What? Released? Where’s the rest of this devlog you ask?

Well, it all went by so fast. During thanksgiving, I had folks around who picked up and asked about the Playdate, and while everyone had a blast trying things out, there wasn’t something for us to engage with together. This got me thinking about pass n’ play style local multiplayer, and what kind of game I could prototype quickly, and by the next day we were trying the first version, with a rough set of premade faces and no audio. Despite it being rough, we had a blast coming up with ever sillier descriptions of the faces that still worked to eliminate suspects, so it felt right to develop the concept further. Fast forward a bit and here we are, a fully fleshed out little game that I hope gives friends and families hours of silly fun!

On the inspiration, it happened rather quickly, so I’m not sure I was fully aware of everything that popped into my head, but I know was thinking of old Beano and Mad Magazine illustrations while I was drawing the faces, while the cheesy dad-joke detective vibe very much came from half forgotten memories of Get Smart and Inspector Gadget. It’s very likely that a childhood full of cherished Brøderbund games also led to a lot of the feelings I’m trying to express here. ❤️

On the Playdate, given this is my first game on the platform, I can say it’s been a pleasure. Something about the constraints is balanced just right such that it feels like there’s oceans of space to explore, but the screen and inputs naturally put up guardrails that keep scope manageable. I particularly love the simulator and how quick it is to iterate with. It feels ideal for a solo dev to really go to town on, and I can’t wait to start the next one. One thing I didn’t expect: the Playdate’s speakers are actually pretty nice, and audio playback is easy. I wasn’t really thinking about audio on Detective Face when I started out, but by the time I finished, I had had a great time cobbling together a whole mood. Going into the next game with that in mind.

I haven’t had time to cut a nice trailer yet, that’s still to come, but to give y’all a flavor of the audio, here’s a raw recording of the first minute or so of gameplay, kid!

For the technically inclined, this project was done in the C flavor of the Playdate SDK, on a Windows machine, with Visual Studio, Aseprite, and Audacity for tooling. If y’all have tech questions, please leave a comment below!