Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze; a whodunnit game with random culprit

[ObsessiveScience]

Hello everyone!

I am developing a game called 'Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze.' It's a whodunnit with a different culprit for each playthrough. You play as Hank and have to figure out who stole the Golden Sneeze from the museum of ancient history. The story changes depending on who did it, but you have to be careful as clues in one story line can be red herrings in another.

We are currently trying to get greenlit on Steam. If you could give us a vote at the following link, we will be eternally grateful. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=669876318

If you want to try the gameplay out, you can play the demo prelude on itch.io: https://obsessive-science-games.itch.io/detective-hank-a-prelude-to-tea The prelude has a completely different story, so it can be played without spoiling the main game.

If you are more visually oriented, I present to you our trailer, voiced by the lovely Francesca Hogan:

'Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze' is planned to release mid-june 2016. We hope you like it and, please, tell us what you think of it down below.

[Jubal]

Lovely stuff! I'll get our twitter to fire out a few tweets about it

Whodunnits are good - I like the slightly steampunk theming as well and it looks like there's a good diversity/range of characters. Greenlight upvote given!

(Have you played Karaski, btw, if steampunk whodunnits are something you like?)

[ObsessiveScience]

Thank you for the tweets and upvote!

When deciding on an art style the artist really loved the steampunk theming, so we went with that. It came out really well with the film noir and Agatha Christe direction we were going for.

I have never even heard of Karaski, but I will put it on a pretty high spot of my list of games that I still want to play. Thanks for the recommendation!

[Jubal]

Yeah, it looks good - certainly light hearted but seems to work well. How "big" is the game/what do you envisage the playthrough time being for each iteration?

Karaski was made by Koobazaur, one of our members - it's an open-ended mystery on a sabotaged airship: http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=4122.0

[ObsessiveScience]

The play time depends on how fast you read and make decisions. If you don't read and just click through, 1 playthrough is about 5-10 minutes long, because the text-delay is skipable. I haven't timed an actual playthrough yet, but it might just be 3-4 hours. The second playthrough will obviously be a bit shorter, but if you want to read all the text, you'll have to include all the wrong paths as well, including 2 fake endings (the dialogue planning was INSANE). In total you might just have 12 hours of playtime as an average reader, but only if you guess all perpetrators on the first playthrough of their storyline.

As for Karaski: it's already on my steam wishlist.  It will be a nice treat to congratulate myself on the release of Detective Hank. 

[Jubal]

OK, cool Look forward to seeing more updates! I'll hopefully get time to look at the demo next week when I'm less swamped by work.

[ObsessiveScience]

Just to keep you all updated: Today I finished the first version of the full beta. It's with the testers now. From here on out it's just polishing the details. I haven't got anything to show for it, because this needs to be kept under wraps, but it is very likely we will release in 2 weeks.

[Jubal]

Good luck, hope the testing goes well!

[ObsessiveScience]

Just a quick update: We are in the final testing stages and the release will be 17 June 2016.

[Glaurung]

Well done - good luck with the release!

[ObsessiveScience]

I'm a bit late, but I wanted to let you know Detective Hank is released on the first platform, itch.io, here:
https://obsessive-science-games.itch.io/detective-hank-and-the-golden-sneeze

The game will be available for more platforms and systems in the near future.

We have also released the full soundtrack here:
https://storytimesymphony.bandcamp.com/album/detective-hank-and-the-golden-sneeze-ost

And if you want more, here is a blog post with the making of Detective Hank:
http://vglegacy.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-this-action-game-dev-made-visual.html

One question: is it customary to edit the main posts on this forum if there are any updates? If so, I will do that later on.

[Jubal]

Many congratulations on the release, great work! I'm snowed under with stuff to do not least from having been ill all week, but I'll try and catch up with your stuff soon.

Editing the original post is perfectly acceptable and often a good idea if the thread has run to more than one page.