Happy New Year!

Matt from Whitepot Studios here with a Wednesday update, lovingly dubbed ‘Whitepot Wednesday’.

First of all, we’d like to thank you all for your patience and support over the last year, it means a lot to us all. We’ve been fairly quiet these past few months and we want to change that, so we’re starting a monthly blog to keep all of you up to date with where we’re at and what we’re up to in the studio.

So, a quick recap of Whitepot’s past year:

• we moved into the Pixel Mill
• prototyped six games in six weeks
• got UK games funding for Murder At Malone Manor (MaMM)
• went to EGX, EGX Rezzed, GamesCom, the Games Finance Market, and more
• and we added two new members to the team, Robbie and Amy.

We wanted to give you all a quick insight into how development on Murder at Malone Manor is going, so we’re spotlighting a game feature we’ve been working on the past month. This month’s focus is the Manor Generation.

Manor Generation

We want people to play a lot of games of MaMM, but we don’t want them to get bored going to the same places, through the same rooms, searching the same furniture over and over again.

Luckily there’s a solution – procedural generation! We’re not doing anything too complicated but it’ll be enough to give some much-needed variation to the manor layouts while keeping the rooms curated and fun/interesting to play in. Basically, we have a set of predefined rooms with certain connection points (doors). We start off from the dining room and branch out from there, picking rooms that can fit with what’s already down until we’ve filled all the available room slots and we’ve got a brand new manor ready for a unique murder mystery experience.

– Adam

On the art side of things, we are designing each room individually to give a more polished and distinct look to the manor. We didn’t want each room to feel generic and random in its design so we’ve created objects unique to each room with a minimal crossover between rooms.

Baron Malone is a very particular about what he places in his house and we want that to be apparent in the room designs. As well as that each room will have a second layout design to allow for more variation in gameplay.

– Matt

Announcements

As well as MaMM we’ve been working on a 2D Pixel Art Pattern Memory Puzzler game called Star Gazing. This game is one of the six games in six weeks we developed back in the summer, the game has been chosen to be further developed as part of a funding scheme by NI Screen.

The aim of the game is to collect constellations by repeating the pattern shown in the starry sky, once you do that you unlock the constellation in your “Starbook”. It’s so astronomically relaxing that you can even read up on the history and the stars that make up the constellations!

Whitepot Recommendations

Here’s what we’ve been reading, watching, listening to and playing the past month.

• Adam: “I’ve been playing destiny 2, listening to the destiny 2 soundtrack, watching the destiny 2 cutscenes and reading the destiny 2 lore”
• Vicky: “Destiny 2 and Abba and I’ve started the witcher on Netflix”
• Matt: I’ve been playing Spyro, watching Booksmart, listening to ABBA.
• Amy: “I’ve been reading “This Golden Fleece” by Esther Rutter which is a really enjoyable non-fiction book, and playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 (also v good)”
• Robbie: “Hello I’ve been reading Design as Art by Bruno Munari, Been listening to Joji, and finished watching Mr. Robot”

We’ll be back next month with another update.

Bye for now,

Matt