This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 13, March 2025

One year ago, solo developer and ICG community member CJ Messam was six months in on a project that would consume all of 2024 and early 2025 for him.

That project is Detect-Dev, a game that was created for Chicaghoul 2023 and is now very close to release.

In case you missed the last interview, Detect-Dev is a sci-fi narrative mystery game with themes of corporate corruption. The two main characters — Dev, a cocky detective straight out of the academy and AV1NA, his wisecracking, lie-detecting robot sidekick — use three kinds of logic puzzles to solve a murder at an animation studio.

Over the last 12 months, Messam has spent a large portion of his development time writing, something that he didn’t think would be the case when he set out on this project. In fact, he was most concerned about the coding and UI.

“I was nervous whether I would be able to create the game I had in my mind and have it be fun, so I focused a lot of my early couple of months on that [the engineering],” he said.

By contrast, he thought the writing would be easy, saying:

“I know the story, I know how I want it to end. I know the characters, I made them. But it took so long to get right because I would write a scene and then read it the next day and say, ‘Oh, this is garbage, mama.’”

The narrative of Detect-Dev, like in many murder mysteries, is central to the experience. However, its particulars haven’t always been set in stone. Over the past year, Messam was part of one of the constant layoffs in the games industry, something that both dimmed his enthusiasm for personal development and changed the ending of his game.

“Being laid off from my original job heavily influenced how I wrote the ending of Detect-Dev. Before, it was a very clean-cut ending where you solved everything. Now, the ending says that even if you have all the answers, you may not have all of the power to fix everything and make the change you thought would be really easy,” he said.

The ending isn’t the only thing influenced by Messam’s time in the games industry. He said that working at a big corporation can make bright and happy people become disillusioned and cause others to compromise their morals for the sake of getting ahead.

“It’s inspired by a lot of the jobs that I’ve worked,” he said. “I’ve seen people either change or sell out for more financial opportunities or fame. And that’s a very big theme within Detect-Dev.”

Messam wants the players of his game to walk away feeling like they aren’t crazy for disliking those co-workers that have allowed possible compensation or recognition from superiors to stop them from going after what they really want.

“There are people in my life that I want to play this game. I almost made the game for them,” he said. “I want them to play it and be like, ‘I do let people manipulate me, I should not let that happen.’”

He also feels that personal stories, ones like Citizen Sleeper (Jump Over the Age, 2022), have a kind of intentionality that can make fantastic situations seem real and draw in players in a way corporate games can’t.

“You’ve got to put yourself into it [your games],” he said. “If you don’t, you get corporate slop where they [the creators] were looking at a spreadsheet of data and saying, ‘We have to have this because gamers like this,’ as opposed to having a story they want other people to experience.”

That personal link, coupled with his personal influences — Danganronpa (Spike Chunsoft), Return of the Obra Dinn (Lucas Pope, 2018), and many other point-and-click mystery games — led to the puzzle styles in Detect-Dev.

Early in development, the portion of the core gameplay loop that got the most attention was Dev’s, which takes the form of a Wordle-style puzzle that allows him to step into the minds of his suspects. Messam chose this system as a way to distance his project from the dialogue-heavy progression of other mystery games.

“In old adventure games, the gameplay is just kind of pressing the continue button, or another way many games will do it is an ‘I Spy’ kind of thing,” Messam said. “I didn’t really ever feel like that was super engaging, especially when you’re trying to create a mystery game where the goal is to make the player feel smart.”

AV1NA’s deduction system was developed with the same framework but takes the form of heavily obscured pictures and a game similar to Scrabble, where all the player is given is a bank of letters and a hint.

Once the player has found all the possible information on a particular suspect, they can speak with AV1NA and fill in the blanks, both figuratively and literally. This is the final style of logic puzzle in Detect-Dev, and the only one that was complete at Chicaghoul.

These puzzles have been heavily tested, at Chicaghoul and M+DEV and by Messam’s fiancé, who is both not a gamer and very good at Wordle, according to him.

“He [my fiancé] would solve all my puzzles super-fast and say that they were easy, but then I brought the game to M+DEV, and I had a lot of folks tell me, ‘This is challenging,’” Messam said.

Those players would ask for hints. Messam is happy to provide them, because to him, experiencing the ending of the story is the most important part of the experience. He wants the puzzles to be difficult so that the player feels challenged, but not so much that they can’t finish the game.

In Detect-Dev, there’s always a chance to redo the puzzles and make progress if you fail.

At his day job, Messam is working on a game called Wyld Land, which he describes as an MMO bullet hell roguelite, and whose demo is available to play right now. In terms of his personal development work, he’s already looking toward the next project, which has elements of “Saw,” escape rooms, and the Danganronpa series.

“I’m trying to make these smaller games that have identifying features of the game I want to make in 10 years, which needs a bunch of systems, but I’m not going to spend 10 years working on a game. I want to release games in the meantime that iterate on those systems,” he said.

Detect-Dev’s demo is out on Steam now, full release coming soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220630/DetectDev_Demo/