Building Casefile: Sixty Seconds — From Murder-Mystery Prototype to Launch Sprint
I’ve been spending a lot of my development time lately on a new Vasken Interactive Studios project called Casefile: Sixty Seconds, and it’s finally starting to feel less like a prototype and more like an actual game.
The basic idea is a procedural mystery game built around a simple loop:
Briefing → Investigation → Accusation → Results
Players examine suspects and evidence, look for contradictions, and decide who is responsible. The goal was to make cases short enough to play in a few minutes without turning the deduction itself into guesswork.
One of the biggest development challenges has been procedural generation. Randomizing names, suspects, evidence, motives, and relationships is easy enough. Randomizing them while still producing a case that is logically solvable is another matter entirely.
So the generator now performs structural validation before a case reaches the player. I recently ran 1,000 generated-case tests, and all 1,000 passed validation. That was one of those development milestones that doesn’t look flashy in a screenshot, but it felt pretty damn good.
The current build includes:
Three handcrafted Pinecrest cases alongside procedural Dispatch cases
Six difficulty levels, from Rookie through Black File
XP, streaks, case archives, personal scores, and Clue Tokens
Daily Case and leaderboard-oriented competition systems
A Case Rush mode where the clock actually becomes part of the pressure
A Supply Desk with a small launch-focused purchase catalog rather than a giant monetization ladder
A progression system that lets players unlock higher difficulty tiers through play, with an optional Investigator Access Pack
The monetization philosophy has been another interesting design problem. I don’t want the game built around constantly interrupting the player or selling them the answer. The current plan is limited to optional rewarded ads, controlled interstitials between cases, Remove Ads, a small Clue Token pack, and the $9.99 Investigator Access Pack.
Most of the core game systems are now working. The remaining launch work is the less glamorous but absolutely necessary stuff: production art, tutorial polish, audio and feedback, mobile layout cleanup, Android packaging, Google Play Billing, leaderboards, privacy/compliance work, and final QA.
That means I’m currently in the dangerous stage of development where the game is functional enough to make you think, “I’m almost done,” while the launch checklist quietly laughs at you from the corner.
Still, seeing the investigation loop, procedural generation, progression, scoring, and case systems finally working together has been a great milestone.
Casefile: Sixty Seconds started as a fairly small idea: three suspects, a handful of clues, one contradiction, make the accusation.
It has turned into a considerably deeper system than I originally expected.
And apparently I have not yet learned my lesson about the phrase “This should be a simple app.”
— Wendell Wilhelm
Founder, Vasken Interactive Studios LLC