The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog/Development

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Development process

“	"Right, so. From start to finish: at the very beginning it was a group of maybe five to ten of us, kinda forming the story, figuring out exactly what we wanted, and then as you get further in it becomes more of an actual game. So then you get QA involved, you get marketing involved, you get production involved, and it just becomes it massive team effort. So you watch, and you’re like, “oh, its a social media bit”, but no, it was a real production that a lot of people put a lot of work into. So I kinda pitched a few different genres and a few ideas, like, “oh maybe we could do this, maybe we could do that”, and we tried to figure out like, “what would be kinda the most viral, I guess, for April Fools’ Day, what would get people excited and surprised.” And we’re like, we’ve not done a visual novel: a murder mystery is just fun, you can do a lot with that, especially playing around with different characters, and the idea of murdering our mascot is definitely a surprise, so we thought that would just be the best route overall for our skillset, for the characters, and just for the community."	„
— Executive producer Katie Chrzanowski^[1]

According to the game's executive producer Katie Chrzanowski, the team took inspiration from games like Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, and studied Victorian era murder mystery parties for further insight into their proposed visual novel concept. Additionally, lead programmer Greg Batha drew inspiration from Sonic the Hedgehog 2's Special Stage when designing the game's isometric bonus round.^[1]

Chrzanowski mentions that a strong focus was paid to the game's characters, wanting to ensure the their murder mystery roles fit said characters well. In particular, Espio the Chameleon was originally intended to play the role of a doctor, but the team found that the character was more fun as a poet instead.^[1]