Paths to Paranoia

Logo
Interacting with characters to solve the mystery!
The player encountering the ghost in the building
Another interactable character
...Gulp

Inspiration

The main inspiration for this game from the Ace Attorney series. Throughout that game the player is not only just to trying to prove the innocence of their client but is also investigating different crime scenes in order to find out evidence. Path of Paranoia focuses more on the investigation. Most of the developers were fans of horror and mystery genres so we decided to make that the overall theme of the game. We aimed to provide a classic interactive visual novel experience with an intriguing story.

What it does

Paths to Paranoia is an interactive visual novel with a horror-based storyline that leaves players blown away by the end of the game. In the game, players have to navigate through various encounters trying to avoid the dangers that might appear in the environment or that could come from people closest to them in the storyline. The game begins with the player waking up in site that has been know for paranormal activity, disoriented and unsure of who they are and how they got to where they are. They are introduced to the other main characters, Don, Girish and Rishi, who are all paranormal investigators. As the story progresses the player can learn more about exactly who they are and how they arrived. While they learn more about themselves players can also collect items and clues to help them understand more information about the haunted building they woke up in.

How we built it

Paths to Paranoia was built in Unity using the C# programming language. In unity, the game began as several panels/backgrounds and progressed with dialogue boxes, an inventory option, clues, and then a minigame where players can walk around to different rooms to interact with the game NPC's. As time progressed each team member learned more and more and this was reflected in the game. Several backgrounds and dialogue boxes became one standard format that could adapt to changing scenes, basic buttons turned into fitting icons, and a long storyline became flowing scripts. In order use dialog boxes throughout the game we used inky to make the game very choice based. We used Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom in order to properly create sprites that went along with the theme of our project. We used FLStudio to create custom soundtracks that would be used for different characters and places in our game.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges that were initially encountered related to understanding the Unity interface and using Inky for dialogue. As time progressed, however, teammates worked together helping each other with their own strengths. Another challenge we came across was coming up with an engaging storyline with minimal plot holes in such a short period of time. We went through many iterations of the storyline, constantly perfecting it until it was good enough in our eyes to present and also feasible to implement in Unity. Other challenges that presented themselves included figuring out a way to revert to the previous scene from the inventory scene, understanding how choices worked within inky and how they transferred over to unity, and a few other interface-related issues. These challenges were overcome through collaboration and persistence between team members.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

C# was a fairly new language to all team members and by the end of the competition, everyone had improved their skills and understanding of the coding language. Two out of the four teammates major in computer science and the other two major in business management which brought together a diverse set of skills. One business major teammate used their composition photo editing skills and to create the soundtrack for the game and edit the image, while the other powered through code and turned the written storyline into usable written scripts. Both computer science majors worked on the intricacies of the code and collaborated with each teammate to bring the flowing ideas to life.

What we learned

We got a better understanding of C# and how to use inky within Unity. Overall doing this project was a huge learning curve for most of us as it was the first time using unity for 3/4 of our team mates.