Playable at: https://joellegames.itch.io/dnn!

A Psycho-Mystery Narrative Game

Donguro no Nazo is an adventure detective game starring a cast of colorful characters, putting you in the role of novice detective Horiki Shoto. Over the course of each chapter, you will have to enter the minds of the island's citizens to gather clues in order to piece together the identity of each suspect. If you fail to do so, the game still continues, so you must work hard to gather all nine clues over the course of twenty-five days. If you are successful in finding the suspect, you will be put to the task of explaining the murder's orchestration in order to pin the crime on the suspect.

Part of Donguri no Nazo's "inventory", a journal that tracked discovered clues.

Development Timeline

Donguri no Nazo was worked on for roughly six years from its inception to its final build in 2020 as a solo developer project. Throughout the years, the game's core design went under drastic changes along with the art style, story, and setting. During 2018, the game was fully revamped into a 2.0 version, featured below in its 2020 build rendition.

The purpose of this redesign was to get a fresh start away from poor design choices I had made while younger, and to give myself an opportunity to implement more advanced elements such as branching dialogue and deduction sequences.

2015 Build

This scene features what would eventually turn into "Homaka", Chapter 1's central town. Allusions to the first chapter's antagonist, the DJ, are featured on Cafe Verde's windows.

2020 Build

A screenshot of the dorm area, intended to be a central hub for all chapters. The player would start each day in their dorm room before heading out and investigating the respective chapter's setting.

2015 Initial Design

Horiki Shoto's original, very cubic, design. Its simplistic nature left a lot of room for improvement.

2017 Prototyping Design

A design made in the initial stages of returning to the project and revamping the game. Limbs were more defined to allow for higher animation quality.

2018 Current Design

While his hair color was adjusted in August 2020, this design remained consistent throughout version 2.0 development.

User Interface

A significant amount of development time went towards the UI, making it both aesthetically-pleasing and functional. This also involved designing different palettes and icons depending on the selected character, as the game had been developed with plans for three playable characters based on story progress.

Character Portraits

Throughout development, dialogue portraits were fleshed out to contain more detail and better depict expression.

Investigation System

This featured allowed players to zoom into a scene with a cursor (magnifying glass) and pick up clues for later puzzles.

Concept Art

This section features concept art for one of the main characters, Scarlet, who became a significantly more prominent character in the latter half of development. She initially served as the "culprit" in the game's proof of concept demo, featured on Itch.io.

Scarlet Full Body

This concept depicts the basic design for Scarlet, initially drawn as one of my first forays into digital art. Scarlet was also planned to be shown at various ages of her teenagehood and therefore has four separate designs from ages 14-17.

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