out on the different pieces of evidence for a more dynamic exploration of each scene that also highlighted our light parallax system.
Game Systems
Progression System
The game progresses in phases, including a tutorial phase at the start. Each of these phases is triggered by the player creating some set of the avilable links at any given phsae, and opens new times/locations.I created a robust designer friendly progression system that could easily be modified, controlling which areas and times were unlocked and how.
Link Text Answer Validation System and Evidence Collection System
The game has a unique chunk of text for each idea link in the game where the player must fill in the blanks correctly with their collected evidence to generate the link and progress in the game. This is the result of a nicely interconnected system of data accessible to the designer to: determine snippets of evidence, associate these snippets of evidence with particular evidence objects, and generate the link text with the correct evidence slotted in.
Tools
I created a debug system to help testers quickly move through the game by: auto-collecting all the snippets in a location, auto-collecting all snippets in the game, and auto-completing the fill in the blank documents.