My old, unfinished detective game (Patreon)

Hello!

Back in a very early episode of Developing, I talked about how I had previously tried to make some games, long before starting GMTK. Like a Picross-based RPG called Carter's Curse, and a film noir point-and-click adventure called City of Angels.

I still had lots of images, sprites, and screenshots of the first game - so I could show that off in the video. But City of Angels was, I thought, lost to time. I managed to find one screenshot through Google to use in the video, but the rest was gone. 

Until today... when I found an old hard drive at my parent's house. It was a backup of an old iMac from around 2015. So this was when I was just starting Game Maker's Toolkit. And, lo and behold, the entire archive of City of Angels (which I was working on circa 2012) was sitting right there!

I started to trawl through it - hundreds of sprites, depicting characters, buildings, objects, UI pieces, and more.

It was incredibly nostalgic. I remembered how I spent hours and hours on this stuff, dutifully recreating old buildings, cars and outfits of post-war Los Angeles, based on archival photographs and film noir movies.

The game itself was... well there wasn't much to it. I was making it in Adventure Game Studio, but never got too far with the actual design or development.

I had plans to craft murder cases for the player solve, and maybe even use procedural generation to create a whole city of people to talk to. I wanted to make the player think and feel like a detective - using some of the ideas I would eventually talk about on GMTK.

But I fell into the common game dev trap: I focused on art and story, and didn't think to design prototypes or get feedback on the ideas. And so, naturally, the project was never completed.

To be honest - I don't really mind. I just had such fun drawing all of this stuff and imagining the game in my head. I wasn't sad the game was never finished - the process itself was fun.

But, I do vividly remember thinking about how one day... people would get to play this game and see all my hard work. That thought kept me going... kept me placing down pixels! And so it's a bit of a shame that literally nobody except my family ever saw this stuff.

So, as a gift to my past self. My wide-eyed, hard-working, endlessly-ambitious past self. Here you go, Mark. Here's your hard work, being shown to the world (or, at least, your Patrons).

Thanks for your support. It means the world.