Paradise Killer News

What a blur. The last blog post feels like we did it an aeon ago. We had an amazing month of coverage and showing off the game as part of a number of events. We revealed an exclusive new Lady Love Dies themed trailer during the PC Gaming Show and were also part of the Escapist Indie Show and the Guerrilla Collective. Reactions to the game continue to be amazing. In particular the cool kids on Waypoint Radio were really nice to us in their podcast!

New Trailer: [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Waypoint Radio: [previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’re in the thick of bug fixing now. We’ve been working on the game for about two years now and our driving development practice has been systems, systems, systems. Everything we’ve implemented has either been tied into a behind the scenes system or driven by gameplay systems. I’ve worked on a lot of games full of bespoke content and the problem with these is that when content is unique, each bug fix only fixes that instance. In a systems based game, you will always have unique bug fixes (dialogue, bits of art etc) but when you fix a gameplay system, you fix it once and it propagates out across the whole game. This tends to mean content fixes are minor (one day we did 120 bugs between us) and systems bug fixes add a lot of value across the whole game.



Due to our systems based approach, the game has been playable start to finish for months. This has given us a very clear idea of where polish needs to be added and which bug fixes are the most important. I’m doing a lot of full playthroughs at the moment (no time off when you’re a small team making a big game!) and each new daily build has really tangible improvements. It’s amazing seeing the whole experience come together.



Games like this are the sum of their parts more than other games. Paradise Killer revolves round a non-linear narrative in an open world but just having those two things isn’t enough to make the game come alive. The secondary mechanics (movement upgrades, economy) and tertiary features (customisable music playlists etc) have proven to be incredibly important to the experience as a whole. The game really feels complete now. I’m having a great time doing playthroughs and logging bugs because the game feels right and the bugs are things to fix rather than worry about. Except for the playthrough stopper I found last night…



Thank you to everyone that has supported Paradise Killer, your enthusiasm for this weird thing continues to blow us away. Very soon we have a very exciting dream-come-true announcement that we can’t wait to share. Actually, we might have a few!

Paradise Island. A synthetic rock floating on an ocean in another reality filled with lunatics, psychopaths and a thousand secrets. Each island fails and a new one is born. On a dark night during the 24th Island Sequence, Paradise is killed.



The surreal Paradise Island is home to the Syndicate; immortal worshippers of dead alien gods. The player assumes the role of Lady Love Dies, an exiled investigator brought back to solve the mass murder of the Syndicate’s Council. Using Starlight, her investigation assistant computer, Lady Love Dies will scour Paradise Island for clues in her quest for justice. Will she find a single culprit or unravel a conspiracy centuries in the making?



Paradise Killer is a free form, open world first person exploration investigation game. The player investigates the mass murder of the island’s ruling council as they wish, piecing together clues and forming their own arguments to present in the end game trial. By choosing how to interrogate suspects and finding any evidence in any order, the player will discover not a singular truth but a truth they shape and craft. Find your truth and breathe life back into Paradise.

Developers from Kaizen Game Works are hosting a live gameplay demo stream of their open world murder mystery, Paradise Killer right here on Steam!

You can tune into the livestream on Tuesday June 16 2020, 11am PT / 7pm BST on Paradise Killer's Steam page.

Meet the secretive psychopaths on Paradise Island and learn more about this innovative investigation game.

The developers will be showcasing the stylish detective game and taking questions from the audience. Helps us breathe life back into Paradise!

We'll also be hosting a Paradise Killer AMA in Fellow Traveller's Discord, on Thursday June 18 2020, 11am PT / 7pm BST.

In the meantime, you can:

• [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1160220/Paradise_Killer/]Wishlist us on Steam

[https://twitter.com/KaizenGameWorks]Follow us on Twitter
[https://discord.gg/mVukYFk]Join Fellow Traveller's Discord

What is Paradise? How was it killed? Who is Lady Love Dies? How did we make a completely non-linear murder mystery in an open world?

All great questions and all questions you can ask us! Come and hang out and ask us anything about the game or game development.

