After Hours

Two minutes until closing. Your sister is still counting the till.

The glass is already clean.
Naledi asks you to finish closing.
Two customers have yet to leave.

Headlights move across the windows, and the clock runs down. Then you're holding the same glass again. After Hours is a first-person time-loop mystery set in a small South African bar. You have two minutes to watch, ask questions, and work out what needs to change before the evening can  finally end.

Last orders

Your sister Naledi is behind the till, trying to finish the figures. Sipho waits in the booth by the side window. Riaan has settled at a table near the entrance and isn't quite ready to leave. You know where everyone sits. What you don't know is why they're still here. Talk to them. Listen to the answers. Watch what happens when they think you're busy with the glasses. A small detail can change the meaning of a conversation.

You can't watch everyone

Choose where to look and let your attention settle. Stare too long and people notice: the eye opens, turns red, and your chance to learn something disappears.

Look down, polish the glass, and let the room settle again. Questions take time too. Reading a conversation pauses the clock, but every answer you choose spends ten seconds. You can take your time thinking; you still have to decide what is worth asking.

Bring your notes into the next loop

Your notebook keeps the things you've heard and seen. Select a person's statement, choose an observation, and decide whether the two really belong together. Confirmed links are circled in pen; rejected links are crossed out. An uneasy look or an odd habit might mean less than you think.

After the first closing, you can try a plan and learn from its consequences. Bring those leads into the next loop and investigate them. Guessing is a way to learn; ending the evening takes evidence.

In this 48 hour game jam game

• A cramped 3D bar, flat 2D characters, warm pools of light, and an illustrated screen treatment that keeps the notebook text readable.
• Three people to watch and question, with follow-up conversations and details that can be missed while you're looking elsewhere.
• A two-minute loop built around attention, suspicion, and the time spent asking questions.
• A paper notebook for comparing statements and observations, plus plan trials that leave new leads.
• Distinct outcomes and an endings journal that records the ones you've found.
• Mouse controls throughout, optional keyboard shortcuts, guided practice, and a pause menu with settings.

Controls

Action	Mouse control
Look around	Click the room, then move the mouse
Watch someone	Aim at them and hold left click
Polish	Look down at the glass and hold left click
Talk	Aim at a person and right-click
Ask a question	Click an option; each answer costs ten seconds
Read your notes	Aim at the counter notebook and click
Link evidence	Choose a person on the left, then an observation on the right; confirm or cancel
Sidestep behind the bar	Scroll the mouse wheel while looking
Pause	Right-click empty space, middle-click, or click the menu icon

Reading the notebook and pause menu stops the clock. The first visit includes guided practice; How to play lets you revisit it.

Other Stuff

A bit disappointed with the story, animations and art work, couldn't spend as much time as I wanted on it, and could only spend about 30 hours on it. 

Character sprites are rendered at high detail, then downscaled and colour-unified with the environment by a shader.

Click the clock when the game is paused 7 times in quick succession for a secret ending.

AI Disclosure

AI was used in this project only for the following:

1. Unit and Integration test writing
2. Build mode debugging for the web and windows build (to ensure itch.io build would work), only to help diagnose the issue
3. Swapping the programmer art for the custom digital art (this was mostly to save time, and could have been done manually, I did not generate any assets for the game with GenAI).

Where Generative AI affected the game:

1. Fixing grammar and spelling mistakes (and doing a pass to add some more South African flavour to the writing).

I believe AI is a tool to be used to assist and enable individuals to build better more refined products in less time, not a product that should be relied on to do everything for you, using it to replace human creativity and problem solving will lead only to worse products and more bugs for developers to fix.

Credits

• Graham Hill (Llih Maharg) ( https://grahamhill.dev/ )
• Bevy Game Engine ( https://bevy.org/ )
• Rust Programming Language ( https://www.rust-lang.org/ )
• Blender ( https://www.blender.org/ )
• Audacity ( https://www.audacityteam.org/ )
• Visual Studio Code ( https://code.visualstudio.com/ )
• Codex (OpenAI) — test writing, build diagnostics and language editing ( https://openai.com/codex/ )
• EmptyCity — background music by yd, CC0 ( https://opengameart.org/content/emptycity-background-music )
• Rain on Window Loop — ambience by alxl, CC0 ( https://opengameart.org/content/rain-on-window-loop )
• Kenney Impact Sounds — CC0 ( https://kenney.nl/assets/impact-sounds )
• Kenney RPG Audio — CC0 ( https://kenney.nl/assets/rpg-audio )
• Kenney Interface Sounds — CC0 ( https://kenney.nl/assets/interface-sounds )
• Inter — The Inter Project Authors, SIL Open Font License ( https://github.com/rsms/inter )
• Fira Mono — Mozilla Foundation and Telefonica S.A., SIL Open Font License ( https://github.com/mozilla/Fira )