Before I say anything else, I would just like to say: Thank you. The reception for this small game that I made with a few friends for fun has been absolutely amazing. To say the least, this game has way outperformed my expectations, and for a small 72-hour project the reception has been amazing. THANK YOU!

So, with a game that has somehow reached the top ten games on the site with the detective tag and with more downloads than I was expecting by a factor of about 8, I figured I owed it to you all to talk about what is next for the game.

Criminal Consequences is very much an experiment. When crafting the game, I wanted to make something completely unique. I wanted to ask the question, "What if a detective game actually rolled with it if you accused the wrong person?" And I think that the result is something that I am very, very happy with. I thoroughly enjoyed making the game, creating the characters, and generally crafting a narrative that was interesting and fun (And solvable! Shoutouts to the people who cracked the narrative. If you know, you know). I also love how it generated discussion among people to try to figure out who the murderer actually was and how the crime happened, which was also my intent.

That all said, it is hard to think of a way that this game is scalable outside of a short, 20 minute experience. I wanted players to take the time to try to figure out the murderer at their own pace. I wanted the players to be able to accuse anyone at any time for any reason, and I wanted the game to let the players deduce for themselves what happened. That said, if the player simply solved x number of mysteries sequentially without ever getting any feedback, that doesn't really work outside of the first time, when the player is confused at first, throwing out wild accusations until finally he/she realizes that the game isn't going to simply give up the answer. As such, if the player were then to be confronted with a new experience where they already know that the answer will never be provided, suddenly there's a sense of meaninglessness that hangs over everything the player does.

If this were to be developed into a full game, then there would need to be a way for the player to try to solve the mystery and only find out if he/she was wrong. And by wrong, I mean EXTREMELY wrong. Thus, I propose the following system:

1. The player is given a mystery and has to try to solve it at their own leisure.

2. The player solves the mystery and accuses the murderer.

3. The player then goes home, and then if the player guessed wrong there would be a chance that the murderer comes in the night and murders the player in their sleep. (Probabilities would be based on the difficulty curve).

4. The cycle repeats, and the player continues to solve mysteries until they die or retire of old age. (Retiring being the good ending).

There is a problem with this cycle that I have been intentionally avoiding. Eventually, people would by the process of elimination (or through data mining) discover who the murder is and post this information on forums, ruining the fun for everyone. This also hurts replayability and makes the game incredibly consumable since the same mysteries are shown to the player at all times.

As such, I am hereby pronouncing this game to be limited to a short experience with one big BUT (one t). I have one idea how to get around the problem, but it's gonna need some time on the cooker in order to figure out if it would work. I also need to make some decisions about whether such a solution is feasible for a one man programming team (a.k.a. myself) and whether it would be more worthwhile to focus my attention on some other project.

In the meantime, consider this game to be in a state of hibernation. I have patched the game to fix a few game bugs that were found (although the original game jam version is still available for download) and the new and improved version can be downloaded using the links below (or maybe above, idk how this site works fully yet XD). Until my next project, this has been Scott, Lead Dev at ScusX, signing off.