What’s next? Elementary, my dear Ampson. Sleuthhounds!

December 12, 2014

It has been an amazing week, watching my new Satin & Sutherland – The Golden Curse go online and become available for purchase. If you haven’t looked into it yet, I think you really should. Of course, I may be a smidge biased. OK, sales pitch over.

Anyway, as the saying goes, no rest for the weary.

The novel is in the wild now. That means it’s time to get moving on the next big production. In this particular case, that production is a computer game. Not only a computer game, but a Cubes computer game.

For the past two months, I have been pushing hard to complete my novel and get it released. Prior to that, I was splitting my time between the novel and working on Sleuthhounds.

Sleuthhounds will be a new addition to the Cubes “storyverse”. It will feature Pureluck Homes (a Sherlock Holmes type character) and his writer colleague Jane Ampson (a combination Jane Austen/John Watson type character). As with office life, superheroes, and adventure movies, detective stories provide plenty of opportunities for comic moments. It is those opportunities I hope to capitalize on with this game.

The game is intended to be a fairly traditional point-n-click adventure game along the lines of LucasArts' The Secret of Monkey Island or Sierra's Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. An adventure game because that’s my favourite game genre. A point-n-click because it lends itself so well to touch based interfaces. Although, I am not 100% committed to this yet (more like 98.342%), I am hoping to develop and release the game simultaneously for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and possibly Linux.

Much progress has already been made with the game, and I am planning to release an early Windows demo, featuring Pureluck Homes, in late January 2015. If all goes to schedule, a second demo, featuring Jane Ampson, will release in spring of 2015 with the full game coming in the fall of 2015.

Stay tuned for more details through the coming months. For now, I'm pleased to present the first official screenshot of the game taken from the current “work in progress” demo.

[Pureluck Homes imprisoned.]
Pureluck Homes imprisoned.
Click to view larger.