Finally made a detective game!

If you've been following me, you must know already that I love narrative games. I always wanted to create a detective game and guess what, I finally made one in Unreal Engine for the 2025 EPIC Megajam!

That feeling when it all came out together was just awesome. Of course, since I made it for a one week Jam, there are still bugs and thankfully not a lot of them. I counted 4 with one kinda game breaking.

• There is actually a bug that only appears when either money or shield reaches 0 so please keep those above 0;
• The Award system is not working properly so players will always be awarded with Gold;
• The moment Vsync is set "On", even if the dropdown still says "OFF", it's actually working. You can verify your frames with Alt+R if you are using an Nvidia card there are also other external tools;
• It is possible that when the kill motive is strength the listed victims might not follow that rule, though be assured that the kill motive will definitely correspond to the killer's preference.

*Tip: Always double check your functions and mostly those with a return node. If it returns something, use local variables that will save you a lot of headaches.

Optimization was another thing I dropped hahaha, I started by trying to use soft references and other corresponding workflows I learned while making my previous projects but my time was running out and playtesting it would just take more of my time. Also the goal was just to get 60 FPS on my 1070 and that goal was achieved. 

For this game I was working on the gameplay systems and basic UI starting friday after the theme was announced then on tuesday I started drawing all the UI textures and on thursday I was working on the level. During the final days, I've been trying to improve it as much I could then finally took a good 8 hours of sleep  (After only sleeping 4 to 5 hours a day). In the morning before the end of the Jam, I made a very fast update because I still saw some typos. This game really started with a lot of ideas, completely overscoped for a solodev, but it feels so good to have most of it out. I came out of it with a sore throat but it was totally worth it.

I am listing all the bugs for this game and working on an update for when the jam is over so if you decide to play it and find more bugs, please let me know. The camera setting was quite a problem to some people so I've already addressed that by adding an option to inverse the X and/or the Y. This game is all I have in my mind right now and I'll just keep working on it at a more healthy pace.

So, If you have some free time and you wanna try the game, it's available for free here on itch and I hope you will have fun with it.

Thanks for reading and see you next time,