Investigator of Things.

Players take the role of a detective investigating a murder in a cyberpunk setting. Environmental interactions, dialogue and inventory puzzles support the investigation, alongside a top-down datamining action minigame.

Created for International Game Concept Creation 2018 at KAMK in Kajaani, Finland, the project earned first runner-up. Our six-person team brought together three Singaporean and three Finnish members. The repository records development from 28 August to 6 September 2018, roughly ten calendar days. Working together was a memorable international experience.

Built the dialogue framework and its custom Unity Editor authoring tool, and worked on interaction handling, selection and object highlighting. Implemented the datamining minigame’s movement, shooting, AI and transport system. Also integrated intro and ending sequences, player animations and the flow connecting the game from start to finish.

Represented dialogue trees and individual nodes as ScriptableObject assets. Nodes store dialogue text, child references and event callbacks; the runtime traverses the tree, presents text with a typewriter effect and invokes attached events. This connected authored conversations to gameplay actions through UnityEvent callbacks. The approach was influenced by Ryan Hipple’s Game Architecture with Scriptable Objects talk at Unite Austin 2017.

Built a custom Dialog Maker window in the Unity Editor. It exposes a recursive hierarchy of dialogue nodes with text and child fields, then generates the tree and node assets. This provided an authoring workflow for branching conversations alongside the runtime system that played them.

Worked on the interaction system that lets players look at, inspect, pick up and use objects, or view logs. Selection and highlighting communicate which objects can be interacted with, while dialogue callbacks connect responses to changes in the game.

Implemented a top-down action minigame with movement, mouse aiming, shooting, enemy behaviours and transport interactions. Integrated the surrounding presentation, including intro and ending sequences and player animations, to connect individual systems into a playable experience.

The project brought gameplay programming, content-authoring tools and integration together within a short development period. Applying ScriptableObject-based design to dialogue was an opportunity to turn an architectural idea from a conference talk into a system used by the team. The international collaboration and first runner-up result remain highlights of the project.