Romancing The Law

Romancing the Law is a mobile Dating sim focused on Choices. You play as Jacinta, a crime boss in J’Neirvana. Recently, the city has fallen into turmoil as rival gangs begin a terrible plot involving cloning, secret weapons and super soldiers. Work together with your gang to uncover the plot and protect the city. All while you manage Jacinta’s romantic connections. Over the course of the adventure, she might get involved with Henry the Police officer charged with stopping the machinations of the cities underworld, or maybe Matt the underworld Lawyer tasked with defending her enemies. Will Jacinta use Henry to further her own goals or sacrifice everything for her one love. You decide.

Romancing the Law was developed by a team of 6 students part time alongside our studies at AIE and presented at AVCon 2019. It is still an In-Development title.

My Role on the project

For Romancing the Law I worked as the assistant designer, supporting the Lead(Tessa Touchette) as she managed the project and set the general direction. My role was to work with the programmers to try and implement the systems and tools we needed to build a mobile narrative game designed around the delivery of multiple chapters.

Working as an assistant was a refreshing experience. I was able to just quietly focus on my tasks without needing to worry if others were doing theirs. While it’s a rare occasion I get to take the back seat, I really enjoyed it and found it was a very positive learning experience

Narrative System

Romancing the Law uses a scriptable object system to store all the dialog and choices the player makes. Working with the other programmers I repeatedly had to iterate on how this system works to make it function in a way that was user friendly. We have a lot of dialog in the game and eventually want to localise it as well, so it was important that the system was robust enough to handle updates and changes. Overall one of the key things I’d like to make sure gets built into the game is the ability to serialise all the dialog data in a way that allows us to pull it from JSON files into the game. This would make iteration on the dialog much simpler and better enable localisation in the future.

Mobile Development

Working with mobile was a new process for me. I found the experience mostly positive, though it did have some odd consequences for UI scaling. In fact, this project may single handedly be the reason I will not tolerate people scaling UI elements without reason. If I see it, I must fix it. It was also my first prolonged exposure to using Text Mesh Pro. Overall, I learned a lot about UI from this project which I was able to apply over the rest of the year.