Fabi
Reichsoellner
A fire late at night. A lost life. Eight witnesses.
You have until morning to talk with the inhabitants of the mansion to figure out who knows what and who the culprit behind the fire really is. If not, you will be the one to face the Officer’s judgement.
Uso is a two chapter demo created in two months as part of DARE Academy 2022 and showcased at EGX London 2022.
Uso is a DARE 2022 finalist and was awarded with the Best Team Award.
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Credits:
Art, Design, Narrative, Production, Social Media, QA - Fabi Reichsoellner
Programming - Michael Keenan
Audio - Curtesy of Alex Chapuis
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Art & Design:
Uso is a papercraft style whodunnit set in a 3d space with visual novel style accessibility elements.
Each character has their own in-game 3d model as well as sprite art.
The main gameplay mechanic is exploring the environment and interacting with characters to collect clues. Certain interactions consume time so the player has to pick and choose what information they deem most important.
The interaction counter does not allow the player to gather the full evidence in one single playthrough to encourage the players to return and choose different interactions.
Narrative:
Uso is my largest narrative driven game. After creating the overarching plot, testing the story on readers to gauge the balance of suspects and making appropriate edits, each character was assigned their personality. Based on that they were created to be more or less hostile or helpful towards the player, revealing information easily or only after further questioning.
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Dialogue:
Each character has bespoke main conversation -with multiple dialogue options and clues to unlock based on the player's choices.
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post conversation - once the player has completed a main conversation, they cannot repeat the conversation to make different choices during that playthrough loop, each character has their own way of signifying that the conversation is over. If the player tries again, the dialogue remains "..."
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"I do not want to talk to you" - as players progress through each playthrough, the characters available and willing to speak to the player change. Speaking to those characters will not consume time.
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"The Officer has arrived" - an indicator that time is up and the player cannot gather more clues without simply ending gameplay.
Ending lines - every suspect has a unique ending screen responding to your accusations.
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Idle conversation - each character mutters to themselves when the player is not talking to them to further show their characteristics and enliven the scene.
As an accessibility feature and to allow the game a visual novel like style, players can choose to toggle the text panel on and off as well as change the font size in the settings.
As the dialogue has to fit both the panel as well as the diegetic text bubbles, which are significantly smaller. I continuously edited and tested the dialogue to be both short and snappy, avoiding unnecessary rambling but still maintain each characters unique manner of speech. My greatest concern was balancing exposition with flavour text.
Production:
This project was created by a two person team and one of the production challenges was coordinating remotely and managing content limitation.
As this project was scheduled on a tight timeline, I led daily Scrum meetings, with short interval Jira sprints to keep track of the production pipeline and to build the prototype as we were progressing.
For each of these builds I conducted playtesting to find and report bugs to fix during the next sprint.
I also managed funds and the social media content used as part of DARE to promote Uso.
