Mugshot Gumshoe
ABOUT
Mugshot Gumshoe is an art project / game created by Mike Stuttman and the team at Lascivious Grin Productions. It is built with JavaScript libraries P5JS and P5Play.
Mugshot sets include original art, as well as photographs and illustrations culled from Public Domain sources including Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag which was created in 1928 and released in the public domain in 2024. Crime synopses written with the assistance of chatGPT. Suspect names generated by randomly merging publicly available pet name and color name databases.
Original art and Mugshot Gumshoe game IP ©2023 Mike Stuttman.
HOW TO PLAY
Press PLAY GAME button to start the game
Drag Mugshots from the SUSPECT side (left) of the screen onto the BUSTED grid.
Fill grid with Suspects.
Use PRESS TO ARREST Button to record an ATTEMPT
Green Light - Suspect did the deed; leave mugshot in place.
Yellow Light - Suspect is guilty, but not in that role; move mugshot to different role on the BUSTED grid.
Red Light - You got the wrong person; replace mugshot with another suspect.
When the BUSTED grid is all Green Lights you WIN. Like golf, with Mugshot Gumshoe, winning with fewer ATTEMPTS is best.
Press NEW CRIME button to start a new game and to load a new set of mugshots.
Comments
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Understanding that this turned into an art project, are the numeric answers supposed to be visible in the targets so that you get the right answers first time, every time?
Doh! I left those in as a debugging cheat. No one else ever noticed. Thank you for playing game and giving it a good look.
The UI was simple and easy to understand. That art was all very nice.
Since the flavor text was one of the big parts of the game, it would have been nice to be able to bring back the description of the crimes. Once I interacted with the screen, the crime description went away, and I couldn't find a way to read it again.
At first I thought there would be some way to deduce who the criminals are, but I quickly realized that was not how the game was setup. Adding some layer of deduction would make the gameplay more engaging. I know you said this is also an art project, so maybe gameplay was not the primary goal.
Thank you so much for the great feedback! The art, randomness and chance to play around/learn coding is what gets me diving into these things. Being exposed to the games in the jam and on itch has been illuminating and inspiring and given me lots to ponder for the next update.
No, the game is very silly/easy to play. I started the project as away to interactively display my comic art in a "polaroid" picture format... than I got lost in creating an image/wordle/puzzle thing and sourced a bunch of public domain image sources for more mugshot sets. So... it's more art project than game.
While it is beyond my ability/availability, I could see adding complexity by creating criminal biographies and actually linking them to crimes and roles. A big aspiration would be for other comic/visual artists to create mugshot sets.
Thank you for giving it a try!
Mike S.
Nice game with very cool art. I feel like I did not 100% understand it though. Can I identify who did the crime from the text?