Where it all Began: Dev Log #1

Around the time of our graduation we knew that we wanted to do something interesting with games. We weren't exactly sure what at the time, but there were some ideas brewing, along with the name of our studio:

 Looking back at our brainstorm back in the day...maybe it was for the best we went with "Broccoli Bunny Studios".

A little before this, I became a little burnt out at making games, partly due to the fact that everyone around me were doing other areas for Computer Science like AI or Software Engineering and actually doing cool projects but I haven't even released anything on Steam, granted I did have a few games on itch.io, so I stopped developing games for a year.

But of course I knew I couldn't keep licking my wounds forever so I decided to start again and do 5 prototypes in a week and see what sticks (and who knows maybe one of the concepts would be interesting).

So I set off coding and designing, and one of the games I had made at the time was a Detective game inspired by the Golden Idol series.

<-- This is unironically the ACTUAL art i did for the first iteration for the game (still better than AI art imo).

It was extremely simple: hover over object, object displays some text or what the guy is saying and fill in a series of blanks.

But let's go back to Golden Idol for now.

One of the interesting game design choices that the designers made for the time was that every single case was in its own part of the story and as you played and solved the cases one by one, you got the whole story and there was this big "eureka!" moment that I really enjoyed.

There were mainly 2 gripes I had with the game that I wanted to address:

Difficulty of the Game

The difficulty of the game was catered towards the more casual puzzle-game audience and it didn't scratch the 'detective' realism itch I still had at the end of the game.

Over-reliance on previous cases

There were times in the game were there were no clues on who specific people were in the case, and you needed to go back to other cases to get reminded who these people were.

So in order to fix that, I decided to go with a game that's similar in mechanics but with some twists:

Cases span across 3 time periods

This is something the last case of Golden Idol had, which I really enjoyed the added complexity and piecing together the entire story as 1 incident, so I bought it to be a feature in all puzzles.

Blanks are now able to be filled in by typing as well as drag and drop

This was a bit of a wild decision for me, especially for a commercial game. Making the final answer panel blanks able to be typed in resulted in a very organic detective feel, but also the layers of complexity in terms of what can / should be typed in was a big problem. But nonetheless this was something that I felt was integral as part of the game and that I didn't want to change.

Funnily enough, this prototype got the most praise from my friends that played so I decided to make this into an actual Steam game, with the promise of better art...which a lot of people then began to remark: "O really? The art is what makes it kinda funny."

And so the art style stuck. Granted now it's actually in colour and engineering pretty well to look like a child drew it, the UI and UX definitely improved the entire game by leaps and bounds. There is now an added narrative element to the whole game with the addition of our very own Detective Hindsight (wishlist on Steam now pls).

All in all, I'm very thankful for the passionate team I have working on the project with me and thanks for reading this entire dev log! We'll be back next month for more updates so stay tuned!

~Kenneth from Broccoli Bunny Studios