Noir Language Mystery - A Huge Success!
And it would seem I am an artist now!
The History of The Mystery
Last year I designed and assembled a case where you need to decypher a language to solve a murder mystery. It was really fun to design, and the first playtest went really well. Very encouraging. That evening, a friend of mine - and at the time my girlfriend - broke up with me.
She had been the one illustrating it, and that generally made the whole thing seem a little bit tricky to return to.
A few months later, once we'd had some time to process everything and return to being friends, we agreed it'd be better to find someone else to illustrate it. So I found a guy at my murder mystery society who was an excellent illustrator and began working with him to do some illustrations.
A few weeks in, his girlfriend broke up with him.
At this point it was clear I couldn't subject anyone else to the curse of working on this project. Newly single, I was obviously immune to this curse and decided I had better illustrate the mystery myself. I felt empowered to do this partially because I had recently successfully illustrated a full four-case set of mysteries based on Perspectives, and my friends were very encouraging about the quality of the illustrations.
I set a date to have the murder mystery society play it, and while I was still illustrating some final touches minutes before heading out to get them printed immediately before going to the event, it all got done in time. And after having about 20 people play it through from start to finish, it was a huge success!
People really enjoyed it, and I had several people mention that this was one of their favourite puzzles from the entire history of the soceity, which was really high praise! It felt really vindicating that I'd made something people enjoyed that thoroughly.
I won't go into any spoilers for the case here, though I might do a write up of something I learned in my Dev Log, if so I'll add a link here.
What Next?
First of all, I want to get a basic version of my Perspectives case and this Language Mystery (which I still need a name for) up on my itch.io so anyone can have a go at them.
After that I'm considering turning the language puzzle into an interactive videogame. I'll need to tweak some of the mechanics you use to confirm your answers (if I do that at all - it kinda seems like games like this are more fun without any answer confirmations, but we'll see), but otherwise the case will be basically identical. I'm also looking into composing some Gameboy-style Noir music, which should be a fun exercise.
That's all for now. Just wanted to make a post commemorating all of this, it feels like a really big step towards being the career game dev I want to be one day!