KROKODИL is one of those game ideas that you regret not finishing for the rest of your life. Although it didn't end up where we wanted it had quite a huge potential to get there. Being a 1st award winner in Sofia Game Jam 2018 and earning a special prize and mentorship from Ubisoft, me and my team decided to continue its development. What you can see in the jam demo is an adventure game disguised as an audio surveillance puzzler set in an 80s dystopian soviet country. The idea is that you control an undercover agent from a van and all you can do is hear the sounds from the wire he wears and give him a little guidance via the vintage gear you have in your van.

Much like its inspiration (Papers Please) all the HUD elements and all user interaction is implemented within the gear you use: terminal, tape recorder, walkie talkie, oxymeter, etc. Our most intiguing idea we began developing for the "never-released-demo" was procedurally generated content which allowed for a completely different playthrough and puzzle solutions without messing up the narrative linearity. If you look at the puzzle structure of this game it's just one big Einstein's Riddle: you have 5 five characters, 5 real names, 5 codenames, 5 different physical and psychological characteristics, 5 different job positions... and all you have to do is find out the right time, right location and the right agent who is going to attend a drug deal. With a clever text parser which is basically giving you a different output of the same puzzle we were able scramble all these ingredients and turn them into a unique experience each time you play the level.

The key things I did during this development:

• designed a huge, interchangable variant of the Einstein's Riddle
• wrote and voiced the dialogues of most of the characters in the game (in broken russian accent)
• wrote and recorded the music for the game
• designed more game mechanics for the future development (CCTV, stress level, smart terminal for data analysis)