All Animals Lie — Dev Log | Blue Rain Studio

A murder on a farm, and you are the fox they sent to look into it. You type your own questions, the suspects answer, and at the end of each day you decide who did not do it.GenreDetective / Narrative PuzzlePlatformPC · SteamPlayersSingle-playerStatusIn DevelopmentThe game never tells you what to believe.In most detective games you work through a list. The questions are written in advance, you try them in order, and you can finish a conversation without ever having understood it. Exhausting the options is enough. Solving quietly turns into consuming.Here there is no list. You think of the question yourself, type it, and live with the answer you get. The only way to catch an animal in a lie is to put what it said yesterday next to what it is saying now, in your own head. Nobody draws that line for you.The suspects answer in their own voices, but nothing they know is improvised. What each one saw, where it was, and what it is keeping to itself are written down before you ever speak to it. The performance is generated; the facts are not. That is the whole trick. You can be lied to, but never misled by accident.Each day ends with a decision, and it is the opposite of an accusation: you name the one you are certain did not do it. Then you decide whether to tell them. Saying it out loud costs you something, because showing your hand on a farm this small is never free.4 entries · newest first6 October 2026 Niko has a mouth that can lie The second animal is modelled and his face is rigged for speech. He can now mouth any word in the language, which is awkward, because nobody has told him anything yet. Niko is the young pig in the dungarees, and the first animal after Reynard to go the whole way: sculpted, modelled and rigged in Blender, then set up so that Unreal will take him without an argument. One character proves the route exists. The rest of the cast is now repetition, which is a considerably nicer problem than the one we had before him. The face is the part that mattered. These animals talk freely, in their own voices, so a head that cannot shape a sound is a head that cannot be in this game. Niko’s is rigged for visemes: the mouth positions speech is built out of, so lip movement can be driven from the audio instead of animated by hand for lines nobody has written yet. The open-mouthed frame is the rig doing its job. It is not an expression of surprise, though it does a convincing impression of a pig who has just been asked where he was on Tuesday. These are Blender renders rather than the game. A couple are lit against a backdrop to read the model on its own, the rest sit in a dressed scene at the end of the day. So they show how he is meant to look, which is not the same promise as how he looks while you are leaning on him. That comes later, and it will be less flattering. Nothing here is final and he cannot say a word yet. For now he stands there looking like he knows something, which, to be fair to him, is the entire job description. Blender render The viseme rig, caught mid-shape. Not guilt. Allegedly. Blender render The same head, turned. Still not talking. Blender render Standing in the yard, late in the day, for no stated reason. Blender render The farm at the hour the light goes. Blender render The mud took longer than the face. We would like that on the record. Blender render The record. Six states, numbered, because a farm does not stay clean and neither does anyone standing on it. ArtBlender1 October 2026 Reynard is standing up The detective is in the engine now, walking the farm, wearing the coat, with the first interface keys sitting in the corner. Up to this point the fox existed as drawings. He is now a model in the build: he stands in the yard, the coat moves with him, and the camera can look at him from the side without the illusion falling apart. Nothing about the interrogation works yet. This is the character arriving, not the game. The two portraits are lit for promotion rather than play, closer to a poster than to anything you will see while questioning someone. The other two are the game as it actually runs, which is why the interface keys are still sitting in the bottom corner. We left them in. A dev log that only shows the parts already polished is advertising. The farm around him is blocked out and little more. Shapes are in place so the lighting and the camera have something to argue with; the detail that the art direction calls for lives in the close-up, and the close-up has not been built yet. In engine Reynard, lit for promotional use. In engine The same model without the prop. In engine Running build. The interface keys in the corner are not final. In engine The barn, blocked out. Detail comes later, and up close. ArtEngine20 September 2026 Ten animals, and one of them is lying The cast got a concept pass: a rooster, a goat, a horse, a cow, two pigs, a hen, a goose, a hound and the fox who has to sort them out. Every one of these sheets was generated with an AI image model, and each is labelled as such above. We are saying it plainly for a reason: this is a game with AI-driven characters, pitched to an audience that has learned to be suspicious of exactly that. Quietly shipping generated art and letting someone find out later would cost us the only thing worth having here. Saying it also lets the other label do its work: everything marked "in engine" is ours, built by hand. What a concept pass is for is deciding who these animals are before anyone commits to modelling them. A doctor who is a goat reads differently from a doctor who is a horse. The sheets settle silhouette, wardrobe and, more than anything, face, because every one of these characters has to be able to look caught. The palette rule is already visible in them. Everything lives in hay, wood, milk and rust; red is a forbidden colour everywhere except blood. Look at the rooster: the only red on that page is on his waistcoat and in the feathers at his feet. That is the whole visual argument in one sheet: a page that looks like a children’s book until you notice what it is showing you. None of these are final. They are the reference the modelling works from, and each animal costs a skeleton and a face rig, so the cast is small on purpose. AI-generated concept Reynard, the detective. AI-generated concept Baron, the rooster, and the only red on the page. AI-generated concept Bruno, the sheriff. AI-generated concept Emil, the doctor. AI-generated concept Hektor. AI-generated concept Mina. AI-generated concept Olga. AI-generated concept Niko. AI-generated concept Roza. AI-generated concept Vera. Art16 September 2026 The rules we wrote down before the case Before writing a single suspect we settled what the game refuses to do. The first thing it refuses is to tell you when you are right. A detective game that confirms your answer has already solved itself for you. So the first decision was the one that is hardest to hold: the game will not say "correct". There is no chime when you spot the contradiction, no tick beside the animal you cleared. The only signals are the ones a real detective gets: how the world reacts, and how certain you actually feel. That cost is deliberate, and it is the riskiest thing here. When the choice is between handing you a hint and leaving you lost, we leave you lost. What we owe you in return is that the evidence is always there to be found. The case cannot be guessed, but it can be proven. The second rule is what keeps the first one honest. The animals speak freely, but they cannot invent. Every fact is written by hand before you talk to it: where each one was, what it saw, what it is hiding. The voice is generated; the knowledge never is. Given a richer improvised answer or a verifiable one, we take the verifiable one every time. And the fox does not lean on anyone. The pressure comes from what goes unsaid: a pause, a subject quietly dropped. Given a dramatic confrontation or an uncomfortable silence, we pick the silence. The farm is allowed to be funny. The death is not. DesignNew entries land here first.All Animals Lie is in development and this page is where the work gets written down: what changed, what broke, and what we decided instead. Discord is where it gets discussed.© 2026 Blue Rain Studio. All rights reserved.All Animals Lie, in development.Studio