Generating a Procedural Mystery
My brother was recently interested in working on a mystery game, possibly a single-player experience for VR, and procedural ideally. I know this problem has already been solved a few ways, with Outer Wilds being the stand-out contemporary example (Sadly, I haven’t played it yet). It’s rare that I document the very first steps of the design process (it’s usually scribbled in notebooks, or lost during early meeting brainstorms), but this time I figured I’d share one of the ways I try to solve these blue-sky problems.
My instinct was to look into Clue or Clue-do. I won’t bother describing Clue, but after a little bit of digging, I was able to find a possible basis for Clue in an old card game called …
The King of Hearts has Five Sons
I tend to enjoy designing “genre” games because they allow me to polish established conventions and subvert well-known expectations without a ton of early R&D. This is mostly done out of necessity as a small team, but scrapping existing games for parts is also just a dang good starting point sometimes.
So rather than documenting some new design here, I just wanted to show how I break down existing systems so that I can digest them and let them “incubate”. A part of this is simplifying systems down to their core components which is why paper prototyping helps and isn’t just for students.
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22 Cards
- 4 Kings
- 4 Queens
- 4 Jacks
- Hearts Cards (1-10)
The components are important to me because they define the “combinatoric” space and give me a good sense of the complexity of the system we’re looking at as well as the possible scope of the project. In this case, we can look at the game as a single system, but if I was looking at something more complicated I’d isolate the system of interest.
This isn’t a complicated process, and that’s the whole point. I already know I like the reference and the experience it generated. I just want to see how things work at a glance, there’s no creativity happening yet. I’m ingesting and simmering. I’m trying to answer basic questions like, what are the parts, how do those parts come together into a game, what does the player need to know to play, and how does the game evoke and facilitate that play? In the back of my head, I’m also thinking, somehow, all together, these parts generated that experience I’m trying to understand.
Setup
Before the game starts, the twelve court cards are shuffled and one card is removed from them at random and placed face down in the middle of the table, without any player seeing its face. Likewise the ten Heart cards are shuffled and one is placed on the table. The remaining twenty cards are then shuffled together and dealt to each player.
So what does a multiplayer card game have to do with a single-player VR experience? Well, functionally, a lot. Deduction as a play behavior is a function of certain antecedent conditions. Not only does The King of Hearts has Five Sons describe those antecedent conditions, but it also lays out a map for how to reinforce that type of play. For example, we can extrapolate here that to translate this experience into a video game we might look into deceptive agents, interrogation, randomized MacGuffins, and accumulating information.
And that’s it… the first step. Somewhat arbitrary, but enough kindling to keep the process going.
I was inspired to write this after seeing a tweet about different ways of approaching design from Ryan Courtney, who I don’t know in the least, but here’s the tweet:
I suppose this approach falls into point 2 or 3, though I’d say in my experience most full dev cycles see a bit of each of these approaches.