Sleuthhounds Year Seven, Will it be the Last?

January 5, 2024

Happy New Year, everyone! The clock has ticked over, the calendar page has turned, and here we are in 2024. And so is development of Sleuthhounds: Cruise. This is the start of the seventh year of development on the game. Before writing this post, I took a look at the one from last year to see how I faired.

My big goal for 2023 was to finish scripting all of the rooms in the game, save for what’s necessary to run animations and play audio (music, voices, sound effects). The results are in and I’m happy to report that all the room scripting did indeed get done and with time to spare The game proper is now functionally complete! More or less.

With the rooms done, I’ve turned my attention to the in-game journal. This is the menu system that can be accessed to adjust game options (done from previous games), review the suspect list and current state of the case (not done), and make use of the built-in hint system.

The hints are where my current effort is going and developing them out has necessitated some additional changes to the room scripting. The foremost change is incorporating a few more state variables to indicate what progress a player has made through the game. The hint system displays only those hints that are relevant to a player at any given time. Knowing when to show different hints tracking the state of things like whether the player has tried a door to find out its locked or if they’ve talked to a character who’s asked them to do a given task. As part of this work, I’ve also finalized the differences between Easy mode and Hard mode in the game. There’s still a bit left to do on the hints, but they should wrap up before the end of the month. Once they do, the rest of the journal work will go much faster and should be finished in the February-March timeframe.

At that point, work should become entirely focused on finishing up the game assets (all the visual and audio files needed to make the game come alive). This includes:

  • Character Animations
  • Dialog Recordings
  • Sound Effects
  • Music

There’s a good chunk of work wrapped up in the game assets, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now (and it’s not a train!). I still don’t have a firm idea for the game’s release date. I think it’s possible it could be this year, but if so it will be towards the end. Far more likely is that it will be ready in 2025. Time will tell. Let’s get ready for another year!