Council of Fate - OpenSuspect Devlog #2

Greetings all, and welcome to the second Devlog, written by none other than yours truly, Moxvallix.

Recently, I posted Devlog #1, discussing the beginnings of our project, what our project aims to be, and the different teams that were formed to tackle various elements of the game's design. Recently, the team leaders met to discuss important topics about the design of the game, which is why I have decided to make a second Devlog, for those who want to stay updated. In the future, these Devlogs are to be handled by the Branding team, and will come out most likely on a weekly basis, and will be cross-posted to our subreddit, r/OpenSuspect.

The Council of Elders has spoken
NiceMicro, Monban, Slaughter, Gobbel and yours truly were at attendance of this weeks leader meeting. First on the agenda was the design plan of the lobby; we are designing the lobby first, as it is a good first milestone to work towards, and allows the game development team to work on a design plan, whilst the other teams work on the lobby. We decided, based on a survey conducted by Gobbel, that the lobby for the first map, which is to be of the theme "1960s Berlin Spy", would be set on a train, which would pull up to the map as the game would start. This cutscene of the train pulling in to the map would be where the player roles would be revealed.

We then discussed the roadmap for the project. Some areas discussed in the roadmap were getting a match making system working, what various roles could we have, and how we could innovate on the task system that is used in Among Us. An important goal is that we remain separate from Among Us, making sure that we innovate, rather than clone. One particular aspect we considered was how we could reinvent the death system prevalent across the social deduction genre, so it would not be boring. We considered alternative goals for the impostors, that did not involve killing. Many of these features will be cemented in the upcoming design document, which will be free for the community to access.

On the art side of things, it was suggested that the map be set in a seaside town in Germany, as it could be quite pretty to design. The art team is yet to decide the map style. In fact, the art team will be having a public vote for the design of the characters, which will effect the style of the rest of the game. Make sure to check r/OpenSuspect in the next day or two, and keep your eyes out for a link to the survey!

The project plans to move to NextCloud for all it's productivity benefits. Monban has kindly set up hosting, and migration will begin shortly. Matrix will still be our primary chat platform. Also, Monban has registered opensuspect.com, which is to be our official domain name.

We finished the meeting discussing finances, a boring and confusing subject, no doubt. As further down the line we plan to host a main server for the game, we will need to consider funding for said server, which may include setting up a Patreon, for people that wanted to support the project. OpenSuspect is under the GNU GPLv3 license, and will always be free, Patreon would be an optional donation.

That is all for the Devlog today, make sure to stick around, as we are making progress. If you would like to become an alpha tester, make sure you join the subreddit, and we'll keep you up to date when a pre-release is ready to test. Otherwise, check out NiceMicro's new video on the project: