Inspiration
The goal of this story was to follow the guidance of keynote speaker and musician will.i.am, who inspired us with his speech on the unity between tech and art— be it musical, visual, or literary.
We had considered trying out the Python script language Ren’py as we thought it would be a fun and creative project to create our own visual novel adventure game. On Friday night, we developed an accidental inside joke regarding a “Matcha Man” and decided to use him as an antagonist for our game. What started out as a joke, ended up being a fully functioning roleplay adventure game.
What it does
A student ends up murdered by a mysterious killer who leaves a trace of matcha powder on his victims. As a detective, it is your job to interrogate the 3 prime suspects : the janitor, teacher and classmate to find out who the culprit is. The game uses a mix of pre-set dialogue as well as question options to ask each character to move the game forward. After speaking with all suspects, you will now have to make a decision.
How we built it
We used the package Ren’py to implement our code which was really easy to use and learn quickly. Ren’Py is a script language written in Python and it was a great choice for beginners like us.
Challenges we ran into
Originally, our game was going to feature the Co:Here api to utilize their text generation. The original pitch was to have a fully organic dialogue system, where the API would generate unique responses each time. However, the further we brainstormed and solifefied our idea, we realized that the functionality we needed for our idea was not aligned with the current functionality of Co:Here. We ended up abandoning the concept of our original pitch and instead, focused on a hard-coded game about murder mystery. There were many inconveniences along the way. Mostly with github and their pull/push system. Our team frequently ran into issues such as merge conflict and VS Code not commiting and pushing our code successfully. However, we were able to overcame them in order to complete our project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud of the fact that we managed to complete our project on time. Having only 36 hours total to finish the project, most of which was spent attending workshops and events instead of coding, was definitely stressful to think about. We not only managed to complete our project, we were also able to get the most out of attending Hack the North!
What we learned
We learned how to use Ren’py to easily make visual novel type games from scratch with importing audio and graphics.
What's next for The Matcha Man - A Murder Mystery
Jail! (Haha.)
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