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Meeting minutes manipulated mysteriously...unmask their machinations!
Everyone's congratulating you on getting your first promotion in the office.
Almost everyone.
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Hell bent on having your reputation ruined, an unknown assailant seeks your downfall. Office Trap is a story-based mystery game set in a 90s Japanese office aesthetic with charming characters and cute hand-drawn mixed 2D and 3D visuals.
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Through insight and investigation, your job is to gather clues and evidence and connect the dots to ascertain the perpetrator.
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Branching dialogue and choices means that every enquiry counts. This narrative-focused game allows for multiple playthroughs - just in case you might've ousted the wrong people.
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What I Did
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Created the character profiles, their goals, and backstories
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Mapped out dialogue options and their branches
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Wrote the script, all text and information for the player.
Design Pillars
Psychologically Expressive Characters
The characters should all remind us of a person we know in real life. Thus, interactions should be authentic and familiar.
Collecting Clues
The player should feel as if they are investigating to make their own assessment of the perpetrator.
Meaningful and Limited Choices
The options are varied and narrow when choosing dialogue options. Choices must be carefully examined.
Oh, the mystery!
Players loved the feeling of deliberating over the dialogue options, knowing they would be sacrificing some key information in lieu of knowing another. Telling a story and building tension through what you don't know.
Design Goals
A believable storyline you care about
With a tabula rasa protagonist, the engagement would be through the other characters and interactions. I wanted to make the characters feel real (in tandem with their anthropomorphic appearance) with nuanced dialogue and emoting that could mean several things at once.
Character Creation
Methods in the making
By making the characters feel authentic, they also had to feel distinct.
When making the characters, I had a few internal goals:
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The player could know who's speaking without a picture or a name
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The player might be reminded of a person they know in real life.
Therefore, drawing upon personal experience and psychological personality theories, especially behaviourist principles, turned out to be the best methodology for creating the characters.
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The main principle used in creation was the DISC Profiles. DISC stands for Dominance, Influence, Stability and Compliance, which are given their own respective colour.
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When creating the characters and the story, I wanted to explore my own understanding of each profile's behaviour and subvert the stereotypes and expectations of each.
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Going above the dialogue, the opportunity in gameplay to snoop around their desks allowed for further character exploration through objects. Check out their images in their profiles.
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With slight spoilers, I specifically wanted to explore the dark empath archetype.
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Check out their profiles below!
