I have always wanted to join a Brackeys Game Jam but each time I backed out because I'm not confident with myself. And when I gained some confidence- I ended up missing it by 2 days. Despite that, I still want to try making a mystery game, which is something I like. I knew it was going to be hard and I would definitely lost sleep because of this, but it was worth it. I got inspiration for the case when I was working on my full-time job in the office, which is why the game takes place in an office too!

I immediately contacted my friend, seraa_n012, to ask if she wanted to join with me as a Game Art Artist. She agreed but she told me the most she could do was probably just the sketches. So I thought, why not just make it black and white? It fits with the story too.

My inspiration for the gameplay comes from the investigation part of Danganronpa. Although in that game, only the people are made with 2D images. I had no time to made 3D models for everything, so I used free assets from Unity Asset Store for the office environment. The characters and the items that we can interact would be hand-drawn.

Then I thought, the hand-drawn things would definitely not blend in with the surroundings, because I didn't have time to customize the 3D models. So why not just make the 2D images even more stand out? Which leads me to suggest adding a white outline, like the characters and the items were cut from paper.

As for the story, I'm aware I'm not skilled enough to write a mystery case in several days and still make it make sense. When I realized I probably could only make an 'easy' mystery, I decided to make the story more interesting by adding a plot twist.

I actually had more ideas for the gameplay. But since I never made a visual novel dialog system before, I spent too much time on this because of unexpected bugs I encountered. This is a visual novel, so of course I had to make sure the dialog system is working correctly before anything else.

And that's how the game design was made. If I had more time, I really wanted to make the mystery not so linear though. This was a great experience either way. In such a short time, I learnt many things I otherwise wouldn't have known if I hadn't joined this game jam!

Check out the game page here: There is No Mystery Here by blanchiel