An update

I have been working on a few art assets (mostly organizing what I already have) these past weeks, including "subkits" for the modular mansion environment prefabs and filling out placeholder structures with actual walls.
I have also been refining the game manager's logic to better handle edge cases, such as when all players die or when the murderer leaves the game.

Dish cabinet

Dish cabinet in Unity

The dish cabinet is one of the larger and more complex pieces of furniture in this game. It has a variety of doors and cabinets to find or hide items inside.
Here's my approach for designing furniture in this game:

• Style: The geometric style across furniture should be pretty consistent. All furniture shares the same texture atlas, so the continuity between carved details in the wood, color of the wood, and style of the interactable handles is pretty easy to maintain across all furniture.
• Set pieces: Some rooms have unique pieces of furniture, usually one or two large obstacles or containers. This dish cabinet is large and uniquely appears in the dining room. Sometimes furniture appears many times in many different rooms. These are usually small, for example a table or lamp. 
• Compartment choice: Considering the dining room doesn't have many containers (it's mostly a table and chairs), this cabinet makes up for that by having quite a few individual compartments. There are both doors and drawers in the cabinet. The glass on the upper section means items are not truly "hidden" on the shelves, while the drawer's contents are secret.
• Locks and glass accessibility: Ideally, any compartment can be locked closed, and glass can be broken using a sturdy tool. This means the glass shelves would be a poor location for hiding an item.
• Surface height: Reaching items above the player's head or below the player's hips takes more time than objects at a comfortable arm-level. Items in the far back of the lower compartments are more hidden and take more time to retrieve (by crouching down), but take more time to hide. Items on the higher glass shelves or on top of the entire cabinet are a bit quicker to hide (by throwing items), but are very visible. Reaching items hidden at the highest points requires the use of a long instrument or a chair to stand on.
• -Hidden compartments: I won't tell you where these are (if they even exist...), but I also consider potential secret compartments on a piece of furniture. Large areas or volumes of seemingly "solid" wood can house secret compartments of varying sizes. The furniture's bulk (or interactable mechanisms like drawers) can also cover up compartments in the surrounding environment.

Old crowdfunding campaign

Screenshot of indiegogo page

A couple weeks ago I launched an indiegogo campaign for Murder at Crane Castle, but I have decided to end it early. I realize now that crowdfunding isn't a pure marketing tool to get my game out there. Instead, the idea is to create buzz about the game first, then launch the campaign as a way for supporters to show interest and earn neat perks.
The issue still stands that I can't yet afford an Vive, Rift CV1, or third-party tracked motion controllers. But that's okay-- I'll keep targeting mono displays and DK2 (also CV1) + xbox controller "platforms" and see where this game goes.
Here are some of the blurbs about the game that I pulled from the indiegogo campaign site:

"Murder at Crane Castle is a multiplayer murder-mystery game in which one player is secretly a murderer, and the other players try to identify the murderer through a set of deadly and challenging puzzles. The game is developed with VR in mind; immersive, detailed environments conceal a myriad of clues for the player to inspect up close."...

..."everything you see in the video was made by me: I made the character models, animated the characters (and configured the inverse kinematic body for head-tracked HMDs), modeled the environment, and wrote all the code"....

• The player joins a dinner party with up to five other characters
• One player, perhaps you, is secretly selected as the "murderer"
• As the murderer, your job is to kill all the other players without getting caught!
• Information is your weapon as you deduce the identity of the murderer; solve puzzles, search for clues, and interrogate other players to win the game!
• Find secret passages to quickly surprise or escape your opponents
• Use items you find to craft unique weapons
• Includes proximity-based voice chat and public matchmaking

..."Murder at Crane Castle is first and foremost aimed at PCs using VR head-mounted displays such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and more. Virtual reality adds a lot to the murder mystery experience. You'll have to search up, down, left and right for clues hidden in the environment of Crane Castle-- not to mention watching over your shoulder for the murderer."
...."My goal is to have Crane Castle be not just one of the best multiplayer experiences for VR, but also be cross-platform compatible on all major VR devices. I want players using the Oculus Rift and an Xbox controller to have a lot of fun, as well as player using the HTC Vive and its motion controllers. When Oculus touch comes out, I want to support that, too. Of course, the game also works with "mono"/regular non-vr displays as well... but the main feature of the game is multiplatform VR support, and not regular display support "adapted" to VR."
..."Right now, though, I've only been developing for my Rift Development Kit 2, which doesn't have any of the new features such as motion controls, integrated headphones, or room-scale tracking that the new consumer displays will provide. "

Announcing "15 Weeks" of summer blog updates

From May 9 through August 22 I plan on posting updates at least once a week about the development of Murder at Crane Castle, a multiplayer and virtual reality video game. I've been working on Crane Castle (for short) for about two years in my spare time. This summer I will be dedicating a significantly large and sequential stretch of time to this project, and by the end of the summer I expect to have a working beta or demo version of the game.
The purpose of this blog is to:

• Showcase content for Murder at Crane Castle for those maybe interested in playing
• Document my progress for my own motivation's sake
• Document my thougs and methods for feedback and critique from other developers
• A look inside one developer's mind and methods for those maybe interested in game dev

The kind of content you'll likely read here:

• My design methods and philosophies, however strange they probably are
• New content multimedia like screenshots, renderings, videos, or recordings
• Playtesting results and practices
• My workflow for different kinds of assets
• Some Murder at Crane Castle-specific stuff, like launch- or beta-related dates and events

How you (yes, you!) can interact with myself or the Crane Castle game:

• Posting questions in the comment section of any post (which I always read, trust me)
• Posting feedback in the comments section
• Voting on feedback polls in the sidebar
• Emailing me at jddtypety@gmail.com

This weekend, I'm still getting some logistical stuff in order for this summer, such as my work schedule and a week-by-week calendar. I'm thinking that will be the topic of the second post.

First sidebar poll: Where did you hear about this blog?