Hi friends,
Is this thing on? *taps mic*
Firstly, we here at General Interactive hope that you, your friends, and your family are safe, well, and happy. It's been a trying year for us all, and one none of us were prepared for. Please continue to stay safe, and continue to look out for one another.
Finding the time to keep you all updated on Chinatown Detective Agency has certainly been difficult over the last few months, and now that I’ve finally been able to sit down and write this, I’m not sure where to start! How about development progress?
Development Progress
We are in the process of completing the Alpha 2 version of the game, which means that a vast majority of the game’s functionalities are already in place. The first Alpha build that we shared with you was very rough around the edges, and a lot of the code had to be cleaned up, and a lot of the bugs that were encountered by players had to be fixed - so this took up a few weeks of development time before we could make more progress.
The most notable newly-added functionality is the save/load function, which will certainly come in handy for the programmers as well, as it will speed up development quite a fair bit. We also finally fully finished the ENDURANCE mechanic, which now includes the ability to let Amira take naps at her office. Everyone’s gotta sleep – even the toughest private detective this side of the Singapore River.
As we finalise the majority of the game’s mechanics and functionalities, the rest of our development time will be focused on implementing the actual missions.
We’ve added a few new locations (both cities and interactive locations), bringing the total so far to 19 locations that Amira can now visit.
A really cool thing we've decided to do is give cities Early Morning - Early Evening - Night phases. It's a lot more work, but the results are well worth it! Check out Athens, Greece below:
Here's a sneak peak at a mansion courtyard, an important location in Singapore's Bukit Timah neighbourhood where one of the early cases takes place.
Following our wonderfully humbling Kickstarter campaign, we took the time to fully flesh out Case #1 and Case #2 — they're now feature complete and playing beautifully. As we speak we’re finalising Case #3 – which we may or may not be showing off pretty soon...stay tuned for more information on that.
Art Updates
Whilst you're here, let's take a look at some of our brand new - and absolutely beautiful - artwork for Chinatown Detective Agency.
First up: check out this super cool work-in-progress poster, illustrated by our wonderful cover artist Hinchel Or.
Excitingly, we also have welcomed a new character portrait illustrator on board, Ivan Ulyanov, known for his work on Wadjet Eye Game's "Unavowed". Here are a couple of examples of his work - the portraits for Amira and Tiger Lily.
Amira Darma
Tiger Lily
How amazing are these?
We'll likely do a separate update down the road focusing exclusively on Ivan's incredible work bringing our characters to life — we've certainly got plenty more to share.
Audio
Having a dedicated audio production house working on Chinatown Detective agency (London and Paris based Aube Production) means that we’re revamping all of the game’s SFX and audio engineering. We’ve re-recorded some VO, and we’ve been back in the studio this month to begin recording the rest of the dialogue with our actors. Things that were really rough in our early builds, namely the audio mixing, has been fixed and improved.
We’ve also got two new tracks from our composer Dmitrii, and we’ve just briefed our second composer, Sean Kolton on a new track. Have a listen to Dmitrii’s new track, “Mastermind”, in our Soundcloud playlist: https://soundcloud.com/genintco/mastermind
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So that’s where we’re at – we’re really excited about the months ahead and rest assured we're going to be pretty active around these parts in the next few weeks. You'll hear a lot more about our plans very soon here on Steam and on our social pages:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/genintco
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/genintco/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genintco/
Imgur: https://imgur.com/user/GenIntCo
Be sure to also join your fellow detectives on our community Discord: https://discord.gg/RK55huC
One last thing, if you haven't already, please do support us by adding Chinatown Detective Agency to your Steam Wishlist (you can use the handy widget below!), that way we can keep you updated on our progress, and any news on our full release coming early next year. Your support means the world to us.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172190/Chinatown_Detective_Agency/
Thank you, and stay safe, gumshoe.
Mark and the General Interactive Co. team