NEW (VERY) SHORT MURDER MYSTERY SCI-FI ADVENTURE GAME!

A friend of mine was the main dev on STARSHIP MURDER and I did the narrative design. It's the best title I'll ever come up with. Kuba the main dev wrote up a whole thing about all the work that went into it, so I'll let him do most of the talking.

FROM NOW ON YOU HEAR THE WORDS OF KUBA.

Hey, everybody! Kuba from My Next Games here.

Ufffff…. It took me longer than I anticipated but I finally got our new game out into the world! It’s called Tales From The Arcade: Starship Murder and it’s an experimental murder mystery roguelite in which the killer changes every time you play. You can now get it for free via Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2541360/Tales_From_The_Arcade_Starship_Murder/

or if you prefer web browser visit Newgrounds:

Steam post image

With this little announcement out of the way, let’s move on to this month’s update. Today I thought I would tell you the story of Starship Murder’s development. I decided to do so not only to show you the process behind a curtain but also as a record of how this thing came to be.

As I mentioned in a previous update, it all started with Hank: Straightjacket - a tiny little adventure game we made at the end of last year. We came out of that side project with high spirit. It was a lot of fun to quickly create something small that everyone can enjoy. As soon as Hank: Straightjacket was released, in our spare time, we started brainstorming ideas for another little game we could make. After a month we took a vote to decide which one we’re gonna pursue.

The vote landed on the picture above. The concept was simple: you click different points of the space station to repair it. After a few more discussions we added in the murder mystery angle. Expecting the people to follow a real time dialog while they keep an eye on the station sounded risky. It could have ended up overwhelming a player. We decided to go with it anyway :P. After all, we were making a tiny free indie game. The goal was to create something unique and learn from the experience.

With all that out of the way it was time for a dummy screenshot. It’s a method I use to better visualize the game to everyone on the team. As my art skills are pretty limited (I’m a programmer) what I usually do is mash tougher whatever I can find on the internet until it resembles what I’m trying to convey :D This is also where we moved away from the idea of the space station in favor of a starship. The journey that is implied with a spacecraft was a natural way of telling the player when the game would end and at the same time it maintained the atmosphere of isolation we were trying to invoke.

Then, finally came the day when we started the development. Initially we set ourselves a two week deadline for finishing the project. We started working and… we failed :(. This is how the game looked at that point.

There were two main problems that we were facing. First, was that the game didn’t feel like you were playing as an AI (It was more like: you're just a human looking at a couple of panels) Second, was that the location window which was de facto the main view of the game was too small and cramped up. Even though we passed the