Once More Around the Promenade

October 7, 2022

One of the locations I knew I wanted to have in Sleuthhounds: Cruise, even before I started designing the game, was that of the promenade deck. The promenade is a deck that provides an uninterrupted walkable space around the entirety of a cruise ship. In terms of being in a 2D animated game, this translates into the room being infinitely scrollable as the characters walk left or right.

The promenade allowed for several cruise activities to be introduced.
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The promenade also turned into a great place to stage a couple of shipboard activities. Historically, at the rear of a ship, cruise patrons were able to participate in skeet shooting. Here, clay disks would be hurled off the back of the ship so patrons could should them out of the sky. This practice has since been abandoned as (a) cruise lines realized that the combination of guns and alcohol may not be the safest in the world and (b) that polluting the oceans with the debris from clay disks and shotgun blasts wasn’t an environmentally friendly solution. However, for Cruise it provided the opportuntiy to incorporate both a historic piece of cruising and marry that to an interesting puzzle sequence.

A more recent addition to the promenade on many cruise ships – though it still goes back a ways – is the walkathon in support of medical research. In the game, many of the passengers are bedridden as the culprit Ampson and Homes are tracking has arranged for a little food poisoning. It seemed the perfect opportunity to include a “walk for the remedy” on the promenade during this section.

An exterior location, the promenade provides the opportunity to include atmospheric effects like fog.
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The promenade is one of the few exterior locations on the Gigantic Joanna. On a cruise, it's also one of the best places to go and watch the scenery going by. One problem I encountered with that is that I had established the cruise ship in the game was far out to sea, meaning the only scenery to see was the blue of the water and the blue of the sky. To make the location a little more visually interesting, I decided to change up its appearance at different times during the game. During Act 2, for instance, the promenade deck starts shrouded in fog. As players progress through the act, the fog thins and eventually disperses altogether.

Who could resist a moonlight stroll? Even though, um, there is no moon.
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I was also keen on giving Homes and Ampson several moments to themselves where they could work through the ongoing events on the ship. An early idea, that made it into the game, was for them to have a walk-and-talk about the deck. For reasons that become apparent in the story, this particular scene was best set at night, which again provided the opportunity to change up the look of the promenade. It does take a little more work to make these variations on a location, but I feel the effect is well worth it.

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