Detective Dialogue System Demo
I don't want to talk too much about this system, as I've put a lot of thought into it and how I could develop on it. However, this project specifically was a class project with the brief "create a game with a narrative element." This coincided with me starting to find an interest in immersive sim games, like Deus-Ex and Dishonored, and so I found myself pivoting away from the dungeon generators I had become so fond of, and more in the direction of games like that.
Now it's no secret that imsims are hard to make, so before I get really bogged down in this, I was not trying to make an imsim with this project. The idea was that dialogue systems where you just select an option from a list work fine, but I've yet to play a detective game that really makes me feel like a detective solving a mystery.
Disco Elysium is one of the best games I've ever played (though I hadn't played it when I made this project) but its focus isn't on being a detective game as much as it's on being a mystery RPG. That is absolutely fine, but I think there's a gap in the market for a game which has more of a focus on clues and making the player put together the puzzle pieces, rather than following a series of quests.
Obviously this isn't that, but it was the very starting point of the idea. In this project, you turn up to a very very rudimentary murder scene and have to use keywords to ask questions. It's probably better portrayed through the associated demo rather than playing it yourself, if I'm being quite honest.
This also came off the back of rewatching Police Squad and watching A Touch of Cloth for the first time, so you can see that humour and style starting to peek through in places. You can perhaps also tell that I hadn't done much environment design at this point. Looking back at it, I can see a bunch of changes I would have made and things I should have added. But it was a class project, what are you gonna do?
The important part is the bones of this system are found here. I've got a project in the backlog, which I'm hoping to come to someday when I've got the budget and resources to do it justice, which uses an evolution of this mechanic in what I think is a really interesting way. Hopefully I'm right. Either way, this class project will always exist as a little time capsule of when the seed got planted for what is one of my favourite ideas for a game so far.