THE SILVER BULLET (2024)

The Silver Bullet is a narrative detective game putting the player in the gumshoes of Detective Sam Moreau, a classic noir-type Officer in the town of Kessler, WA. A rich businessman has been slaughtered, and it will take all of Sam’s skill and cunning, through rifling through evidence and interrogating the public, to piece together the case.

The main gameplay of The Silver Bullet consists of inspecting items around the map for clues, and talking to a wide variety of NPCs with branching and evolving dialogue, within a carefully built town rife with environmental storytelling and mindfully thought-out navigation. The game progresses through various Acts as the player talks to the right people and finds the right evidence, through Detective deduction.

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The aim of this project was to test various academic ideas about player guidance through level and narrative design, with the open town giving the player absolute freedom, whilst being subtly railroaded via contextual clues, level lighting, and points of interest. The results of this can be read in my thesis below.

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Download The Silver Bullet now!: https://zacthompson.itch.io/the-silver-bullet

Or if you're more into reading, the accompanying Thesis can be found HERE!

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