Murder at Supper

Murder at Supper puts a comedic and charming spin on murder mysteries. The story surrounds Geoffrey, an elderly, retired engineer who lives alone in a mansion, accompanied only by a family of robots he created to take care of him. One day, Geoffrey dies suddenly! Players assume the role of P.A.M. (Geoffrey’s Personal Assistant Machine), the lone robot on a mission to solve the untimely death of their beloved father.

• Developed in Unity & C#
• Coded in Visual Studio Code
• Version Controlled through GitHub
• Implemented dialogue through YarnSpinner

Below are some of my highlights as the lead developer on Murder at Supper.

• Worked on the back end to develop an inventory system for collecting and displaying clues.
• Organized scenes with Model-View-Controller (MVC) software pattern.
• Created Game Manager Objects to connect assets in scene.
• Wrote C# scripts with respect to the official Unity documentation.

Nicole worked on the back end to develop an inventory system that would collect clues to solve the murder. Clues are collected in one of two ways:

1. Through conversations with other characters
2. Through collision-based interactions in the scene

Below is an example of the YarnSpinner script, which contains the declaration of the clues, as well as their descriptions. These values are set in the game script and then sent over by the GameManager to be utilized in other C# classes.

Game Managers

In addition to a singular GameManager, Nicole created “Manager” Objects for other systems in her scene, including an InventoryManager, an AudioManager, a ClueManager, and more. These Game Objects contained scripts that controlled assets and logic within the scene. Their architecture was inspired by the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

MVC Architecture

Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a software development pattern Nicole discovered in one of her coding classes. She gathered inspiration from the practice to create a unique setup for scripts and objects in her Unity scene. As explained in this commit, she designed a GameManager object that acted as a central hub of communication for different, smaller systems in the scene.

I established and ran a GitHub repository that could do the following:

• Quickly and easily share files
• Track progress and maintain an organized workflow
• Periodically create stable builds of the game
• Systematically identify and fix errors, without corrupting said builds
• Develop comprehensive and user-friendly documentation

You can visit the official Murder at Supper repository here.

Since not everyone in my group was familiar with GitHub, I developed a comprehensive Guide to Getting Started, explaining the usage, terminology, and more.

Additionally, I carefully crafted very detailed descriptions in all of my commits and pull requests. This not only kept everyone up-to-date through the Discord, but also helped me keep track of my work.

As all game-lovers tend to do, Nicole created a Discord as a central hub of communication. More importantly, she setup a webhook between the repository and the server itself, allowing any updates to flow into a specific channel. These updates are automatically hyperlinked, making it quick and easy to stay up-to-date with the project.

As discussed in the many pull requests on the repository, Nicole created several branches for each feature and stage of the project.

• Development (dev)
• Inventory System (feat/inventory)
• Clues for Inventory (feat/clues)
• Documentation (docs)
• and more