Ghostdoku
Major Studio Project
This project took most of 2022 to make, working in a small team of developers and having a few mentors helping us along the way. My main role was the narrative designer/creative director, I also contributed to UI art, logo, background design environment art and other assets.
Ghostdoku is a fun 2D story-driven puzzle game (created in the Unity game engine). You play as an old lady, solving sudoku to help ghosts remember their pasts and ascend from the graveyard. The story unravels and darkens the further Meemaw helps the ghosts remember and the player discovers terrible twists and solves the murder!
We are intrigued to see what the future brings and to see how far this game can be further developed. Our game has the potential to go into full production with funding.
*all character art done by Hina
Some of our earliest concepts of Ghostdoku would have limited the scope of the game, so during Semester Two, we reimagined the game, tweaking it so that the game could have an expandable storyline. The main selling point of this game is that players solve a murder mystery by solving sudoku puzzles - it's what sets it apart from other story-based games.
The concept of the game was born out of two ideas merging together: ghosts and sudoku. We came up with multiple outcomes using these concepts and finally settled on the murder mystery storyline. In the game industry, there are little to no games that use sudoku in a story-driven game, so this idea was innovative and unseen before. This means there is a risk as it is uncharted territory and we were unsure of how well the concept actually works.
Our team consists of two artists and one programmer. Hina and Samantha’s original focus was Graphic Design but both changed their sights over to Game Design in their second year, and Anthony is at the BIT focussing on game development. Hina is the lead artist and is in charge of character design, animation and shared the creation of environmental assets with Sam, who is in charge of narrative design and UI design. Anthony is the lead and only programmer on the Ghostdoku project, creating the functionality of the game. The project is overseen by our mentors, Edwin and Paul (Game Design), and Adon (BIT).