CHOMPSIE'S: A BURGER MYSTERY
A visual novel/point and click style game about helping your coworker solve a puzzling mystery at your workplace! Chompsie's: A burger mystery is a game made in 2021 using the Ren'Py visual novel engine, during my year long course on game development at HEO. Development time was three weeks. Dialogue, story, coding, UI and character portraits are by me, my project partner drew the backgrounds, interactable items, and helped put dialogue in the code. I also learned some Python to code this game.
Play the game below, and scroll on for a closer look at some details! Ren'Py browser player is still in development, so load times for images may be slow.
CONCEPT ART
Character, UI and environment sketches and concepts. The characters and the story were made up by me a couple years back, so some of the art here is older.
SCRATCH PROTOTYPE
The game was first prototyped on Scratch with the help of a couple more classmates than ended up being in the final project.
Our coder in the Scratch project had a hard time with the dialogue system, so I decided to make the final game in an engine specifically tailored for visual novels.
The Scratch prototype includes the first two locations, an inventory and character tab, and character interactions, just like in the final version.
The only coding I did for this version were the audio system and the character tab. In the Ren'Py version I did all the scripting by myself.
Character portraits
The characters in this game have multiple expressions to match with their emotions and dialogue. Some only have a couple different expressions, and some, like Kutri, have a lot of them to match the complexity of their storyline. Kutri also has a number of expressions where they have shapeshifted to impersonate another character, which raises their portrait count by a good number.
UI
The UI in Chompsie's: a burger mystery is simple, clean, and has a retro look to it. One inspiration for it was the UI of Read Only Memories 2064, which is one of my favorite games. Our development time was short, so some UI elements are still Ren'Py defaults, like the dialogue choice prompts.
The items menu shows items you're currently carrying and the characters menu shows characters you've met along your investigation. The box with a cityscape at the bottom shows you the time of day: morning, midday, and evening.
The interaction menu has three buttons, of which the appropriate ones get activated when you click on an interactable item. The icons are eye, hand and bag, for the look at, use, and pick up actions respectively.
I also made two different fonts for the game, of which we decided on using the all caps one, because it was easier to read.
OTHER ART
Here are a couple more pieces that I did for the game.
