Yesterday, we published a demo version of our game (post about it). However, the journey to this point has been a long one. In this series of devlogs, I'll try to tell you how we came up with the game, how it evolved, and all the challenges we faced during its development.

Back in 2019, my wife and I played a lot of board games, and one of them was Sherlock Holmes. It amazed us with its uniqueness. If you haven't played it (highly recommended), the premise is simple: at the beginning, Sherlock Holmes receives a letter with a lot of information, and after reading it, you need to decide where to go. However, there’s no list of places; all players have is a London directory and a map. By choosing a location, you receive new information and decide where to go next. You continue this process until you find the criminal. I had never encountered such freedom of choice in games before. Even in computer games, you usually get three narrow paths pre-arranged for you. Later, I discovered Her Story and fell in love with it, but I didn’t know about it at the time.

So, the idea arose: what if we could bring such a simple gameplay concept to a computer game? We’d write a story, create connections between locations, and draw clues. It seemed straightforward, but how wrong we were. How everything went awry will be covered in the next parts.