End of the Road

April 7, 2023

For historical reasons, the basic building block of point-and-click adventures, like Sleuthhounds: Cruise, is the room. As players move about the game, they venture into different rooms. The number of completely scripted rooms is the measure by which I’ve been tracking production to date. I’m excited to say, I’ve reached an important milestone. I’ve now completed the scripting on the last walkable room!

A walkable room is, as the name implies, any room that the game characters can walk through. This is in contrast to specialty rooms like the close-ups that are used for Homes’s deductions or Ampson’s interviews of suspects. Generally speaking, walkable rooms take more work to complete than specialty rooms because they tend to have more hotspots to interact with and usually have additional animation requirements that the specialty rooms do not.

[The fountain controls are a hybrid combination of a partly walkable room and a special close-up room.]
The fountain controls are a hybrid combination of a partly walkable room and a special close-up room.
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With the walkable rooms complete, there are now twelve rooms remaining that need to have their scripting finalized. That doesn’t mean the game will be done once those are finished. Other tasks still remain, such as completing character animations, recording voices and sound effects, and implementing other aspects of the game such as the progress journal and built-in hint system. Even so, having the scripting on all the rooms done is a HUGE step towards finishing the game.