By Miguel Moran, Social Media Manager

When we brought The Darkside Detective to new platforms back in April, we wanted to do something fun and/or weird to announce the launch and get people excited.

So, why not make a playable teaser – except you play it on Twitter?

A lot of the initial heavy lifting on this idea came from me (me = the Social Media Manager at Akupara Games, Miguel!) as I was brainstorming unique ways to share the news of the ports, but we also worked really closely with the actual lead artist and lead writer from the development team for The Darkside Detective, Paul Conway and Dave McCabe respectively.

This is how it worked – every day for about two weeks, there would be a 2-part tweet thread on the official Twitter for The Darkside Detective. On day 1, there would be a visual made to look like a screenshot from the game accompanied with some descriptive flavor text to set the scene for what was going on. The 2nd tweet would be a poll with two options – Twitter followers had a day to cast their vote, and the post on day 2 would be a simple text post confirming what the winning choice was.

And so the pattern continued, with a Visual Update day and a Winner Announcement day, until the Twitter adventure wrapped up on April 7th. Even though the whole thing was guided by fan-chosen routes, we still had to do a pretty beefy amount of prep-work before this whole thing kicked off. We wrote out vague ideas for where the story could head depending on each branching decision path, leading to a super length branching tree of story beats that we could prep ourselves for. This was mostly a life-saver when it came to the art for each update.

Everything in this image from the 2nd part of the Twitter adventure, for example, is pretty modular. Paul Conway prepped a bunch of individual character sprites, backgrounds, item sprites, text-boxes, and text-window-character-portraits, and organized them all into one massive Photoshop file. With that, I was able to quickly prep images for each potential update, and then Dave McCabe could swoop in and add some classic Darkside Detective dialogue to the text box in each image.

Besides the art and dialogue, another way I wanted to try and make the Twitter adventure emulate the actual game was through an inventory system. In The Darkside Detective, you collect items in each case that you can combine or use to solve puzzles and progress the story. At certain points in the Twitter adventure, your choices would lead to someone giving you an item – and the items would come into play a couple times during the interactive adventure to help you progress. There were multiple items planned and prepped based on the choices that got selected, so there are actually a couple of items we planned for that never saw the light of day!

Once the whole thing wrapped up, it ended on a teaser that brought fans to our big announcement – The Darkside Detective being released on brand new consoles, just a week before the release of the sequel, The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark.

We’ve got plenty of other fun stuff cooking on our socials, so check us out on Twitter if you want to get involved or learn more about our games!