First screenshot

Having dinnerIt’s not much of a screenshot, but I’m still quite pleased. (Although I’ve had to jump through some frightening hoops to get it to display in the new version of WordPress. Looking forward to them fixing this new “insert media” interface).

This is showing a replay of the events of the evening. The little bar at the top of the screen shows the current progress through the evening; right now, we’re looking at the very start of the evening (actually, the end of dinner; it’s at 8:00pm), and all the guests are sitting at the table, in the dining room. The white circle over in the northeastern room is the Unspecified Murder Weapon, which later in the evening, one of our guests will pick up and make use of. (Daisy picks it up and conceals it at 8:45pm, and uses it to kill Mr. Green in the Dining Room at 11:30pm. The corpse then isn’t noticed until 2am. I’m a little nervous at how often Daisy kills Mr. Green in these; that particular combination seems to come up about half the time. I’m going to need to check my random number generator!)

In practice, the game’s player will never actually get to look at the whole course of the murder like this; he’ll have to figure it out, by checking the events as recalled by each individual guest, and piecing together the truth from conflicting alternate accounts.

But I’m exhausted now, and am going to head to bed. It’s going to be a pretty rough ‘Game in a Week’ this week; I don’t think this one is going to have a nice front menu or anything, like the previous ones have. The project is just too big to actually complete and polish up in the limited time I’ve had. But I’m still pretty pleased with it; it’s one of the coolest things I’ve written in a long time, I think. It’ll be even better when I get a chance to plug in an algorithmically generated mansion, and start printing people’s names and room names and suchlike. :)