Behind The Scenes of Suspectives
What if you committed a crime? And what if real facts about yourself were used to convict you of that crime?? (Editor’s note: I’m being told that this is how all convictions are supposed to work… interesting…)
Well that’s what happens in Suspectives, a new game coming to The Jackbox Party Pack 11 this fall! Suspectives is our latest social deduction game where everyone is a doggy detective but one of those doggy detectives is actually the criminal! Round by round, a different real fact will be revealed about whomever committed the crime. The other detectives try to narrow down their suspect, while the criminal tries to blend in! Who knew your love of boy bands would come back to bite you??
We recently spoke to the Suspectives team to learn more about what went into making a social deduction game, challenges they faced in production, and the pratfalls of knowing your coworkers a little too well…
Wishlist Party Pack 11 now so you don’t miss when Suspectives drops later this fall!
Please introduce yourself and your role on Suspectives.
I'm Tim Sniffen, the director of Suspectives! Or rather, the Suspector.
Hi! I’m Ryan McGill, jackbox.tv engineer for Suspectives in The Jackbox Party Pack 11.
Hello! I’m Liz Anderson, writer and editorial lead for Suspectives!
Howdy! I’m Lev Cantoral, lead artist on Suspectives!
How did you come up with the idea for Suspectives?
The core idea behind Suspectives, "survey answers become evidence", had been floating around the Jackbox halls for the last year or so. But this year it jelled together in a way that had people excited to build out the mechanic into a complete game. - Tim
What makes the Suspectives dev team so special?
I’m completely impressed with our team’s flexibility. A different pairing of engineers got this game off the ground in the beginning, then swapped with a team that polished the excellent foundation they left. Over that entire time, I never did discover the one team member who was tasked to secretly work against us while trying to avoid suspicion! Isn’t that right, Tim? - Ryan
This was my first outing as an art lead on a game, and I couldn’t have asked for a better team to learn the ropes with. Everyone on it is such a master of their craft. I immediately felt I was in great hands with Tim as director. Tim was actually one of the very first people I worked with as a contractor at Jackbox back in 2021 when I made the trailer for Party Pack 8, so we have a great rapport. - Lev
What was one challenge you had to overcome during production?
An initial challenge was "what if people simply lie on the surveys?" This led to our in-game "lie detector" where you have a chance to choose a topic and potentially see what a player answered. If it's not in line with what you know about them, or different than what they said during an interrogation… you might just be looking at a criminal. - Tim
A key part of the game loop for Suspectives is the survey of personal information players take at the beginning. These may look simple on the surface, but it actually took us a while to really hone in on what a good survey question looks like. They must:
- Be easy to answer quickly
- Be broad enough to not to give anyone away
- Be narrow enough to generate strong opinions
- Generate immediately useful information
- Be entertaining
That’s a lot! Our team went through around three rounds of full, top-down overhauls of our content pool. During those overhauls we had to reject somewhere around ⅔ of all our written content! What remains in-game is the best of the best. That effort was worth it, I think, because our shipped game is more consistent, more juicy, and ultimately more fun. -Liz
What were you inspired by while designing the look and music for Suspectives?
There's a real seventies cop show (à la Columbo) and noir feeling about the look, music and dialogue of the game. For a moment like questioning other players, we wanted to keep it light and fun to dig into, and that approach felt like a good match for this mechanic. And our Audio Lead Elise Wattman is a wildly talented jazz musician who was able to coordinate musicians and compose-improvise the smokey jazzy soundtrack. - Tim
The core components of the look of Suspectives are classic film noir mixed with the more gritty 70s vibes of Columbo, all wrapped in a package of cartoon dogs. - Lev
What is your favorite part of Suspectives?
I love the interrogations and how every player can weigh in. There's sometimes a great moment where the subject will slip, maybe say something sketchy and suddenly everyone is hitting their "deeply suspicious" emoji… you can feel the net closing in on them, true crime style!
As you fill out the surveys at the beginning of the game, you’ll see a montage of moody city-scapes. These are all inspired by real-life locations around Chicago where Jackbox is headquartered. In many cases, I took photos of actual street corners around me and used those as direct reference. The vast majority of them were then painted by Charlie Bickett, who I must sing the praises of. So much artistry and care went into each one. They’re a brief moment of the game, but I think they do a great deal in setting the mood and tone. - Lev
Any fun glitches or unexpected gameplay moments that happened during production and testing?
We’ve all seen the prompts so many times, I know so much about my co-workers, that it began to be impossible to accurately playtest because we each KNEW when someone was lying about knowing about the stock market or whatever. Oh, you suddenly know about IPOs now?? SURE. -Liz
So at one point we decided to make the avatars blink, but while that was in the process of being hooked up (connecting the art in the game to the actual code that makes the art do things), there was a time where we had avatars with no eyes, which was somewhat horrifying. - Lev
What has been your favorite memory of making Suspectives?
The first day the team playtested with emoji reactions in, everyone went wild spamming them to see the faces squint and jump. Seeing something I had just animated the day before be so immediately engaged with was so fun. - Lev
As director I was worried that taking the surveys at the top of the game would feel slow-going. But when Lev's Chicago-inspired artwork was in, Elise's music was playing, and Liz's easy-weird-interesting survey questions were in the system, that worry went up in smoke. All those elements added up to such a fun way to get pulled into the world of the game. More than once we've said "I could stay in this moment forever!" (Seriously: run the game, leave the survey screen up, stare out the window towards that devil-may-care moon over the city skyline, and drink in the vibes.) - Tim
Suspectives is coming to Party Pack 11 on October 23rd. Wishlist now on Steam and Xbox!
