I've finally decided to write a development update about how things are going with my detective prosecutor simulator set in the totalitarian medieval state of Nadragia. First, I'd like to talk about the game's core features - the things I've spent so much time working on - and then move on to the development process and the current results.
The Core Features of Laws of Nadragia:
Real-time search for contradictions
Unlike other courtroom games, Laws of Nadragia never highlights suspicious statements in green or tells you which testimony contains a contradiction. In other words, the game never tells you whether someone is lying.
Instead, it's up to you to examine every statement made by witnesses, lawyers, and defendants, comparing what they say against the available facts and laws.
I've always found it a little strange that many detective games directly ask the player "Which part of this testimony is a lie?" Sure, it makes the gameplay more accessible, but at the same time it does half of the detective's (or lawyer's, or prosecutor's) job for them. Before you can expose a lie, you first have to realize that there is a lie.
Branching story
In well-known courtroom games you're usually either a judge (like in We. The Revolution) deciding who deserves imprisonment or execution, or a defense attorney (like in Ace Attorney or Aviary Attorney), whose goal is to prove their client's innocence.
When playing as a judge, the game often becomes a decision-making simulator. Your job isn't to investigate the case but to make a verdict based on the available information, your own moral values, and possible political pressure. These games usually offer branching outcomes, but the detective and courtroom investigation itself either plays a very small role or is absent entirely.
Attorney simulators take the opposite approach. The investigations are incredibly detailed, but there's usually no real possibility of failing a case or making a choice that actually affects the story. If you answer the judge's question incorrectly or run out of "lives" (also known as the judge's patience), the game simply reloads the latest checkpoint, forcing you to replay the last 15–20 minutes.
In Laws of Nadragia, I wanted to create a truly branching story. You can abandon any case, completely botch it, or even accept a bribe from the defendant - and the story will continue while taking your actions into account.
The branching doesn't stop at different verdicts. During trials, you might overlook an important statement and send the case down a completely different narrative path. Or you may deliberately choose to hide inconvenient evidence from the court if it serves your own interests.
Character abilities and salary management
Every successfully completed trial rewards you with gold. You can spend it either on important story-related expenses (taxes, rent, mandatory "donations" to the government...) or on active and passive abilities that help make the game's rather challenging investigations a little easier.
Character animations
At the beginning of development, we deliberately chose a very ambitious level of detail for our pixel art characters. Their sprites use larger canvases, more animation frames, and a much wider range of emotions than many other pixel art games.
As a result, I think we've achieved a fairly distinctive visual style.
The downside is that creating a single character - with all of their animations (usually between 8 and 20) - can easily take our artist one or even two months.
I'll attach a couple of GIFs below as examples. They're still work in progress - the animation timing has already been adjusted inside the engine.
Watch on YouTube Now let's move on to the development process and our current Steam progress.
Development
The game is being developed by just the two of us - my wife and me. I'm responsible for game design, programming in Construct 3, writing the story, and translating the game into English. My wife creates all of the pixel art and animations. Also, I need to mention that the soundtrack is being composed by a composer I've previously worked with.
We've been working on the Laws of Nadragia for four years now.
Yes... four years.
Why did it take so long? Because I completely underestimated the scope of the project. I honestly thought making a story-driven detective game would be relatively straightforward. Turns out Laws of Nadragia wasn't exactly a "on your mark, get set, release" kind of project.
On top of that, my desire to make the game feel truly unique - and to include lots of branching storylines that make every player's experience feel personal - multiplied the workload several times over. If every trial had been completely linear, the game probably would've been finished about two years ago.
There was also a long period when I simply couldn't work. Sometimes I'd spend hours staring at my computer without writing a single line of dialogue, convinced everything I was doing was pointless.
Fortunately, I managed to get out of that mindset. Now I'm back to writing, designing, and working every single day.
Here's what the planning board for Trial №8 currently looks like.
