[Winner!] Gumshoe

[simon17]

The game: I'm going with working title of Gumshoe. It's inspired by the game Sleuth: Wikipedia Abandonware (runs in dosbox). I decided I wanted to make this because I loved Sleuth when I was young, but when I got older and rediscovered it, I thought it was too easy. The principle gameplay will probably be similar, but I'm going to try to add some more mechanics and content to make it more challenging and more interesting.
How the game works: A person has been murdered in his house, and his guests are all suspects (think Clue). You are a detective, and you must examine evidence and interview guests to discover or deduce the murderer, the murder weapon and the location of the crime.
Random elements: The guests, victim, weapon, and rooms will be randomized. The guests randomly move about the house during the game. I would also like to randomize the layout of the house itself. I am trying to come up with ideas to balance a house contrived enough to be generated, but be a bit more realistic (seriously, what kind of house has 9 equal sized rooms laid out in a 3x3 grid?).
Art: I'm a terrible artist, so I'm going to see how far I can go using lines and shapes. The player tokens will probably be represented by colored circles, and I will draw the house using lines and rectangles. I'm going to try to give the game more of a board game feel, so hopefully it'll work. I'll probably need to come up with a few very basic icons for UI.
Technical details: I'm using C++, and a simple 2D framework I've built on top of sfml. I'm going to go with a smaller screen size, in case I want to run it on my phone, probably 480x320. I've been doing software for a while, but this will be the first time I've made my own game, so I'm going to do some experimenting with architecture/code design as well.

Hopefully, I'll be putting up some screen shots and updates soon!


Windows Download

[Frod]

It always good to have another entry thrown in the mix. I hope to see some updates in the coming days.

[simon17]

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sc1.png (30.77 KiB) Viewed 649 times

I've got some screenshots here. My tile engine is running, and my UI is mostly designed. I'm still working on the color scheme. A lot of what you see here is just for show, but the buttons provide the functionality for the game, from the top: [magnifying glass] examine objects and rooms. [speech bubble ?] ask for alibis or information. [Hand] Pick up object. This icon was rendered from wingdings. [speech bubble !] make an accusation. [?] help.

The font is Mode Nine, free from http://www.dafont.com/grudnuk.d532

[Frod]

That looks great. I really like the clean look of the current schematic map. Very nice screenshots and progress.

I found some footage of Sleuth on Youtube. The way I understand it.. picking up an object provides further information about the object, but what's the thought behind it? Whenever the player sees an object won't they always pick them up? Maybe your game play differs more from this design though..?

[simon17]

Hey Frod, thanks for taking the time to comment.
The mechanism for finding the murder weapon is basically going to be the same as Sleuth, and it works like this: You get information about objects by examining them. You can only get useful detailed information if you have the magnifying glass, which is hidden somewhere in the house. So you only need to pick up the magnifying glass to use it, and you need to pick up the murder weapon before making an accusation. So why wouldn't you always examine every object in every room? Part of your score is based on the number of moves you make. In Sleuth, the murderer actually stalks and kills you after a certain number of moves. If you know that an innocent person was in a certain room during the murder, there's no need to search or examine this room.

[Des Tomate]

Very simple but beautiful UI! I really like it and I think it looks like a game I would enjoy playing on a phone.

[Moosader]

Looks really cool, very simple and clean look so far.

[eatcomics]

Oh my. This looks wonderful. I could definitely get into a truly random sleuth game. That's a brilliant idea. And Des Tomate's suggestion of a mobile version sounds appealing as well. Good work, keep us updated. Looking forward to playing this.

[simon17]

It's been kind of quiet on the forums, so I thought I'd update to share some technical details, about my tile engine specifically. The tile data is stored as images where 1 pixel = 1 tile that look something like this: (zoomed in 24x)

Tile Data

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Each different color corresponds to a different room (probably obvious). For example, the pink-ish salmon-ish color is RGB=(255,127,127) or 0xFF7F7F. This number corresponds directly to an ID for a room randomly loaded from an xml file. White serves as the "outside" color. The semi transparent pixels are doorway tiles. Normally, you can only move to an adjacent tile if it's the same color/(same room ID) as the one you're on, but you can always move onto or off of a doorway tile in any direction. The renderer draws all of the non-outdoor tiles, plus the black lines if the neighboring tile is a different color, unless it's a doorway. (There's a "gutter" of outdoor tiles that I add to the border of the entire map during loading so I don't have to handle edge cases in movement or drawing).
The result looks like this:

Tiles in game

tileex.png (3.63 KiB) Viewed 563 times

Notice the slightly darker translucent pixel in the pink room designates the player starting position. This method is very simple and elegant, but has a few restrictions. Since the doorways go in all directions, it can be tricky putting a door in a corner, or all the way across a hallway for example, but most of the time this can be worked around (by putting the doorway tiles on the other side of the wall maybe).

I randomize the house by loading 3 images like the one you see here, and splicing them together, with random horizontal mirroring/flips for each image.

[simon17]

Ok, I don't know if I'm "done" done, but the game is reasonably complete, and I'm getting a bit tired of working on it. I might still add some more content, or fix any bugs that get reported. I'll try to get a linux build going and package up the source this weekend.

The zip is too big to attach here. Would someone (Rach) mind hosting it for me?