Conscience
Project Details:
- Duration: 5 Months
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints
- Tools Used: Blender, Github Desktop, Figma, Ableton, Miro, Affinity Photo, Audacity
- Released On: Steam
- Team Size: Solo
What is Conscience:
Conscience is a noir detective mystery game where you're a private investigator hired to uncover the truth behind Jack Beckham's death. The gameplay revolves around finding clues, investigating the victims apartment, and piecing together the mystery.
Goal of Conscience:
Conscience was intended to be my first commercial released. A game that wasn't a prototype or a short game jam project.
Going into the project my main goal was to learn the full process of making a game, from the idea to release.But I didn't want to get trapped into spending years and years on my "Magnus Opus", as that seems to be a common occurrence among game developers.
So I decided to purposely make a short detective game that mostly takes place in one environment. This allowed me to limit my scope and confine the game to a reasonable time frame.
But as is tradition in game development, everything took longer then expected.
It's also important to note that early on I chose to release the game for free. I didn't care about making a profit, I just wanted to improve and learn as a game developer. Knowing the game would be free also helped reduce the pressure of releasing Conscience on Steam.
Visual Style:
Initially Conscience was birthed not by the idea for the game, but by experimenting with different post process techniques in Unreal Engine.
Too often players complain about certain games having an "Unreal Engine Look" to them, a look that just kind of makes the game look generic.
So the first thing I began working on was attempting to emulate different aspects of multiple games visual styles, in hopes of stumbling upon something unique.
After a while of experimenting and toggling, I stumbled on a visual style that evoked a feeling in me. One of a moody, dark, nior detective game.
This post-process effect ended up determining the entire direction and visual identity for the game. And from there I built the gameplay and story around it.
Creating the Mystery:
Suprisingly the hardest part of Conscience wasn't coming up with the puzzles or the mysteries, it was trying to reverse engineer a story that could be solved by a player.
Writing a story of how someone was murdered, sure not the hardest thing in the world. But writing said story while taking into account:
- How is the player going to solve the mystery
- What clues are they going to find
- Why did the characters actions cause those clues to appear
- And fixing all the plot holes created from trying to make the mystery solvable.
This is when I realised that I am not a writer...
I love creating puzzles and making games, but writing a loop hole free story that ties the puzzles to the story is not my forte.
But after many weeks of hitting my head against the wall, the story and puzzles were all set-up without any known loopholes.
Reception:
When Conscience released I expected it to fly under the radar. Dozens of games are released on Steam everyday, at most I thought 50 people max would play my game.
To my surprise, after two weeks of silence from Steam regarding the games performance and whilst on a holiday, I decided to check my Steam store.
I was pleasantly surprised to find 11 reviews all of which were positive and glowing, one person even made a YouTube play-through.
The following months the game seemed to grow and snowball, garnering more and more players and reviews. I assume this is mostly due to the game being free, but I also hope it's an indication of it's quality.
Currently as of writing Conscience now has had:
- Over 7000 unique players
- 118 reviews at 93% very positive
- 1000+ wish-lists, which I don't entirely understand since the game is free
- And over 56,000 licenses redeemed (which are people who have added it to their library)
Reading the reviews can be nerve-racking but overall I agree with nearly everyone.
Many talk about the games potential and desire to see more levels and an expanded game. While others mention the game being a bit easy - both of which I agree with.
Considering I didn't expect even 100 people to play Conscience, I was extremely shocked by it's reception.
It's given me much encouragement and motivation to continue improving as a game developer.
Reflecting on Conscience:
Looking back on Conscience it's extremely easy to count its numerous flaws and issues I'd like to change.
But overall I'm proud of the work all things considered, and am motivated to make something even better.
I think it was the right decision to make Conscience free. It reduced the pressure of making and the releasing a game, while also allowing me to see a full development cycle in a lower pressure environment.
When I release my next commercial game, I now have the knowledge of all the twists and turns and road bumps along the way (especially when setting up a game with Steam).
Now it's on to the next project.