Shiba town is the culmination of my team's semester-long efforts and struggles against challenges that took most of the world off guard. Our game was made as the meeting point between a Visual Novel and a Hidden Object Game, where the player, in the role of Shiba, must search for clues around various crime scenes and use those clues to interrogate suspects.
Our goal was to explore the medium though contrast. Cute characters against gritty backdrops. The classic camp feel of wise cracking heroes against a modern tale.
Shiba never knew Ashley A. Ashton; he only knew her death couldn't go unpunished. In a case steeped in the woes of a broken family, secrets taken to the grave, and unseen corruption, only Shiba has a hope of finding the truth.
My Roles:
Game Designer
Level Designer
Narrative Designer
Writer
There was nothing simple about the spring of 2020, and for my team, this was no exception; the school shut down almost neatly in the center of our development time. In our team of five, we arranged our roles so that there were at least two people covering each one, a neat bit of redundancy and simple to coordinate when we spent all of our time in the same building.
Going home to different time zones, our system turned against us. When we were in person, the teams would do all of their work as teams, an inefficient system even then, but due to the nature of the team and early friction over the division of work, one we found necessary to prevent burnout; we quickly learned that arranging such sessions over three time zones with next to no warning would be unfeasible.
For each team we worked around, for the writers, we could meet only once every few days, so we would assign sections of the script and write them individually; at our meetings, we would swap them and make notes as well as assign the next sections to do.
Over the past years, I've learned many strategies that are more efficient, but those were built over time and over the foundations the Shiba Town team built.
