The Detective - Interactive Web-Based Game
Location: The Apartments
Location: The Lanes
Location: Mid-Town
Location: The Heights
Rationale
For interactive web-based experience, the goal was to create a story that follows a detective in a distant dystopian city. The story follows a basic ‘Who has done it?’, with multiple suspects and several clues and red herrings. The narrative follows the detective as he travels through the city finding clues and finding the motives for each suspect. As the detective reaches the end of the narrative, he gathers his evidence and label one of the suspects as the murderer. From this, Option 1 ’create a game/interactive puzzle’ was picked to tell this story, as it would allow the player to roam the world and gather information to make the decision at crucial points in the story.
The storyline of the game is: A wise journalist who is well known for finding the truth has been murder has occurred in the lower city inside his apartment. Within this future dystopian city, the police have their hands full with other crime. A detective is called in. Being a famous journalist who uncovers the truth, the list of enemies is endless. As the detective, the player will travel through the different locations and meet with different characters to find evidence to make a case.
This game will be located on a website and would be accessible to all, this would allow for ease of sharing and increase in visitors to the site. With the interactive narrative located on the web, it can generate discussions and debates for which ending is correct and increase engagement with the site.
The world the game takes place in is a distant dystopia future, but it retains certain qualities of the 1900s. From this, a retro aesthetic was established, and to keep with the theme I decided to use pixel art to create the world. By creating pixel gifs for the background, it can loop in Animate and keep the scene interesting for the players as they move around.
Throughout the game, there will be many hidden buttons that only glow when hovered over by the player. This allows for players to explore a room or location to see if they can find any hidden objects or clues. This is important as there are some interactions and locations that are locked and won’t be accessible to players if they haven’t found a clue or haven’t interacted with certain characters. For the player to maximise interaction with all the characters and all of the clues, the player will have to jump back and forth between all the different locations, allowing the game to feel more open (One key series of events hidden in the game can be open by: opening ‘final notice’ – talk to bank manager and click the computer screen – talk to bartender and ask about Owen – click on K Door).
The game uses simple buttons in Animate CC which allows the game to jump from different parts of the timeline for each location. Some locations and interactions are locked until an action or button has been press by the player. This is done using variables. By adding variables to certain buttons, it would add a value when clicked and allow the game to jump to a different part of the timeline allowing for a different set of interactions. (E.g. Var x = 0: Location 1 timeline = (frame 30 + x(0)). Click button (x+=1). Location 1.5 timeline = (frame 30 + x(1))).
