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DeadHerring is a 2D/3D Detective RPG set in the snowed-over town of Limboro. Discover the conspiracy behind the fishy murder of the mayor!
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A passion project in early development. It's a labor of love I care deeply about, and have created a timeline intent on releasing as an indie demo on Steam in early 2027.
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As the project's producer and creative director, I manage our small team's roles, organize sprint sheets, documentation, and work on 2D/3D art, tech, design, and writing.
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For the most recent updates on this project, check out the Devlog!
Background Art by Jo Chen.
PROJECT BREAKDOWN
Application is no longer available.
Above is a project brief I created intended to onboard team members and give a brief rundown of the game.
As an RPG inspired by the detective genre, I felt it was important for the design to tie gameplay to the stories progression in a unique way, where every battle gives you the same amount of interesting bits of plot as something like a cutscene does, like a trial in Ace Attorney.
To do this, I worked with the Level & Systems Design Lead to develop a combat system that mixes strategic RPG combat with interrogation mechanics.
The system uses Action Points, forcing the player to engage in combat before being able to engage in actions and interrogation. A battle can technically be completed through solely combat, but the player benefits much more if strategically using action points to investigate the enemy and crack the miniature case of each battle.
A concern with level design and art I had to address early on with DeadHerring was creating interesting 3D level designs while keeping the main characters as 2D art. This posed a concern for camera angles, as it essentially limits us to one front-facing camera at all times.
Currently, the workaround is designing levels with more open staging. However, I am currently developing a pipeline from Blender 3D rigs to 2D hand-drawn sprites, which would allow us to animate 2.5D sprites at a much higher speed and permit us to us more unique fixed camera angles.
DESIGN
BRIEF
DeadHerring is still in the early stages of tech, with a lot of the effort currently planned to go into the turn-based combat system.
Currently, major tech strides have been setting up 2.5D, a material pipeline, the modular dialogue system/UI, and onboarding the team onto Diversion version control.
The game uses PaperZD to have high quality sprites in a 3D setting. The sprite pipeline uses art drawn and animated in Clip Studio Paint, laid out in Aseprite, and then imported and set up in Unreal through PaperZD.
The game uses 2 dialogue systems-- one for inspecting the environment with inner monologue/flavor text, and one for dialogue with portrait sprites. The system is fully modular and applicable to any object with changeable sprites and values for who is talking.
The next steps for tech development is working out the camera in the overworld. Currently, I have implemented a "fading" effect in materials for when the camera is near an object to avoid clipping.
I also want to implement moving fixed camera angles when in certain areas. To accomplish this, I am developing a pipeline to create 2D sprites from different angles easier, using 3D rigs heavily as reference. Updates on this process will be shared on the Devlog!
TECH
DeadHerring is planned to be a very visually stylized game that is meant to mix and match art styles, as I've always been drawn to mixed medium visuals. Because of this, it's
very important to me to have everything still adhere
to a singular creative vision through concept art.
For art, I consult and work with my friend, Jo Chen, who is the lead artist, to match our styles in the middle a bit more.
This unification is important to me, as I don't want to restrict art style too much, but I still want it all to feel like it's from the same game, especially in things like textures and models.
ART
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