But doing so costs Amira some money - and perhaps the player’s sense of accomplishment. Players can call Mei Ting if they get stuck, and she can provide either a hint or straight up tell you the answer. Amira meets Mei Ting very early on in the game, and the character is incredibly bubbly and enthusiastic - she’s very curious about how Amira conducts her detective work. That’s part of the reason why Mei Ting the librarian exists. He knew, however, that most players would eventually hit a wall anyway. “We were already taking a bold step in requiring gamers to do research in the real world," Fillon says, "so we thought we should go all the way and put in some puzzles that call for serious analysis and investigation.” There’s no in-game resource to figure it out, so players have to take to the real world and use search engines to find information (though, 2022 being what it is, this had resulted it its own problem).Īt the start of development, the team decided to deliberately make the puzzles challenging, the kind that they’d want players to step away from the game to think about, do real reading and research, and then come back once they figured out the answer. For example, in one of the early chapters Amira has to find out a stamp’s country of origin. In Chinatown Detective Agency that core revolves around solving puzzles with factual trivia. “So we decided to focus more on the core gameplay and mechanics.” “It seems great the first few times, but the novelty wears off really fast – and we had multiple playtesters bring this up,” says Fillon. Although the mechanic sounded great on paper, it ended up just bogging down the entire game experience. But a good number of demo players found this mechanic confusing and halting, and it's completely absent from the shipped game. Earlier versions of the game included an Endurance meter where, if her Endurance got too low, Amira would have trouble completing tasks, even requiring food or rest to bounce back.
While Chinatown Detective Agency steadily improved over the several years of development, not everything made the final cut. We’ve refined the art style and went wild experimenting with lighting effects until we found the right tone,” Fillon explains.Ī comparison between 2018 (on the left) and 2022 “That’s a huge difference between the actual game versus what it was two years ago. In particular, they used the Unity engine’s new 2D lighting effects to add more depth that normally wouldn’t show in flat pixel art. General Interactive decided to emulate the classic retro pixel art style with Chinatown Detective Agency too, but to fit in with the overall grimier dystopian aesthetic, art director Richardo Juchem and the others wanted to give the art style a dark and edgier feel. The game is reminiscent of the point and click Carmen Sandiego games back in the 1980s, where the titular character would travel throughout the world to catch criminals and solve cases.
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