Year: 2023
Duration: 5 weeks
Team size: 4
Role: Story writer and gameplay implementation
Description: An AR murder-mystery experience
The goal
Our team had to create a mixed media prototype of a game experience. We did this by using a scale model of a café and AR technology.
The player can interact with the prototype by using their phone and scanning the model. Then they can walk around freely and hold their phone closer or further from the model to investigate.
Video
The Mechanics & Story
The player is a junior investigator put onto an old case together with their mentor, Brice. The district deemed this a cold case, but with newfound technology the player is able to view snippets of the past and therefore the crime scene. These snippets are short frames in time and are able to be viewed from all angles and can be inspected closely. If the player taps on a certain object or person, more information can be revealed, but most of the crucial information can be acquired by simply looking closer.
When the player thinks they have enough information, they can tap on the icon in the lower right-hand corner. There they can see an overview of all of the information they have gathered on everyone in the form of keywords. The player can combine three of those keywords to form a sentence. For example: Kassidy, Bjorn, Relationship. This would give the full sentence: “Kassidy and Bjorn have a relationship together.” If the player deems this information to be significant enough, they can send it over to their mentor, Brice. He will then give his opinion or reaction based on the information you sent him.
Throughout the prototype, Brice is a way of guiding the player in the right direction, or at least, that’s the intention. Because in reality, Brice was the culprit all along and was manipulating the player into a different direction.
Process
The first week consisted mainly of brainstorming and researching manipulation and the ethics of using it. Through this research I got the idea of the mentor manipulating the player throughout the game.
The second week was about more research and first prototypes. Since I’d never made a detective game before, I started with a lot of content research. This is where the game: Return of The Obra Dinn came up. Without realizing it beforehand, our concept resembled this game to an extent. Together with the other research I did, I found something that can be viewed as the most important thing in making a detective game. You first have to create more questions before you start giving away any solutions.
The third week was implementation week for me. The clue system was the thing that took me the longest time. Here you can see a short bit of the code used.
The fourth and fifth week were spent doing the last polishes on the prototype and writing the documentation.
Challenges & Takeaways
The fact that the mentor was the killer could be fleshed out more. The one thing I got out of this the most was: Don’t overcomplicate things when they aren’t necessary. The story concept in itself was rather interesting, but the added layer with the manipulation was too vague for anyone to notice. Only after it being pointed out, did it become clear to play testers.
Creating all of the different characters, their connections to each other and their possible motives for murder was really fun and interesting to do.