Murder Menu

During a course in the second semester of my Master’s program, I joined a cross-disciplinary project called Murder Menu. The goal of the project was to support students from other fields with our creative expertise. Murder Menu is an app designed to host murder mystery dinner games, replacing printed booklets with a streamlined experience where clues unlock over time and voting is handled seamlessly. I joined a small creative team to work on the first playable case, Shadowfall, where my role focused on character illustration and overall visual style.

I began the project with market research, focusing on how existing murder mystery games use visual storytelling. I was particularly interested in styles that allow room for player interpretation. This led me to develop a character design approach based on strong silhouettes, a reduced colour palette, and simplified shading. It provided clarity while leaving enough ambiguity for players to imagine the characters in their own way.

Working closely with the narrative team, I created moodboards for eight characters, identified key personality traits, and translated those into distinct outfit elements and recognisable visual features. Once the style was approved, I illustrated the final character portraits as vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator and collaborated with the animation teammate to adapt the artwork for later animation. Since I finished earlier than expected, I also contributed several clue illustrations, and later created the cover image for the first case, using a small 3D reference scene in Blender to define lighting and composition.

This project stood out to me because of its strong illustrative focus and narrative depth. It also pushed me to refine my vector illustration workflow, which has since become a valuable part of my skillset.