Intro

Murder Hotel is an unfinished group project developed over the course of the Spring 2021 semester. The prompt given to us was “Monster Therapy Visual Novel”. Over the course of the initial meeting, we decided to go with a top down 2D puzzle game.

My role in this project was lead programmer. It was my job to bring the assets into Unity and add functionality.

About

A group of archaeologists went to an archeology convention and decided to stay in a hotel while they were in town. Unbeknownst to them, they brought cursed relics that warped reality itself and changed the world around them. Watching his staff turn into monsters and the ghosts of old employees come back to haunt him, the Hotel manager calls upon a private investigator to get to the bottom of the issue and stop it.

The original scope of the game was far too large to develop in one semester, so we decided to limit the scope heavily. A fully realized version of the game would have been a puzzle game where you move from room to room in the hotel, being careful to avoid the monsters in the hallway. Each room featured a small mystery to solve. Maybe a piece of furniture was missing or haunted, maybe a monster lurked in the corner. In order to solve the mystery, the player had to speak to the room resident to gain intel, then explore the room to find the items needed to crack the case.

In the end, I decided to make a minimalist level with a moveable player character and direct my attention towards building a character customizer that could change body type, hair style, and hair color.

Development

The core focus of this project was not developing a game. The main goal was learning how to work together as a team to develop a game. We worked together to write a design document, and set up production goals and milestones for each member of the team. We spent a lot of time in meetings discussing what we had done and what we were doing to get feedback and make sure we were all in agreement about the trajectory of the game.

As the programmer, I was putting together assets given to me by the other members of my team, as well as a few collected by myself. I built a floor of the hotel, with a small square hallway and 2 bedrooms, and the character select screen.

Retrospective

This project was interesting to me for a few reasons. It was the first game project I developed as part of a team, so it was a challenge to not be in total control of the game. However, it became an excellent experience in learning and development. My teammates supplied me with art and music that was far above my caliber, and it was an honor to be the one to put it together. If I were developing the project by myself, I would only have managed to create some of the art, and I wouldn’t have been able to make as much as my colleague.

Another challenge we experienced was the time constraint. At this point, I had already made a few demo projects so I thought the process would be easy, but I was wrong. The projects in question (Skeletim and InterGalactic Highway) were solo works built over the course of a long break, so I could put as much time as I wanted into them, and there was never any deadline or pressure. In contrast, this project was one of a few classes I was taking, so I had many competing priorities at the same time. Additionally, we only had 2 months to build the entire project which severely limited what we were capable of building. The upside of this was that I got to experience crunch time development. When you have time to ponder all the different approaches you could choose, you can get lost in the sea of options. When your back is against the wall, you have to pick something and move with it. I could have developed a more advanced and optimized customization screen, but what matters is that I developed any customization screen at all.

The most important takeaway from this project was the art of the design document. I had written up blueprints for games before that went over mechanics, level structure, and assets needed, but I had never made anything as descriptive as a well written design document. A detailed plan saves a lot of time and stress later on in the project, but more importantly it’s very fun to write.