The AMA be happening on Thursday June 18 2020, 11am PT / 7pm BST, in Paradise Killer's Publishers Discord.

Join us in the Fellow Traveller Paradise Killer Discord channel: https://discord.gg/mVukYFk

Meet the secretive psychopaths on Paradise Island and learn more about this innovative investigation game.

The developers will be showcasing the stylish detective game and taking questions from the audience. Helps us breathe life back into Paradise!

We'll also be hosting a Paradise Killer Gameplay livestream on Steam, on Tuesday June 16 2020, 11am PT / 7pm BST

In the meantime, you can:

• [https://store.steampowered.com/app/1160220/Paradise_Killer/]Wishlist us on Steam

[https://twitter.com/KaizenGameWorks]Follow us on Twitter
[https://discord.gg/mVukYFk]Join Fellow Traveller's Discord

May has been a crazy month. I mean, they all are but this one has been crazy in some different ways.

We had a very successful LudoNarraCon in April, massive thanks to Fellow Traveller for organising it and making it an amazing event! Lots of people played the demo, checked out our stream videos and talked to us on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who played the demo, I had a huge grin all weekend.



Straight after LNC we got confirmation that we’ll need a new trailer for some exciting events soon so we got straight on with that. When you’re an indie dev you suddenly find you have to learn a lot of skills that you didn’t have before. Phil has done an amazing job on all our trailers and pulled the new one (more on that soon) together very quickly.



We’re launching Paradise Killer later this year and to make sure we hit our dates we set the end of May as our content lock deadline. Content lock means everything that will be in the final game is in the build to a near final standard. Somethings always slip through the net but the goal is to get 99% of our content in. Anything that doesn’t make it in will be minor (missing images, missing SFX etc) but the systems to support them are in and the game is “complete”. Our remaining time will be spent doing small bits of polish and attacking our mammoth bug list until we ship. We’ve been in Paradise for two years now and it feels very strange to be finally getting to the point where we’ll call it final and release it. I’m not ready to say goodbye to Paradise yet. I love the sun bleached concrete and psychopaths on the island.

Anyway, in order to hit content lock we had roughly 1 (one) billion tasks to do. Lots of incredibly small jobs but also some major ones. We restructured all of the end game trials to allow players to make more choices and choose how they will present evidence to the court. The new structure feels loads better and has more drama. Along with the restructure, we also completely redid the trial UI. It has been first pass for months and really didn’t sell the climax of the game. It has all been redone and looks loads better.



Another big change was the gutting of a gameplay system that’s been in the game for ages. We originally had a system where you would be given keywords by suspects that could be input as search terms into a computer. These searches would pull admin records from the Syndicate’s moon database. The system worked fine but felt redundant. There was no player creativity since you had to put in exact search terms to get exact results and you could only get a handful of records. It always seemed weird that you couldn’t just search the whole database. In focus testing, players felt the same. It was an unnecessary step to get evidence and felt half-baked. We had two options; create an entire database of records for a society that has existed for thousands of years (and in the process, confuse the player with way too much information) or pull the system out.

I’m a big fan of slightly unnecessary friction in games. I like games that have rough edges with systems that aren’t streamlined. It creates flavour. However, in this case the answer was to streamline the experience and rip it out. The evidence the player would get from the moon database is still in game but we have strengthened a number of suspect interactions and crime scenes by placing the evidence directly in context rather than putting in an unnecessary step to acquire it. It also means I haven’t had to write a trillion database entries that players would never read (and even if they did read, would muddy the waters around what is evidence and what isn’t evidence). It feels much better and I’m particularly happy with one change that made an area of the game much more important and tells a nice story about someone’s movements.



We also did final dressing on loads of areas. A very unique and secret area has existed as a white box (a term that means it didn’t have any real art in it, just blank cubes to designate the playable space) for about 18 months got final dressing and looks really cool. We also got a new prop in that helps tell the player how the island works. A haulage trolley based on the ones used in Tsukiji fish market are now dotted around the island and show how workers in the Agri Fields and Deep Factory transport their cargo around the island.



And now we dive into battle with the bugs! Catch you next month!