Connected: Summer of '09
In a quiet summer of 2009, friendships were tested among a group of friends when an anonymous texter threatened to permanently keep them offline one by one.
Connected: Summer of ’09 is a mystery visual novel about a group of friends and an anonymous killer. It explores and breaks the concepts of trust and loyalty within the bounds of chatboxes.
Highlights
- Made our first ever Unity Project within a month's timeframe in College.
- Designed a murder mystery teen flick genre visual novel.
- Developed a chat box feature for a customized visual novel system with 7 concurrent tabs simulating a frantic chat between friends.
Learnings
This was first digital game that I developed for a school project. With limited knowledge at that time, I had to research several things about Unity such as Scriptable Objects and handling canvas elements to create the a functional chatbox system/social media channel browser effect.
It was satisfying to see the fruits of our labor within a month’s worth of producing this simple visual novel. Looking at this now, I can point out several design flaws that were evident here
- Bombardment of backstory not evenly spaced out or not even paced at all. This can be solved by implementing a system on dropping certain narrative beats.
- Lack of feedback with the time-bounded choices for the player. The only feedback they have is the decreasing transparency of button’s background. A timer could be present on top of the choices to give players visibility on how much time there is.
- Lack of tutorials or contrast among visual elements would leave players not knowing what elements in the screen are interactable. This could be fixed by overhauling the UI to and allow for affordances that can be lifted from modern websites and messaging apps.
On a positive note, this small limited-time student project already demonstrated growth within our capacities as game designers and developers.