A Murder of Crows
looms ominously above the corpse of New York City.
I made “A Murder of Crows” with a team of 5 other people. It’s actually still in the oven right now but should be released on Itch.io and (hopefully) Android by the end of the year! Keep your eyes peeled for when I update this page with new information. In this turn-based strategy noir, you play as Private Investigator Crowley Corvo, New York’s best problem solver. You also happen to be a group of crows idling around in a trench coat.
I worked as an artist, animator, and programmer on this lovely project. In the title screen above, I spent several (a few too many) hours making the title screen. I’ve gotten pretty used to Unity’s animation feature with this project. “A Murder of Crows” drifts in from the top, and my talented coworker made each of the buttons animate as well. My favorite part of this scene is the streetlights, which I made flicker every few random seconds. I’m really proud of this. When I finished it and we started the game, I thought “holy crap, we’re doing this!”.
The gameplay is split into 2 phases: investigation and battle. They interchange between themselves, allowing the player for regular beats of excitement, then downtime, then excitement again. We based the fighting mechanics on the Fire Emblem franchise, with each unit being able to move within the grid. Adjacent units can interact as the player and computer switch turns.
The scene above shows the onboarding sequence, when the player is just getting used to the controls. Here the crows are simply attacking a bag of chips, which is helpless against their talons!
The image on the right depicts the investigation phase, where Crowley must collect clues, gather information, and interrogate suspects. Whenever you get a new piece of information, it is added into your notebook. I implemented the notebook’s UI and ping system, which is called every time Crowley learns something that pertains to the investigation.
There’s so much more of the game that I want to show right now, but we’re working hard on finishing it. We’re doing daily scrum, weeklong sprints, the whole shebang. It’s actually quite fun and I can’t wait to finish this baby. I’m just so excited!
Well, until December, friends!
This game is being made with Team Birds of a Feather: Grace Carter, Madeline Fisher, Noah Galloso, Colin Pool, Ian Thorne, and Matthew Umana. They’re a great bunch to work with, all exceptionally talented, all gonna do some pretty awesome things in the future.
UPDATE: A Murder of Crows is here! Check out the link below to play it for free! I ended up doing lots of character art and animation, but also implementing some UI, and even setting up a little debugger tool for my team.
