Rosy Raven Game Dev
Who Killed Dr. Crowe is the first published game that I ever worked on. It was produced over the course of three months with a team of fourteen developers and released June 2025. You play as Edward Gray, a private investigator who must solve an unexpected murder at a house party.
The team contained three programmers; a system programmer, a UI programmer, and I was the lead programmer. In addition to being a second system programmer, I was responsible for overseeing the quality of the output of the programming team. In addition to these responsibilities, I was assigned with developing the dialog system; one of the most important aspects of the game.
Throughout the entire process of development, my primary priority was making the whole system highly customizable while still being easy to implement. I regularly received feedback from the lead developers and eventually playtesters that I was able to incorporate into the system to create something that perfectly fits the game.
One of the most important aspects of the dialog system is its incorporation with the event handler; another system that I was responsible for creating. Events could be triggered by viewing certain dialogs, different dialogs could be made accessible after events were triggered, and some dialogs were directly triggered by an event.
Overall, while I feel there there is a lot of polish that could be added, and there are many aspects of the game that are far from perfect, I do think that Who Killed Dr. Crowe is a major accomplishment for everyone involved.
Because I wasn't on the writing team and therefore wouldn't be implementing the system in the final game, I wanted to make it as simple and understandable as possible, while still implementing all of the features that the lead developers requested. In addition, it had to be completely modular, as no two dialogs would be the same.
I began by creating a prototype NPC that could be interacted with to bring up a dialog box. Over the course of development the lead developers changed what they wanted from the dialog system several times, which meant that I ended up implementing several features that never saw the light of day.