Conscience is a free noir detective mystery game where you play as a private investigator hired to uncover the truth behind Jack Beckham's death. Initially ruled as a suicide, Jack’s father believes otherwise and hires you to search Jack’s apartment for clues to reveal what really happened.
Conscience was initially intended to be my first attempt at a full game, one that wasn't a prototype nor a game jam. At first I thought I could get it completed in 2 months, but as is tradition in game development it took much longer.
Eventually the goalpost shifted towards treating Conscience as a low-stakes short practice game. Having heard stories from many developers spent years making their magnum opus only for it to flop, I wanted to avoid this.
So the goal changed to making the smallest game I could be proud of and releasing it on steam before the end of 2025. And most importantly, not charging for the game.
This would allowed to learn all everything it takes to complete and release a game on Steam, without the pressure of living up to a price tag. In my mind, releasing Conscience for free lowered the stakes and helped me focus on finishing the game.
For Conscience I had decided very early on that I wanted the game to have a unique visual style. I didn't know if the style would be good, but I knew I wanted it to be unique.
Too often I see a game and am immediately put off by it's generic visual, especially with "Unreal Engine Look".
So for Conscience I wanted to merge 3 different styles together:
It took many tutorials and lot's of experimentation to eventually find a style I was happy with. Despite the style not looking perfect, it achieves my goal of looking unique and it also allows me to a variety of different assets together due to the post processing harmonising all assets into the same style.
One of the hardest parts of making Conscience wasn't coming up with the puzzles or the mysteries, it was trying to reverse engineer a story that could be solved by a player.
You see it's all well and easy to write a story of how someone was murdered. But taking into account that you need to account for:
This is when I realised that I am not a writer. I love creating puzzles and making games, but having to write a story without any loop holes that allows the puzzles to remain is a difficult skill to master.
But after many weeks of hitting my head against the wall, the story and puzzles were all set-up without any known loopholes.
When releasing Conscience I had expected it to fly under the radar. Knowing that dozens of games are released on steam everyday, I assumed max 50 people would play my game.
To my surprise, after two weeks of silence from Steam regarding the games performance and while on a deserved holiday, I decided to check my Steam store. I was pleasantly surprised to find 11 reviews all of which were positive and glowing, one person even made a YouTube play-through.
The following months the game seemed to snowball, garnering more and more players and reviews. I assume this is mostly due to the game being free, but I also hope it's an indication of it's quality.
Currently as of writing Conscience now has had:
Reading the reviews can be nerve-racking but overall I agree with nearly everyone. Many talk about the games potential and desire to see more levels and an expanded game. While others mention the game being a bit easy, which I also agree with.
Now considering I didn't expect even 100 people to play Conscience, I was extremely shocked by it's reception.
It's given me much more encouragement and desire to keep improving as a developer, especially seeing the response for a game that I personally felt was quite rushed.
But overall I'm extremely happy, and excited to make my next commerical release... which next time won't be free.