Day 1: The Draft

It's been a while since I've made time for game development, and I've been playing a lot of great "thinky games" lately. The Case of the Thinky Game Jam seemed like a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone -- to get back into the swing of things with a small project, and to try my hand at developing my own "thinky game".

The Paper Prototype

My idea is quite a traditional (and literal) detective game, similar to Frogwares' Sherlock series. I started by sketching out my crime, and then worked backwards from that to fill in the evidence that the player will need to find, the dialogue options they'll have with various characters, and all the red herrings designed to throw them off the path.

I'm quite pleased with how this went. After two days' work, I had a 10 page "paper prototype" that looked like the below.  I decided to group all of the responses each character would have to a given piece of evidence in one place, both to help me ensure that there wasn't much duplication in responses, and to assist the reader.

CHOICES:

• DETECTIVE: Talk me through what happened.
  SON: I was out drinking last night, and I didn’t get home until the early hours.
  ...
• DETECTIVE: What time did you get home?
  SON: I’m not really sure. I left the pub just after they called time, and I walked straight here.

NEW EVIDENCE: The safe was open.
REACTIONS:

• SON: You’d have to ask the butler. The safe is his.
• BUTLER: I must have forgotten to lock it.

Play Testing

I gave the paper prototype to my wife and asked her three questions:

1. Who did it?
2. Why did they do it?
3. How did they do it?

I watched her read and re-read the text for 30 minutes, all the while verbalizing her deductive process. She solved the case -- eventually -- and encouraged me to code it up.  So that's what I'm going to do!

I'm really glad that I made a paper prototype, as it helped in quite a few different ways:

• It was a good test of whether the case is interesting enough to keep a player going, even in the absence of flashy gameplay.
• It was easy to make small edits to dialogue that was ambiguous, or didn't quite point the player in the right direction.
• It was much, much, easier to create than a full prototype.