Initial Inspiration
I have always been fascinated with the story of 1920s radium girls, who were some of the first working American woman. They were lied to by the owners of the Radium Dial Company that radium was good for their health when the owners had evidence to suspect it was dangerous. The girls licked their paint brushes to make it easier to apply radium onto the army’s dial watches in a timely manner. This caused terrible health problems which most of the girls died prematurely from.
In my version of the story, the girls and their doctors have died and are sent to entertain a purgatory justice system with too much time on their hands. They're given the chance to win their case and go back in time with restored health and public image, but they must collect evidence to sway the top ghost Judge Henry in their favor.
Multiple Prototypes
As a part of the class, we were given a month to prototype our games. Initially, the game was an exploration type game, where the players had to explore rooms to collect evidence. In that version, I could never fix the problem with the paintbrush clock determining the number of rounds, so I switched to a gamified court case. In Ace Attorney style, the players play against each other in teams to prove their argument. The paintbrushes still determine the number of rounds; but instead of racing against the clock, the players are mainly playing against each other.
Making the Assets
I made all the 3D assets from scratch with my own concept art in Autodesk Maya and the textures in photoshop. I made specular maps, but those were not importable into Tabletop Simulator. Luckily, the ambient lighting I added to the game made up for that! They all still looked very radiant!​​​
Implementing in Tabletop Simulator & The Rules
I had to watch a few videos on how to develop in Tabletop Simulator, but it was a pretty easy tool to adapt to.
What I spent a lot of time on was the rules. I wanted to make sure it was easy to navigate and had all the necessary information to play. In the class, we studied a lot of great game rules, like that of Secret Hitler and D&D: Lords of Waterdeep
Here's the final version of the rules.
How I'd Improve It
If I am able to give the game an update in the future, I would change out the 2D art and create a greater challenge for the judge that gives them more consequences for biased decisions. I also think more personality/research could be put into the different characters.