“Detective Dotson” is a multimedia project featuring an animated movie and a video game. The game initially released in April 2025 on PC & Xbox, and it was later ported to PlayStation & Nintendo Switch in late 2025.
As the Game Design Intern from 2024 to 2025, I worked on both the game and the movie. For the game made in Unity, I worked on programming, recording utilities and custom NPC behaviour for capturing gameplay footage. I also created a majority of the game’s pixel-art-based VFX and set up the various find-object minigames. After the game’s initial release, I worked on designing several questlines and levels for the unreleased Chapter 2 DLC.
VFX
Dotson’s 2.5D pixel-art style lends itself to really interesting ideas for VFX. It was my job to bring the game’s world and people to life through VFX. I hand-drew several simple sprites and used Unity’s Particle System to make them move. I made effects for Dotson’s dancing powerup, dust trails for when he’s jumping around, different emotes for NPCs, colourful explosions for the Holi gulaal throwable, bubbly foam for the soap throwable, thundering clouds that strike lightning on the well and more! For throwables like the banana and soap that trip NPCs over and make them scream obscenities at Dotson, I also programmed the NPC routines for those actions.
For the game world, I made fly swarms that buzzed around the Basti area, flower confetti for the wedding procession, and swinging bells & tyre swings near the well area. I set up every single one of the game's 10+ interior scenes with assets from the art team, and added various ambient dust particles with fake volumetric lighting.
Recording Utilities
To record several dozens of clips for the game’s promotion, I made several customised builds of the game with modified controls that allowed the marketing team to get the perfect shot. I used a few simple Unity C# scripts to hijack the game’s camera and hand control over when the recording mode was toggled. The most frequently used build allowed me to turn off the game’s UI and take control of the camera (modify the zoom level and offset positions) using simple keyboard shortcuts. To ensure that I could carry over these hack-y scripts over to the game’s latest builds without committing them to the official repository, I made a simple “RecordingHacks” Unity package that could be quickly imported into the game’s project files to set up the basic recording utilities.
The clip below shows the RecordingHacks package in action. After users press P, it activates the recording mode, which disables the default camera that follows the player. Users can press L to toggle the FollowCam on/off. If they press U, they can toggle the game’s UI. Most importantly, players can use the H/N keys to offset the camera left/right and the B/M keys to zoom in/out to frame the shot how they want. Lastly, pressing P returns the game to its original, unmodified state.
Some clips also required me to hijack NPC routines and make them do specific actions like dance in tandem with Dotson or cheer when he hits a six in cricket. The clips that the marketing team and I recorded were featured in major gameshows and outlets like Future Games Show! IndieGamesFest, IGN, Xbox and more!
I also wrote a program that allowed me to separate the world’s 3D environment models and place them one by one in the scene to create the illusion of a world being built in real time. I used this script to generate clips of several key locations in the game, like the Gateway, Hotel Sharma, Basti and more! These clips were featured in GDC 2025 in the talk on worldbuilding by Shalin Shodhan, the Founder & CEO of Masala Games.