Confidential Killings - a detective game

[lorenzo]

Hey folks! I've been working for quite some time on a game with my friend BRANE, who also started with AGS (you may remember The RoboLovers).

It's a detective game in which you inspect crime scenes, find clues, connect them, and reconstruct what happened.

Trailer:

Some screenshots!

A regular car crash, or something worse...?


Was the car sabotaged? Perhaps the garage will hold some clues.


It's not a detective game without a depressing office!

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The game is made in Godot (boo!), which is a lovely engine I can barely use, but luckily I'm not doing any coding. 

We're working hard on polishing the demo at the moment! In the meantime, here's the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2797960/Confidential_Killings/

If you like the look of the game, wishlist it there! If you don't like it, feel free to wishlist it nonetheless

[heltenjon]

I'm sure I will hate it, but I better wishlist and buy it just to make sure. Probably buy a t-shirt with that depressing office image as well.

So...you're waiting for Godot to be coded? 

[BRANE]

Can't believe I remember my AGS password after all these years!

AGS was my first engine and now we're rocking with Godot.

[Pogwizd]

@lorenzo what are the main benefits of switching to Godot? Things have probably moved on by now, but I remember people used to complain that it wasn't very point-and-click friendly. A lot of features that come built-in with AGS need to be implemented manually in Godot (which can be fun in its own way). I'd imagine the main advantages are standardised syntax, better performance (though that's probably not much of an issue for point-and-click games?), and cross-platform compatibility. I'm not having a moan – I'm genuinely curious, as I've wanted to try Godot myself but never quite found the motivation.

Also, your art is spot on, as always!

[lorenzo]

heltenjon: hahaha, thanks!
I've been waiting and waiting for Godot to code himself, but the silly program refuses to do it. Such a slacker. Thankfully, Brane is a Godot master, so I can annoy him with requests instead. He's done a wonderful job creating a framework for the game that even dumb people like me can use.

Pogwizd: thanks!
What are the benefits of using Godot? I can't go into the details regarding code, because I don't know much about it, and Brane has done all the programming; he has done amazing things with the engine over the years, including a chess simulation game! So, he's quite the advanced user. But I can give you my opinion on the rest, then if he wants, he can chime in with his thoughts.

So, before starting Confidential Killings, we did this game for a jam, to see if we had the chops to tackle such a project: https://branegames.itch.io/we-suspect-foul-play
While it's less polished, it has similar mechanics to Confidential Killings (missing some), and you can check it out to see how it plays.
The game has similarities to adventure games, like clicking on hotspots, reading documents, etc., but also cuts some mechanics: no walking around, no inventory, etc. So, path-finding, inventory handling, and so on (which are strong points of AGS), are not needed.

The other main reasons why we went with Godot:

- It's made for collaborations: it's really tricky to collaborate on a project in AGS. The sprite file, acsprset.spr, which becomes huge with time and needs constant importing of sprites; the room files, which can't be modified without the editor (although I've seen that steps have been made to change this in AGS 4), and so on. Meanwhile, Godot keeps things open and in regular formats. Sprites, backgrounds, etc. are png files in a folder. If I need to update a sprite, I just overwrite a png image and push the update on Git. It saves us a lot of time.

- Ease of use: I wrote above, Brane has created a framework for this type of game, with custom nodes and all that. This means that I can create levels without having to touch a single line of code (which is a good thing, because of my incredibly limited knowledge of Godot ). This makes prototyping and tweaking levels really easy and fast, which is very important.

- Performance: while the game is mostly made of static screens, performance is a concern. It runs at 1440p, and in the past I had a lot of trouble with AGS and fullscreen animations. Here, I can throw 1440p fullscreen pngs without having to worry about fps getting killed.

- Shaders and other modern commodities: Godot is a modern engine and has a lot of fancy things that AGS lacks. A particle system like the dustmotes you can (barely see) at 0:11 in the trailer, or the water shaders in the pool at 0:14, and the underwater close-ups. They're quick to set up, if you know what you're doing (i.e., not me), but they add a lot of polish to the game.

I may have got some things wrong, as I'm very new to Godot, but for me those are the main reasons.
But if I were alone working on it, I would go with AGS because I'm not experienced with Godot and I couldn't do a single thing 

[Pogwizd]

Wow, thanks for such a detailed response! I hadn't realised there was so much to it. It all makes sense, though – especially what you said about performance with high-res backgrounds and working collaboratively. I once shared a project with someone and tried using Git for version control. It did the job, but felt a bit clunky – unless I was just doing it wrong.