Milestone: Act I Done-ish

May 4, 2018

Back in late March (the twentieth to be precise) I started actual production work on Sleuthhounds: Cruise. Prior to that I had been developing new tech to support certain sections of the game and had been doing a lot of design work. Earlier this week (the May first to again be precise) I completed work on the critical path through to the end of act 1 of the game’s 4 act structure.

The critical path in a game consists of those actions that the player must do in order to complete that game. It therefore omits any optional interactions or side quests. While act 1 is now technically playable, it’s not a particularly exciting prospect to play as it lacks a lot of the optional clues and side actions that really fill out the other Sleuthhounds games. However, it is exciting to me as the developer to have that much of the game in place. Especially as act 1 introduces several new gameplay mechanics that will recur at various points throughout the remaining acts and should help their development go a bit faster.

Interviewing a suspicious suspect.

I’ve already devoted several blog posts – parts one, two, and three – to describing the new system that allows Jane Ampson to interview other characters. And I’ve also written about being able to have Homes and Ampson working together or apart as well as the improved abilities of the various NPCs. One new system that I haven’t talked about is specific to interacting with one of the non playable characters in the game.

Grapes and Peas in the work in progress Dressings of Fruits and Veggies.
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Napier Forsythe is a retired army colonel who has a penchant for playing war board games. In order to get his help, at several points during the game the player will have to best him at a round of Dressings of Fruits and Veggies, a produce based war game inspired by the tactical portion of the classic Heroes of Might Magic III. This tactical portion is both point-n-click and turn based, so it fits the point-n-click play style of the rest of the game and doesn’t add the pressure of being a “high octane” action sequence. It’s also a simple system to learn but one that allows for some interesting tactical decisions.

Act 1 also has Ampson going through the ship’s library to conduct research on Pureluck Homes. Chronologically, Cruise is the first time that Homes and Ampson ever meet. That’s been a lot of fun to write and part of that initial meeting involves Ampson finding out about Homes’s deductive abilities in order to trick them (Homes doesn’t particularly care for reporters and Ampson doesn’t want to be discovered to be a reporter by him). To do that Ampson has to search a card catalog and then locate necessary resources in the library shelves and microfiche drawers (which of course requires a microfiche reader). Each of these steps is performed via specialized interfaces that will be used a couple of additional times in the game as well.

Clearing smoke with the ventillation system.
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Of course, there are also a couple of special one-off novelty screens in this first act. One of them requires the player to use the ship’s fancy ventilation system to direct smoke through the ship’s different areas and outside before everyone starts to hack, cough, and wheeze. Why is there smoke in the ship? You’ll have to wait for the final game to find that out.

Ampson about to be deduced.

I even had some fun mixing up some of the existing mechanics of the game. At that first meeting between Homes and Ampson naturally Homes will use his deductive abilities on Ampson. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Ampson has arranged for a few distractions that manipulate how the deduction board is played and the conclusions that Homes can draw.

All said, the critical path of act 1 takes about forty-five minutes to play. Now that’s from timing myself knowing exactly what to do, reading the dialog faster than what will be the case when the game is fully voiced, and missing several key animations that aren’t strictly needed at this point. Based on the design work I’ve done, I expect act 1 will be the shortest of the four acts, so the final game will have a healthy length of gameplay probably in the vicinity of all the previous Sleuthhounds put together. All that’s left to do is…implement it.

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