ONE SHOT

ONE SHOT is a 2D pixel art videogame  made by onbox GAMES, a one person company, @xrobergmz.

This game came out with the idea of making a detective like videogame for the No Shit Sherlock Jam, Hosted by @Ludipe. I end up with the concept of making a videogame in wich you play like a man whos wife was murdered and decided to buy a gun with only one bullet to find her killer and finish (him/her).

If you are intrested in playing the game please do it before continue to read this lines. There will be "Spoilers" because i want to tell about the making process and the general thoughts about the game concept.

General Thoughts:

Instead of like traditional detective games where you find the clues and lead you to the killer, in this game there is no clear killer. So you will have to use your instint to kill the right person... or not.

The fact that there is no clear killer and everyone is suspicius, make you think about what you are about to do. Are you willing to end up with a life of another person just because of your suffering even if you are not sure who the murder is? This is how human behavior works? Thouse things were the first one i wrote on a word document when starting develop the game.

After lot of feedback recieved  from more than 130 players, i decided to add more conflict between characters and made a story ending. It happens when you get certain information from specifics characters in the game.

Making Process:

I choose pixel art mainly because is easier to me, but then my goal was eaven further, was to develop abilities making a pixel perfect game. This was something i wanted to experiment with and i took the opportunity.

Also i wanted to develop a small dialog system, but a difrent one. No needs of pushing a button to continue.  I manage to get the result that i was looking for, with a dialog that has two difrent variants, the first one, when you get close to someone, that person can start talking you and you can stop and listen or you can just ignore at what he/she is telling you, and of course the second one, you can interact with someone and start a conversation, but all of this without taking off the free movement of the player.

Then i realized that as the camera was in pixel perfect view and the pixel size of the sprites was set from the begining, i needed to choose a pixel art font quite small, but readable. Tha´s the font you can find in game. Although, some times it is a bit difficult to understand certain words but they can be figured out just by the context.

Im a music lover and maker, and i made two songs for this videogame but for some reason, the musc in-game was distracting and was geting me out of the experience, so i decided to mute them, just left the cricket sound when the player is walkin throught the Town. This way seems to me more envolving than with the soundtracks.

The time runned out quickly and the final hours where dedicated to make the dialogs. I wish had more time to polish the conversations and add narrative archs and deeper relations between characters.

A special feature i wanted to be in the game from the first moment was the aiming mechanic, when you are aiming to a certain person, he/she feels threatened and start giving you lot of information, but in some cases it happen the oposite, the person just stop givin you details because is afraid, so you need to be carefull with it.

Thanks for reading. Leave a comment if you liked it.

Bye.

PS: To make this game i used Unity Engine, Pyxel Edit, Audacity, and LMMS Studio.