Summary:

• Team gathered to create a murder mystery detective game for MysteryGameJam2024.

• Game structure is non-linear, allowing players to conduct interviews, collect evidence, and form deductions at their own pace and in any order.

• Playtime intended to be 1-3 hours.

• Single-player, primarily aimed at 18+ market, allowing for macabre details such as autopsies.

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Unique Mechanics:

• Rival—Murderer is able to obstruct the player’s investigation by stealing evidence either before or after the player has uncovered it.

• Energy and Day/Night—Sleeping refills a player’s energy, which is expended throughout the investigation. Supplements like food and coffee can top up energy to push the investigation past sunset.

• Trust—NPCs can gain or lose trust in the player character based on how the player behaves in-game. Fulfilling side quests earns trust, which will be required to make some NPCs open up and offer testimony. False accusations damage trust.

• Dialogue—Conversations are prompted by presenting character profiles, location profiles, evidence, or testimony. Basic prompts are available from the start of the game but many conversations are locked until specific evidence is found.

 

My Duties:

• Design the narrative structure for the entire game, plotting out the story and deciding how to deliver it to the player in a non-linear fashion.

• Detail all evidence/testimony/etc. that can be obtained, with both in-game text and descriptive text.

• Write all dialogues, and hand-off to other team members to implement. Dialogue will not be voice acted.

• Document entire narrative for easy reference by team members unfamiliar with story. Any team member should be able to quickly find a specific chunk of text through clear indexing, and understand how that text relates to other story info.

• Development Process:

  1. Team came together several times for brainstorming sessions to ideate on story and mechanics. Later split off on individual tasks, when I polished the ideas into the final plotline.

  2. Drafted mood boards and visual references for major characters and locations. Sketched world map and planned where NPCs and evidence could be found around the game world. Handed this info off to 3D artist to begin developing character and environment models.

  3. Wrote text content for evidence, adding new pieces to fill holes in plot where they appeared.

  4. Wrote dialogues, leveraging generic conversations where possible to save unique conversations for major plot advancements.

 

Conclusion:

• Development team hit a bottle neck as professional commitments cut down on time available to spend working on the game jam. Development stalled before an ending to the story was hammered out, as that required further ideation on accusation mechanics.

• I improved on documentation skills, with a focus on a plug-and-play approach to dialogue to cut down on extra work for other team members.

• I practiced dialogue writing and narrative design skills, furthering experience in non-linear and open-world narratives.