In a rainy night of the year 19XX, the Great Culinary Exhibition opened with a grand ceremony to celebrate the city and its cuisine.

But only a few hours later, the biggest sponsor of the event was dead in his room...

This is my second ever game jam game, which I created with the talented artist Hai Lam Dang, musician Jonas and programmer Anton for the 4th Hannover Game Jam. The topic was "Trade Fair"/ "Exhibition" and the time limit was just under 46 hours. Seven other teams participated, but the jury declared our game the overall winner.

Idea

As with most game jams, we were given an hour to come up with game ideas for the topic. The first idea that came to my mind was a top-down management sim where you arrange booths at a fairground to allow for the most optimal routing of attendees. But then Jonas reminded me that that sounded like the most boring game idea he's ever heard of and I realized he was right.

Our next idea revolved around the incredibly long queues that you often see at fairs. We thought it would be fun to create a game about skipping the queue - either by stealthily sneaking around other queuers or hack-and-slashing your way through the masses. However, we realized that a stealth game about waiting in a queue would probably be more boring than the management sim idea. The hack-and-slash idea would also be too far removed from the idea of standing in a queue for something...

We really had trouble coming up with fun ideas, so the hour went by without a concrete goal in mind. Luckily, after the initial brainstorming session, all groups that did have ideas presented them in a sort of pitch to everyone else to recruit people who couldn't find ideas themselves. Hai and Anton shared their idea of a Ace Accorney-esque murder mystery game that has a trade fair as its story setting. This sounded absolutely fascinating, so we quickly joined their team!

Style

The most recognizable aspect of our game is its unique black and white noir style. At an earlier stage, we experimented with including colored neon lights to add some splashes of color, but ultimately decided against it, as we didn't have enough time for detailed background art anyways. In fact, we didn't have any time for background art at all and decided to spend 9€ on stock assets. Anton turned them grayscale and added a wind effect to the trees, and I think it turned out rather well!

I also wanted to implement some way that the player can keep track of their progress throughout the story if they weren't paying attention perfectly during dialogue or forgot some detail that happened 20 minutes ago. Inspired by AI: The Somnium Files, which features a somewhat diegetic ring binder in which the protagonist keeps track of characters and events, I decided to add a notebook in which Detective Pierce adds handwritten notes about the characters and discoveries in the point-and-click section. Because playtesting revealed that sometimes players wouldn't notice that you can scroll through the notebook with A and D, I added the cover page with prompts players to try scrolling with A and D. While I was at it, I also added a back page which features the game's credits as a little secret.

The Opening Cutscene

Wasn't there some quote about how a good idea solves a problem, but a great idea solves multiple ones? Well, I'm quite proud of the opening cutscene in out game and wanted to elaborate on that a little.

On the second day, we decided to add some sort of title screen, but I found that a simple title screen in a different scene that then loads the main game scene would be too boring. Instead, I proposed that we add an opening cutscene instead, which features the Detective walking onto the crime scene instead. This turned out to be a brilliant idea, since it solved not one, not two, not three, but four problems at once!

• It serves as a title screen
• As the Detective walks across the entire left half of the crime scene, it introduces the explorable game world to the player
• The style and atmosphere of the game is its main selling point, and this intro cutscene immediately presents the player with 20 seconds during which they cannot move but have to soak in the visuals and music
• Once the player walks up to Inspector Alonzo, the "E" tooltip is displayed, so this serves as a tutorial for how to initiate dialogue