The interface and gameplay systems were actually finished quite a long time ago. What's left is the content itself: courtroom puzzles, story, characters, and dialogue. Before I implement any of it into the game as dialogue tables and event triggers, I first design everything on a Miro real-time workboard (see the screenshots above and below).
For anyone who's curious, here's what all those colored boxes mean:
Blue boxes contain dialogue.
Green boxes represent player choices (for example, selecting a law or a piece of evidence during testimony to raise an objection).
Purple boxes are variables - the consequences of the player's decisions that the engine needs to remember because they'll affect future dialogue, character relationships, and other events.
Dark blue diamonds check those previously stored variables, including choices made in earlier conversations, trials, or even previous in-game days.
Gray boxes contain unique hint text that's shown when the player makes a mistake on a specific line of dialogue.
Dark gray boxes act as "teleports," connecting one part of the story to another.
Red boxes represent failure states - moments where the player loses the case due to huge mistakes or narrative dead ends caused by earlier decisions.
Once a trial (or an NPC conversation) has been fully designed and I know exactly what the prosecutor, judge, witnesses, defendant, and lawyer should say (and when), I move everything into the game engine using my dialogue tables.
Each dialogue entry includes not only the text itself, but also the character's emotion (animation), the voice line that should be played (yes, the game features partial voice acting by both professional and amateur actors), variable checks, branching dialogue choices, music changes, and much more.
The engine reads all of this data and turns it into the final gameplay experience. I built this entire dialogue system myself, and I keep expanding it with new features whenever I need them. It's turned out to be incredibly convenient.
After the release of the Laws of Nadragia, I'd love to let players create their own in-game days, NPC conversations, and courtroom cases using the game's tools and assets, then upload them and share complete campaigns with each other.
I really hope players will appreciate all the effort that's gone into this project.
Personally, I've always loved games that genuinely react to the player's actions. Too often, story-driven games promise that "This character will remember that," but those choices rarely have a meaningful impact later on.
Ironically, while trying to make this project simpler than my previous game (KingSim), I ended up falling into exactly the same trap. In KingSim, your decisions affect the story, your relationships with characters, your kingdom's resources, and the buildings you can construct. I really did intend to make Laws of Nadragia a much more manageable project... Apparently I'll have to stop myself from adding so many ideas next time. Maybe then I'll actually finish games faster.
As I mentioned earlier, I finished the core gameplay systems and interface quite a long time ago.
Right now, the biggest bottleneck is the story. Each in-game day consists of three court trials. At the moment, I'm finishing Trial №8 (Day 3, Courtroom 2).
Originally, the plan was to make 10 in-game days (30 trials in total), but I've come to terms with the fact that this simply isn't realistic. Otherwise, the game might never be released. Instead, I'm planning to launch with six or seven completed in-game days. Honestly, that's still a pretty substantial amount of content. Each trial is expected to take around 30 to 60 minutes to complete. So... wish me luck.
Marketing and Wishlists
Over the years, I've tried promoting the game in all sorts of ways: posting on Reddit, releasing a demo (and emailing streamers and content creators, asking them to give it a try), participating in Steam festivals, and even experimenting with TikTok.
For now, though, I've put marketing almost completely on hold so I can focus on one thing: Actually finishing the game.
Right now, Laws of Nadragia has around 9,500 wishlists. Is that a lot? Honestly... it's hard to say. On the one hand, it's far more than my previous game ever had - and that project still turned out to be commercially successful and was received well.
On the other hand, many developers have pointed out that players are adding more games to their wishlists than ever before, while buying a smaller percentage of them. So it's difficult to know what to expect.
The good news is that the demo has a surprisingly high median playtime: 1 hour and 6 minutes. Since the demo itself takes about an hour to complete (assuming you don't get too distracted), this suggests that most players who start it actually finish it. Seeing that statistic makes me think that maybe I'm not spending all these years making this game for nothing.
And maybe Laws of Nadragia really will become another great indie game that adds something new to the genre. ːsteamhappyː
If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!
I'll read every single one and do my best to reply.