So I’ve been doing some more work on Nicholas Spratt today. It’s mostly been housekeeping, trying to clean up some of the uglier things that went in during the last few hours of development in the “Game in a Week” version. But I’ve begun modifying the mansion rendering and camera behaviour in preparation for allowing the player to actually walk around within the mansion, questioning suspects who will have been separated into the different rooms of the mansion.

You can see that compared to the “Game in a Week” version, the camera is much closer in to the action, and there’s a soft gradient given to the floors, hinting at the grid pattern underneath (which will become integral to the mystery, in the next revision of the game).

My current thinking is that in the next version, the hallways will become locations just like the rooms were in the last one, and guests will be able to see each other if their view is unobstructed. Guest movement will still not really take geography into account, except in terms of who they’re able to see. Visually, when the player is examining a suspect’s testimony, the character will actually travel from place to place using simple pathfinding (probably copied directly from the “meat” pathfinding I wrote for Muncher’s Labyrinth), but that will probably be purely visual.

Of course, there will also be huge improvements to the murder mystery generation algorithm. But that’s a topic for a different post. :)