Climbing the Rungs

December 1, 2023

Work continues on the in-game hint system for Sleuthhounds: Cruise. One of the side effects of this is that it also brings to the fore working on the different difficulty settings for the game. For the earlier installements in the Sleuthhounds series the games have included three difficulty levels. For this game, I’ve opted to go with only two. Given the length of the game, I figured players likely wouldn’t do all three difficulty settings individually.

The game features Gumshoe (easy) and Super Sleuth (hard) difficulties. While building the game, as with the previous entries, I essentially built the hard version of the game first. As far as development goes, it’s easier to do the most difficult setting first then do a pass to make the easy version out of that. The easy version either omits certain puzzles entirely or else simplifies them down.

The simplification of puzzles requires additional programming to accomplish. It also usually requires creating more game assets like images, sound effects, and animations.

Homes ascending the ladder. Or descending, depending on which way he’s going.

Such was the case when working on the undercroft. Here, Homes has to inspect a panel on the wall. On Super Sleuth the player has to navigate a series of vents to pop out near the panel. On Gumshoe a convenient ladder is already in place that Homes can simply climb. Well, I say “simply” but from a production standpoint it means I had to create both the ladder sprite and the animation of Homes climbing up and down the ladder. But that’s OK! I needed to have a Homes climbing animation for another part of the game as well, so some nice asset reuse there.

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