Hi everyone,
A big thank you to all those who joined last week’s AMA and for your ongoing support! Here’s a recap of the questions and answers—plus a little sneak peek! 👀
Who's your favourite character in Mindcop?
Sean. He was a lot of fun to write and animate. Second place goes to Robin for the same reasons.
Any plans for a sequel or DLC?
Sorry, but there are no plans to do a sequel or DLC right now. If I can continue to work on games, then I would want to try something new and different.
Any plans for a release of the OST for purchase?
Kevin [the composer] is working on that. It will happen soon I think.
Really hoping for a sequel and more background to the main character duo. What were some influences for this game? It really reminded me of some of my favourite games/media like AI: The Somnium Files, Inception, ID Invaded. It certainly is up there now as well :)
Thank you! No plans for a sequel right now. My biggest and most obvious media influence would be Twin Peaks. Also lots of other detective games. From the games you named I played the first two.
Out of curiosity, what inspired you to choose the design the game takes on? I love the groovy mix of almost disco-funk as a splash of color in a cartoon-noir world. Other question, will we ever get to see inside the doors of Linda or Mindcop?
The overall art design is influenced by a mix of film noir, Twin Peaks, and modern cartoons. From the start, I wanted to create a serious detective game with dark themes, but I was nervous about it becoming too bleak or depressing. Especially with that color palette. So, many of the design choices I made early on were meant to counter that. For example, I made the Mindsurf sequences really vibrant and flashy, and I introduced more color in the Sea of Thoughts.
From a game design perspective, the Mindsurf minigame also serves as a palate cleanser, so I leaned into the heavy contrast to enhance this effect.
To your second question I will say that I don’t plan to add story content to the game through patches or DLC.
Curious if you ever considered multiple save files? This is mainly a personal issue for me because when i almost got the "all topics" achievement just to be reset to nothing kinda felt bad. Still a good game tho.
The game design heavily relies on players having to live with their choices. A save system encourages players to save often and load their last save file after wasting time on something. As you point out, having only the auto-save has its downsides, but I think the real issue lies with the achievements themselves.
I must admit, I totally underestimated how big of a deal achievements are. Creating achievements for a narrative game felt silly to me, so I didn’t put much thought into it. Now that I see their role for players who enjoy the game and want something to do after finishing it, I regret making so many of them rather frustrating. If you somehow unlock all topics through “normal play” it’s cool to see an achievement pop up for that. That’s what I had in mind when I came up with them. But if you actively look at the achievements and start hunting for them, some just aren’t fun, and I should have avoided this.
How did you approach the narrative design for your game? Did you follow any guidance or use any tools/methods that you found helpful? Love the game, thank you for making it!
There are general whodunit mystery writing rules that are certainly helpful, and then there’s the whole challenge of adapting mystery storytelling methods into a fairly open game design where players can choose what to do and when.
For the general mystery, I didn’t use any fancy tools. I just used a single big Photoshop document filled with mind maps, timelines, and character charts. It became very chaotic very quickly, and I wouldn’t do it this way again.
As for making all of this work in a non-linear game, there’s a lot to talk about, but a big part of it involves trying to subtly guide players into doing things in the order I want, without making it too obvious.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1517180/Mindcop/
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