This project is my approach in using game as a media to tell story. The purpose of this project is to raise awareness on the issue of missing and murdered children, while teaching them ways to protect themselves from these situations. We integrated this purpose to our game by designing the protagonist as a detective with the superpower to “become” the victim and reenact the crime in their head. While they reenact the crime, we incorporate some tips of ways the victim could have protected themself. Depending on how well the player mastered these tips, we designed a “escape medal” system to keep in track of the number of correct decisions. If the player made every decision correctly, the story would have a good ending.

On the game side, we focused on replicating the process of piecing together clues when solving a case. In multiple parts of the game, we require the player to examine one evidence multiple times or use the information from one evidence to obtain other evidence. We also heavily modified the original case, dissecting it into various events that took place in 3 scenes. We tried to make sure that as the player is piecing together evidence, they are also piecing together the story.

My biggest takeaway from this project is the experience to deliver stories and information in a game, and to learn how this can be done through interactions. This encourages me to highlight interactivity in future narrative game projects and to focus on making the player part of the world that I am trying to build.