Old Hound of Baker Street is now avaliable!

We really like mystery stories. Complex murders that the detective must solve before the worst happens, the exhilarating moment when you accuse the criminal of committing the deed. And then, if you were careful, if you were clever and attentive, the scene where you are proven right.

When we decided to take part in Café Dot's Game Jam and the 'Animals with Jobs' theme was revealed, we weren't expecting to end up with a text-based murder mystery. But then we started brainstorming, Sherlock came up, and it just made sense. We pictured him old. Tired. Years would have passed by. London would have exited the Great War, thinking that it would be its last. And there, Sherlock would take one last case. One he would do reluctantly. One only he could solve.

We overscoped, there's no doubt in our minds. We made a visual novel with over 20K words, complex text interactions, 6 endings, beautiful portraits, two music tracks, and almost an hour of play, according to our latest testers, all in two weeks. But we managed to finish it. It had some bugs, of course, and things that could be better. And so, after fixing all that, Old Hound of Baker Street is complete.

We learned a lot during the two-week period of the Jam. This was our first time working as a team, but everyone's expertise was nicely balanced.

Our artist experimented a lot with how the game should look. We finally choose an isometric room in order to leave space for the textbox and the beautiful portraits he did in the lower part of the screen.

Our writers had to unify styles after the different dialogue branches were written, which showed the importance of planifying beforehand. Luckily, both knew the character extremely well, and so there wasn't much difference between their Sherlocks.

They also worked in tandem with our composer, in order to make the music fit the tone of the game. Asking for constant feedback, he created a beautiful, suspenseful track that worked great on loop and allowed variation in tense moments.

And, of course, there was the internal code of the game, which was quickly organised and implemented to be as easy to use as possible. Sadly, we couldn't do as much testing as we wanted, and in a non-linear game, bugs are easy to overlook. From silly mistakes to dialogue options that couldn't be interacted with, it took us a few days more to clean everything after the Jam.

This may have been our first time working together, but it certainly won't be the last. Old Hound is, we feel, a game we can be proud of. We want to start new projects as a team and experiment with different narratives and styles of play. And it would be great if you decided to follow us along the way.

See you on the next devlog!