Emma Higgins – Game Designer

Writer, Designer, Programmer

April to May 2024

Made by: Emma Higgins and Nick Doherty

Death and Delicacy is a narrative/puzzle game made in Unity. It’s loosely based on Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Play as a vampire commanded to suck the blood of the wealthy Tilney family. Navigate Regency society through branching dialogue, navigate sunlight-filled corridors by moving objects around the environment, and take down the Tilney family. Or, you can rebel against the commands of your vampire father to attempt to save the Tilneys. Either way, there will be death amidst this delicacy.

Death and Delicacy forced me to expand my Unity skills. I learned how to integrate branching dialogue with Yarnspinner. I had to figure out how to transfer and store variables between Yarnspinner scripts and C# scripts. I also learned a lot about converging the branches of dialogue so I could include lots of minor choices. Furthermore, this was my first experience with post-processing in Unity, and I had a lot of fun messing with color palettes and cranking up the bloom to emphasize the harshness of the sunlight.