Unusual Suspects

[Mandle]

UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

The Story:

You play a police detective, straight out of training, investigating break-ins in suburban households.

You will enter each household and search it for clues. As you investigate the crime scene you might uncover traces of the perpetrator's hair, hand prints, foot prints, or threads from their clothes.

Unfortunately, police detectives are pressed for time, so you will have to work fast gathering said clues lest the perp escapes.

Once you are done with your search, or your time limit expires, you will return to the police station to participate in a lineup of the Unusual Suspects.

If you are able to identify the perp in the lineup in time you will receive a promotion and continue on to your next case.

Promotions result in perks that I will not discuss here so as not to spoil the fun

Of course, the time limits on crime scene investigation and lineup recognition will get tighter and tighter as you progress.

Failure to capture the perp will result in a black mark on your record.

Three such black marks and you are demoted to a desk position and the game is over.

The game will only be saveable at certain achievement points.

Development Progress:

Story: 100%
Scripting: 10%
Graphics: 30%
Sound/Music: 0%

Expected completion date: Early 2014.

Screenshots:









Developer's Blog:

October 4th, 2013

Well, still working on the graphics and scripting at the moment. Luckily I happen to be a teacher and managed to enslave about a dozen of my students to draw the actual Unusual Suspects characters so be prepared for a funky police lineup each time (said students ranged in age from about 5 years old to about 11 years old).

What I have to show right now is the basic exterior shot of the crime scene house where your detective character arrives each case.

And when I say basic I mean basic.

If you download the following file and run it then you will see an exterior shot of the crime scene house similar (but different) to the screenshots posted above.

At the moment the houses' color scene is a tad gaudy I'll admit. I will be playing with those parameters and hopefully tuning them properly before final release so players' eyes do not get burned out.

For now just imagine that this is the suburb from the movie Edward Scissorhands.

Backgrounds will also be implemented so it does not look every time like you arrive in the middle of nowhere.

So...If you download this you will see that it is only an EXE file. I did not see the need to zip it up as there are no sounds etc. so far.

Once you run it:

If you click on the sky with any other icon except the "walk" icon a new random house setup will appear.

Oh, and you must press Alt-X to exit.

That's about it for now but I am constantly working on this project, free time allowed...

(Hoping to get the gardens , kiddie pools, and pink lawn flamingos done soon)

DOWNLOAD HERE

[miguel]

You have a nice clean style for your houses and the story sounds fun and engaging. Detective games are always a good theme for adventure games.
Good luck with your project and shout if you need any help.

[Mati256]

Those houses reminds me of the "Einstein's Riddle" for some reason.

[Darth Mandarb]

Are these actually "in game" screenshots (I see no GUIs, no PC/NPCs, no cursors, etc).

[Mandle]

Are these actually "in game" screenshots (I see no GUIs, no PC/NPCs, no cursors, etc).

Yes sir, they certainly are.

There are no GUIs because this is not actually a traditional adventure game but rather a level by level challenge where you investigate crime scenes to find clues and (hopefully) arrest the perp. The time limit gets tighter and tighter with each following level to add to the challenge. Thus I will not be using the usual GUIs at all most likely.

There are no characters yet as I pushed the player character off the screen for now as I have not yet drawn or animated him.

I moved the cursor down to the bottom right corner in each screenie as I didn't like it in the middle of the shot. If you zoom in on the lower right corner you can probably find a few pixels evidence of it being there.

For now I just wanted to get some progress on the forums to motivate myself to keep working on the project, knowing that people were watching.

All it really is so far is an EXE that, when started, generates a completely different random house exterior each time you click on the sky.

My next step will be to create the houses' interiors (also different each time) that your police detective character will search for the clues he needs to nail the perp in the lineup.

I will be able to get some more work done on the coming weekend

[CaptainD]

This does look rather intriguing - especially as you're not doing it in a traditional style.  I'm interested to see how this develops.

[Mandle]

Well, I got a bit of work done today, in that I managed to kind of put the random case titles for each arrival of the detective on the crime scene in place...

Still cannot figure out how to get everything on the same line but working around it for now.

For now everything is "Case #20" but, as I know how to use that variable (I think), this will change very soon.

NEW SCREENIES







Mini-Update:

Yay! I got the "File #" variable worked out and figured out how to include multiple variables into the display text on one line (It's so simple once I knew how that I did a self-face-palm )

[Mandle]

Things are going a bit slow on this project right now as I am concentrating on proofreading/editing AprilSkies' English translation of "Donald Dowell and the Ghosts of Barker Manor". At 25,000+ words it's a big job but it's about 30% done so far after 3 days work.

And from what I have been reading during the editing process I must say the game looks amazingly in-depth. I'm going to need a Men In Black flashy thingy once I'm done though to remove all spoilers from my memory before I play it (aka. 2 bottle of scotch)

Anyways...."Unusual Suspects":

Working on the main character's look and walkcycles at the moment.

Hopefully I can get a few screenies up in the near future...

Mini-Update:

Found a bit of time to work on the horizontal walkcycles. The character is not complete yet. Just a rudimentary police uniform so far, to which I will be adding more details.

But anyways...

Here is a shot of our hero approaching one of his crime scene investigations: