So I’m still making a noir mystery detective game. Right now we have a pretty straightforward game loop that’s sort of tried and true. Investigate environments and collective evidence, interrogate suspects and collect statements, and use the evidence and statements to make deductions about the “case”.
This is more less a variation on all the mystery detective games that have come before, from L.A. Noire to Ace Attorney, and perhaps most recently seen in A Case of Distrust. It’s fine. It’s serviceable. But what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t actually follow what our pulp detective novel/film heroes actually do: lie, manipulate, turn their enemies against each other, get out of tight situations, and lastly, make hunches. Immediately after I realized this I started to become less and less interested in a traditional conversation and deduction-type system (especially since these types of systems tend to halt all forward progress in the game, and are the primary source of frustration in these games).
We can handle lying and manipulating in conversations easily enough in our chosen narrative engine, Ink; before initiating a conversation with the NPC, the player can simply choose to approach the conversation honestly or deceitfully, and specific lines in the following dialogue can check for that condition. (More importantly, the player should be able to choose how they’re going to deceive the NPC). It’s a unique approach to interactive fiction that I haven’t seen much before, where the player can make meta choices about how to proceed with the conversation, in addition to choosing immediate responses during the conversation itself. But Ink can handle that no problem. This was a “freebie” design win.
Hunches, on the other hand, are less straightforward to implement. They pose a pretty interesting design question: how to make a puzzle that doesn’t make you feel bad for getting it wrong? As it turns out, the Ink engine developers have been thinking about this very problem:
Well, here’s what we realised about that: Sudoku doesn’t like you getting things wrong. Get something wrong and your whole puzzle goes in the bin. But crosswords are all about getting things wrong. You see “Vegetable (6)” and write in CARROT, but a bit later you figure out the word going down that put a T where the C should be and you change it to TURNIP. You got it wrong, but it didn’t feel too bad, because you only found out you got it wrong at the moment you got it right. (Well, assuming the answer wasn’t TOMATO, that is.)
The answer is “fuzzy puzzle design”. Puzzles need to not immediately fail you when you get something wrong. You need to continue on with the game, and only realize you failed when you come up with a better answer. Voila.
The Ink dev’s next game, Heaven’s Vault, is built around this concept, by having the player as archaeologist make educated guesses about deciphering an alien language. I’m thinking we can use this concept to have our detective follow hunches about the case. The “solution” to the problem needs to gradually evolve as the player’s understanding of the case evolves. It’s brilliant. It’s great. But the trick is making a game revolve around puzzles that you’re allowed to get wrong while still having an interesting game.
Problem: Removal of “hard failure states” while still having player choice matter.
Solution: Keep soft failure states to signal to players to “evolve” their hunch (reaching a “deadend”, finding new evidence or NPCs giving statements that contradict the hunch, etc). Repercussions for “wrong” choices have narrative consequences: (like arriving too late at a crime scene, negatively impacting an NPC’s emotional state, a worse story outcome for a character you cared about, etc).
In some ways this “hunches system” is about making a meta-meta choice about the story, (whereas choosing to deceive a particular NPC is just about a single conversation). In between locations, players will enter into the “generate hunches phase”, where they’ll see the old hunches they’ve already figured out, and can generate new ones (by matching Questions with Statements and Evidence collected from the previous scene; so we haven’t completely thrown our all the particulars of our Deductions system). This also lends some weight to deciding on a hunch; the player is stuck with it until they finish the sequence.
To wrap up, I’m pretty excited about this new direction for the systems of the game. I think it will better align where the player is and where the protagonist is in terms of their understanding about the case, while allowing the player to progress even if they missed a detail.
