Sleuth is a two-player game made in unity. Player one, the Sleuth, must search out and capture player two, the Punk, who tries to hide among a group of monks. The Punk has cleverly disguised himself as a monk. The monks in the courtyard go about their business. The Punk must try and match the movement of the monks in such a way that the Sleuth is not able to discover him. The Sleuth has only a limited amount of time in which to find the Punk or he will escape to cause unknown mischief in the world.

Sleuth was created as part of the Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam is a 48 hour global game design challenge where teams create games based on a series of restrictions. For this jam, the main theme was deception (requiring the use of a punk, a monk, or a skunk).

As an added challenge, the Sleuth team decided to tackle several achievements outlined in the Global Game Jam (teams could only select four). We achieved the Instant Online Gratification Game (for creating an easily accessible online game), take Five Game (for gameplay under five minutes), Universal Language Game (a game with no text), EGA Lives Game (for a game with less than 16 colours).

My role in the team was that of implementation. I worked closely with the main programmer (Jodon) and artist (Cody) to ensure that the project came together. This was my first time working directly in unity and was not entirely familiar with c-sharp or the unity interface. I was able to learn the basics of unity enough to fully create the interface and scene transitions. I was also responsible for all the modeling which was basic polygons.

Building a game in 48 hours is a challenge under normal conditions. Out team’s choice to go with unity (a platform I’m unfamiliar with) made it all the more challenging (and rewarding). One of the more difficult parts of the challenge was the Universal Language Game achievement. This required that we have absolutely no text or language in the game. This required us to be creative in how we represented player controls and game mechanics to the user.