Dear gumshoes,
We have a lot of new things to show you as part of our development updates.
Let’s get started with some art
Ricardo's having a lot of fun experimenting with Unity's lighting effects, and some of the end results are just beautiful. Check out the one below - a dark, menacing, dilapidated house where a crucial lead is just begging to be uncovered.
Or check out Tiger Lily's own personal onsen at her health club.
Darkness and light really set the mood in each scene of the game, and that's something we're hoping to consistently deliver.
We've also been working hard on perfecting the implementation of the assets in the game (part of the polishing phase). Here are some gifs of scenes you haven't seen before (no worries, no spoilers!):
Our art team has also been working away on the in-game characters that some of our backers have created. Here are just some samples:
We're also midway through implementing the remaining VO. We had a lot of fun recording some of the key characters in the game. We'd rather not reveal too much information about them, but let's just say they both play a pretty crucial role in the game's many story arcs.
First round of QA completed
Our first round of QA for the PC build was completed weeks ago, and we've got a laundry list of bugs and issues that our programmers have been focusing on in the coming weeks, followed up by time spent on polish and improvements.
Probably the biggest update now is that we'll be resolving the last Class A bug (a bug that causes a game to crash) in our list -- that means that after that, our latest build will have no more show-stopping bugs, leaving us to focus on the less serious things that need polishing, such as visual and animation hiccups. From a development standpoint, that's fairly important -- Class A bugs are a major obstacle in development progress as they're often indicative of larger issues in the build. Once we finish off the rest of the non-serious bugs and errors, we'll have our first launch candidate build, which is a major milestone. This is something we're hoping to have in a month's time.
Porting Process kicked off
We've also begun the porting process sometime ago for the platforms we'll be releasing in. This is taking place in parallel to our bug fixing/polish phase. We've hired a dedicated UX designer to make sure the game is the best it can be no matter how you play it.
Finally, and we're sure this is on everyone's mind, we've been doing a lot of planning and discussions around the release date. We're going to release an update video in the next few weeks (we just want to finish the next development milestone first). In this video update, we'll make the exclusive announcement here of when Chinatown Detective agency is releasing on all platforms, including PC, Nintendo Switch and Xbox.
Thanks for reading and for all your support to Chinatown Detective Agency.
The GenIntCo. Team
The Chinatown Detective Agency: Day One prologue is available for free here on Steam.
Join us on Discord for more updates and content (some game-related, some random) from our team.
Is social media your thing? Amira Darma is on Twitter.