Oh, whoops, something has fallen out of my pocket, onto the ground, face up at your feet! Don’t look at it! Don’t look at it! Don’t look at it… too closely, anyway:
My current WIP is a detective game using my Forsaken Edge setting from Forsaken Denizen and Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince. It’s blending ideas I’ve explored before in Castle of the Red Prince (each case is a single location) and Weird City Interloper (verbless gameplay where you acquire knowledge), but I guess the elevator pitch would be:
(IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: there is no dog in my game.)
Normally, I toil away on these things in the dark and then throw them at my poor beta testers to help smooth off the rough edges, while shrugging about any major flaws they uncover in the foundations of the design. I’m still going to do that to some extent! I don’t think this is the best concept for “a detective game” that I could have come up with, especially when we have the likes of Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees are Dead and, in our own community, Color the Truth, all directly tackling the problem of how to make a game where you investigate and make deductions. I’m just making my simple game where you explore some fantastical locations and contradict witnesses and suspects! That’s what appeals to me!
BUT.
The fact is that I am singularly ill-equipped to write murder mysteries. I like playing with my weird little characters in make-believe land. I like dressing them up and decorating the set. I like leaving things a bit vague so you can fill in the blanks with your own imagination. I like giving characters rocket launchers and jetbikes and letting them use them. What I am less good at is writing a cast-iron plot with no logical inconsistencies. Really, I have probably never done that!
So my plan with Vasily Verchek’s Not Dead is that after I’ve finished each of the five cases (I have a vague character arc in mind, but mostly it’s just that Ace Attorney games normally have five cases), I’ll release them for beta testing - maybe even open beta testing?! And we can try and fill in all the plot holes with gravel (or whatever plot is made of).
I’m probably still a way away from anything worth sharing (how about a very early alpha-type release to check that the basic mechanics are comprehensible? something a sensible author might do, if I am one), but while I work on it, I’m going to post here every so often with some polls, in-universe bits of text etc. to try and drum up interest and expand my pool of victims volunteers.
Partisans Captured, Killed in Citywide Raid Rex Kaster, Crime Correspondent
When Inspector Tremain transferred to Makzelo from New Mars, it was with the unspoken promise that he would help restore law and order at a time of unprecedented chaos and uncertainty. Following a series of raids on suspected terrorist safehouses within the city, assisted by Space Corps forces from the orbiting battleship Venko, he appears to have made some first steps in that direction. “Several” key members of the Forsaken Militia leadership structure have been captured alive, according to Imperial sources, while an unstated number of other partisans were killed in the engagement.
Initial rumours, inspired by the lack of newcomers among those apprehended, suggested that these might be members of the notorious, human-supremacist Zeta Cell, which is said to be growing bolder in venturing south from the Olmlands. But authorities have now identified the terrorists as belonging to Rho Cell - contradicting its egalitarian facade. Having already been charged with terrorism and sedition, sentencing of the suspects under the Emergency Mandate is expected later today.
RHO TWO’S NOTES: Comparison to Zeta Cell is direct Imperial talking point. Though if none of us are supposed to be newcomers that keeps suspicion away from me. Possible that no-one captured alive - attempt to provoke rescue mission? Trap? Not enough good soldiers left anyway.
Here’s a first little poll for you lot: about the title. I can’t promise I’ll change anything based on any polls, mind, but it will at least help me gauge reaction.
In the Forsaken Edge setting, Vasily Verchek is a Great Detective out of the history books. You might think he died hundreds of years ago… but, in fact, he’s Not Dead! (Kind of!)
This is the essence of my title. There’s a name presented like you should know who the heck it is. And there’s a surprising description of his state that might pique your interest and perhaps implies that he has had previous exciting adventures. I know I often come up with strange titles for my games, but in this case I think I’ve done pretty well!
But Verchek was a detective on a generation ship, and there’s another prominent parser game out there featuring a starship on a long voyage and with a title that ends in “Dead”: Never Gives Up Her Dead. It’s also one of the few games to have a dev thread on this forum. Do these similarities actually matter at all? Click a thingy below and let me know what you think!
Does the title “Vasily Verchek’s Not Dead” remind you of “Never Gives Up Her Dead”?
No, it’s fine
Yes, you should change it
Yes, but it’s fine
No, but you should change it because I, a person with bad taste in titles, do not like it
Just playing the devil’s advocate for a moment, I know that “Verchek’s” in the title is a contraction of “Verchek is”, but it could also be seen as possessive, as in the Not Dead (or Undead) belonging to Vasily Verchek, and that may even be intentional.
As a (former) technical writer, I was trained to not use contractions in technical documentation for an international audience, as English may not be everyone’s first language and they may not understand contractions. So, should it be “Vasily Verchek is not Dead”?
When I saw the poll and that it was about a name, I still didn’t think of Never Gives Up Her Dead, and I wrote it! It just didn’t occur to me that they might be different. I think it’s because for me I thought of Russian first (my apologies if it’s actually Polish or another non-russian language) so I started picturing Cosmonauts and some kind of vibe like ‘Jetson’s if it was written by the Soviets and more gritty’. So while the meter and last word are a little similar if pointed out, the images your title evokes felt unique and fresh to me and didn’t bring any similarity to mind.
I’ll confess that I like the cadence of four words more, but you make a good point. There’s also “Vasily Verchek isn’t Dead”, which retains a contraction but avoids the ambiguity.
I’d say that someone who can’t understand contractions wouldn’t be able to get into the game, but titles still have utility for people who haven’t engaged with a work directly (or can’t).
I suspect there may be another poll in the future…
(sorry for clogging up responses to your dev diary. The setting from your other two games is so cool, love to see it coming back, and mysteries are my favorite type of IF!)
Real life events have slowed me down a bit the past week or two, but given that I’m maybe halfway through the first of five cases, I’m in this project for the long haul regardless.
For now, let’s talk about worldbuilding. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed a fair few lore dumps, setting books and fan wikis in my time, but I’m also more than happy to suspend disbelief and I don’t mind occasionally seeing the creator’s fingerprints on the world.
When I’m making something, I usually see worldbuilding as the box of toys that I give myself to play with. And my main preoccupation is putting enough cool and weird things in that box to hold my interest.
But what’s even the point of reusing a setting if I end up contradicting myself too badly? I want to try my best to keep things consistent, even if I hope you’ll give me a bit of leeway. To that end, I’ve tried documenting Forsaken Edge in a few different OneNotes, TiddlyWikis and other formats… None of which have stuck… until now!
It’s divided up between characters, locations and a glossary. And each entry adheres to my rule of thumb that everything can be described in two sentences if you try hard enough. There are some mild(?) spoilers for Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince and Forsaken Denizen, and some things are defined a little more concretely than they are in the games - but I’ve still erred on the side of being mysterious. Even now, no-one can tell us what a hydroponics sphere is!
(FYI, there are probably still some errors and omissions in the guide, but at this point I think I need to put it down and get back to my WIP.)
