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The Darkside Detective dev discusses decisions made for players with little free time

by rawmeatcowboy
07 February 2018
GN Version 5.0

The older you get, the less free time you have. A lot of developers are starting to recognize this, and are making sure their experiences respect the time a player has to offer. In a NintendoPlay interview, Dave McCabe of Spooky Door discusses how The Darkside Detective respects players' time with a specific approach.

We wanted to make the game accessible to time-poor players, so we tried to keep each case to around 1 hour or so of play. One of the ways we tightened the experience was removing the walking animations. They add a lot of padding in terms of time, but not in terms of gameplay. A third of your average PnC’s playtime is walking from room to room. It’s empty time. We removed it so players got the same amount of game, but no less actual content.

This also came from trying to keep the game accessible. For us, a lot of times we get half way or so in a game, then life gets in the way and when you return you can’t recall what you were doing or looking for, why, etc. The episodic format means you can play a case then leave the game for a month before playing the next one if you wish. This format also means we can add extra cases post-launch. in fact, there’s a new case already which will be coming to Switch soon.

[Link]