A Crimson Searchlight [Sci-Fi Detective FPS]

Hey guys. Been working on a project for a little while and decided to bring up the Indie DB page. It's basically the mix between Gone Home's environmental storytelling with a Phillip K. Dick/Blade Runner narrative.

A Crimson Searchlight on Indie DB

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Still pretty early, but I'm hoping to get a video and a public/private testing build (basically, open to people who want to actively play test it here on Mapcore and a few other places) up in the next week or so.

Some alpha images -

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Edited: Updated images to more recent versions.

Quote from Nerve

I'd love to help out with the testing, would you bear me in mind?

Absolutely!

Quote from blackdog

For some reason I generally like cel shading, and these early images makes no exception for me. Curious you mention P. K. Dick, the palette reminds me of the Scanner Darkly movie; being a fan of the writer I'm curious to see what you come up with.

Keep us posted!

Huge fan of PKD, as if the game itself wasn't a tell. A few of the police agency devices/tactics were heavily inspired from A Scanner Darkly. Man in the High Castle has also been helpful in trying to create characters that feel at odds with the society they are in.

I've started participating in #screenshotsaturday - an event where indie developers just post up WIP for that week. It's a nice little motivator to keep working each week so you have something new to show. Here's today's one:

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Thanks for the comments, guys. I appreciate it greatly.

Admittantly, BR is an influence, but it's not BR the game. And anyone going in thinking that will be quite disappointed. You are investigating a space - the stories are told directly through an area. You don't give interrogations or VG tests. And your job is not to hunt androids - your method of removing them is very abstracted - in the form of a device left their apartment.

So whereas BR focuses on the interaction between Deckard and the people/androids around him, that's not happening here. It's a completely different way of interpreting humanity. It's about sifting through drawers, closets and emails and asking ourselves what parts really make us "human."

So while the "elevator pitch" / face concept sounds similar, it's a very different core engagement. And I only say this because I think it'll upset BR fans if I don't. They want a proper BR game, and this won't be it.

...it's not in that universe. It's inspired from it. We aren't allowed to do games in worlds with human-like artificiality?

It's a common theme for a lot of media. See: Natural City, Deus Ex: HR, A.I., Remember Me, I, Robot. Even Blade Runner is inspired from a book - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

Just because the themes are similar doesn't mean you have to get IP licenses. None of the characters, locations, devices, objects or even story arc is being used from any film or book, including Blade Runner.

You work for a government agency that is inherently surveillance obsessed and you use a cremation-urn shaped device to digitally destroy a victim (which you hide in their apartment). You investigate and trap - you aren't a bounty hunter by any means.

I'm confused as to why you don't understand the difference between influence and based in a IP.

Posted up a news article on IndieDB!

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This one is about the dystopian-esque vaporization device the player uses in order to erase confirmed artificials.

Quote from Nerve

How's the test build coming along?

Coming along nicely! We had it playtested at the NYU Game Center in NYC last Thursday, and got a lot of really good feedback. Mostly just need to make the game more digestible for first-time players and flesh out the first suspect a bit more before I toss it up here. We got some pretty crazy interpretations on whether he was an artificial or not. It was really neat.

http://indiestatik.com/2013/12/08/crimson-searchlight/

Indie Statik wrote an article about the game. Not... all of it is accurate, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Mostly spot on to a lot of the themes/ideas of the game, though!

Yikes. Triple post. Been a while since I posted updates on here.

Sorry for the lack of a test build. I've been having a lot of local testing events and each one kind of ripples out to "I want to fix this for the next build." Real easy way to lose track of time.

Here's some latest WIP shots:

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I've got Nerve down for testing. Anyone else curious to participate?

Also, I'll be bringing a build for playtesting at IndieCade East. The timeslot I have been given is between 4PM and 6PM on Saturday, Feb. 15th.