Hello everyone~! It's been a little over a week since I first released Locked Room on Rails, so I figured it was the perfect time to write up a postmortem about the entire process of making this game. I'll keep spoilers to a minimum here though, so no worries about that if you haven't had the chance to play through it yet.

The original version

As I mentioned in the description, this game was originally created for a school project back in March. I ended up really liking how it turned out overall, so I set it aside to finish it up for an Itchio release. The project was to create our own detective fiction, and I decided to dust off an old story idea I've had for a while for it

Image: A screenshot of the school version, showing one of the stock photo backgrounds and the sketch version of Santiago's sprite.

In terms of the differences between the original version and the Itchio version, the main ones are:

• No original background art

All of it was either stock photos with filters, or - in the case of the cabin background for the point and click scene - a simple scene I made in Google Sketchup and doodled over.

• Different ending

I won't spoil it exactly, but the school version does not have the scenes after the deduction show in it! I had it written down in my outline initially, however I removed it (and a related small scene before the murder) from the school version to make sure I could finish it on time. When I decided to finish this up to release here on Itchio, I went back to my outline to add those scenes back in now that I had the time to.

As we wrap up this section I will say that I did end up getting full marks for that project, which makes me very happy.

The Itchio version

Now we move onto the version that's released here on Itchio!

After April I had been slowly working on it here and there with the idea to release it sometime this year. It wasn't until the Summer Novel Festival started when I decided to really go ham and blast through the rest of dev so I could release it as part of it.

Most of the game's script was done at this point - aside from the extra scenes at the end - so there wasn't too much I had to do in that regard. My efforts were focused on making all the original artwork, the UI, all the animations, and programming some extra screens that I wanted to add to this version.

Image: The interrogation selection screen, which was one of the new custom screens I added for the Itchio version.

Yeah I kept the school version very basic, but that meant I could play around with Ren'Py a little more for this version to my liking. Overall the final pieces of the script took me about four days to crank out (had some writer's block), and the finished artwork and UI took a little under a week.

My thoughts overall

This short project helped me learn a lot of helpful lessons to make gamedev easier on myself going forward. Realizing that if I push myself a little I can whip out a 10k word game in the span of a month is fantastic, and I'm hopeful that this means I'll be able to release more short games while I work on my longer projects.

Special thanks to my friend Redd for playtesting and offering feedback, it really helped a ton.

Anyways that's all from me, thanks for reading. Thank you to everyone who's played it so far! If you tried the game and liked it, feel free to leave a comment and a review.

See you all next time!