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Twilight Roast

Role: Game Designer, Artist
In Progress
Team of 2

Café Mystery is a passion project that demonstrates my ability to design efficient tools for game development, making narrative-heavy projects more scalable and manageable.

 

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Game Summary

Café Mystery is a 2D visual novel dating sim created in Ren'Py. Players take on the role of a young woman who starts working at a mysterious café, only to find herself being stalked. As she navigates romantic relationships with three potential love interests who seem like they have something to hide. She must make the right choices to survive.

This project showcases my ability to:

  •  Develop a fully functional Ren’Py game – From concept to implementation, including narrative design, UI, and gameplay systems.

  • Design scalable writing tools – Created an Excel-based tool that allows non-technical writers to input dialogue, choices, and scene transitions with ease.

  • Implemented the favorability system that affects character routes and endings.

  • Creation of Sprites and Assets for a visual novel

Concept 

One of our main challenges was designing a relationship system that felt meaningful and supported replayability. I explored several possibilities for how to track player choices and determine the ending:

  • Option 1: Check both the highest and lowest favorability, and locing into the most extreme favorability to determine the route and tone of the ending.

  • Option 2: Lock onto the character with the highest points, then determine a good or bad ending based on a score threshold.

  • Option 3: Use a hidden "interest" meter to determine which character's route you’re on, and a separate "story" meter to decide the type of ending.​

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Developing a Design Tool

 

We ultimately chose Option 3 for its balance of mystery and control. It lets the player naturally fall into a route without always realizing it, while still being rewarded (or punished) based on how they treat that character.


To streamline collaboration, I created a custom spreadsheet system for dialogue and branching logic. I received feedback from my teammate to ensure it was intuitive and easy to use, even for someone unfamiliar with scripting.

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