The Small Fry Media team, the talented creators of The Hierophant. I missed the memo about wearing all black.
My team
The Hierophant was my capstone project for my final year at Brock University. In September, we agreed to make a murder mystery visual novel game with a little twist, you play as a tarot reader. My role on the team was three-fold. I was lead UX/UI designer, a sound designer and a programmer for the game. I was also the voice actor for Lana who is the lead detective in the story. Juggling all of these roles was stressful at times but so rewarding in the end. Wearing all these different hats and acting as a go between for the art and technical teams was a great way for me to work closely with all of my teammates and bring all our ideas from concept to completion.
The main menu screen.
my process
There weren’t many people in my program that have made a game before (including myself) so we didn’t want to make something that would be too complex coding-wise such as an RPG. After pitching our ideas we decided that creating a visual novel would allow us to use our teams abilities to the fullest. Although we didn’t have programmers, we had a lot of visual artists, graphic artists, musicians and writers. We built our game in the Unity engine which worked well for the type of game we were making. There were only two coders on our team and I volunteered to be the third addition to complete the team. I had never built anything in Unity before then so I was tasked with onboarding some programming skills. Most of my learning came from the process of working in engine. I had taken some online courses to learn the basics of the engine like the tools and the coding standards but it didn’t prepare me enough for the more complex things we had to put into the game. It wasn’t all bad though, doing the sound design and voice acting was really fun and my primary role of lead UX/UI designer gave me the ability to work with all the departments and have a more diverse set of tasks to complete every week. This project was both the hardest and most rewarding experience I’ve had in my entire university career and it has taught me so much more than I could have anticipated.
A screenshot of the main gameplay interface. You are to match the evidence from the crime scene photos to one of the tarot cards that have been dealt. There is also a guidebook.
the project & covid-19
The main goal we had been working towards was to showcase our game at Toronto’s Level Up competition, but unfortunately due to Covid-19 we were unable to participate this year. The pandemic had also caused our school to close prematurely and we weren’t able to fully complete our game. We do plan to have a working version of what we do have completed up on our website so that people who are interested can play. You can also find blog posts from all the members of the team and an art gallery. The way our year closed out was definitely not what I’d expected, but I’m still so grateful for the experience and the lovely team I was working alongside of.
A screenshot of the dialogue system.