A neo-noir sci-fi locked-room murder mystery. One suspect. Nine clues. Three endings.

Built in Unity + Ink as the centrepiece of a junior game-dev portfolio targeting gameplay programming, tools, and narrative design roles.

Play on itch.io · Case Study

Marcus Dunwell is a former infrastructure engineer. He's not a detective. He's the prime suspect.

He's three hours and twenty-five minutes late to a dying man's call. In Sificity — a future city where the towers block out the sun and the streets belong to aliens, robots, and people who couldn't afford to leave — that's not a window. That's a eulogy.

The victim, Dexter Clear, discovered something behind the apartment's wall screens. The man who put it there is someone Marcus used to know.

Explore the apartment and interact with objects to discover clues

Open the case board and connect related clues — Marcus will react to each connection

Pay attention to what you find, what you connect, and what you choose to do with it

~10–20 minutes to complete

Three endings. What you find determines what you can prove. What you choose determines who you become.

InkBridge Architecture Unity and Ink stay fully decoupled. Unity owns the world — collision, player state, clue tracking. Ink owns all narrative output. InkBridge.cs sits between them: Unity calls knots by name, Ink returns text and tags, InkBridge fires Unity events in response. Neither system reaches into the other directly.

Case Board Clue cards distributed along a spline. Connections drawn as real-time UI Image lines tracked via InverseTransformPoint. Each connection is backed by a dictionary keyed on a sorted clue-pair string, mapping to a unique Ink knot — so order of discovery never matters, only what you bring together.

Two-Camera Inspection System Third-person exploration switches to a first-person inspection camera on interaction. Objects rotate in world space; original transforms are saved on entry and restored exactly on exit.

Tag-Driven Events Story events (scene transitions, UI updates, manager encounters, story locks) are driven by Ink tags read by InkBridge — keeping narrative logic in Ink and game logic in Unity.

TransitionManager Singleton with DontDestroyOnLoad. One smoothstep Fade coroutine handles the opening fade, the in-scene Ending B jail swap, scene loads, and the final fade-to-menu.

Unity (C#)

Ink — narrative scripting

WebGL build (currently hangs on load — compression and texture pass planned)

Sound design and ambient audio

Bluff mechanic refactor: replace inverted bool with explicit bluffAttempted / bluffFailed two-flag system

Resolution-independent case board spline

Possible expansion: Marcus at the Downtown warehouse — Dante's servers

Full breakdown of the architecture, challenges, and retrospective: verbatimaura64.github.io/project-dunwell.html