How we designed mechanics to support the narrative

Apart from watching 600 episodes of Case Closed as a child, and watching the odd mystery movie, I was by no means a mystery expert. So I started seriously diving into the genre across all media (books, movies, shows, anime, podcasts, etc), while also reading breakdowns of the genre, such as the CliffsNotes on Detective in Fiction (I like to start small).

I wanted to really understand what made those stories so popular. My conclusion is that mystery is less a genre and more of a device for engagement. We humans experience something called the curiosity gap, a discomfort that motivates us to close the gap between what we know and what we want to know. All great stories will make us ask a question often: why? what? how? And these single-word questions can enthrall us for several hours.

In contrast to that grandeur, our stories have to ask questions that seem immediate and solvable. A man has died. There were four people present. Some really didn't like him. Who did it? Go. Because a player can ask the chief anything, it is all the more important to limit the scenarios' in scope.

Mystery is everywhere, but detective fiction most definitely is a genre. So how do you communicate that vibe through a game?

One trait that is manifested to the mega in detectives is perception. Their observational skills are what separate them from us Joes. This was where our game could shine: wherever a player chose to look, there something would be--even if I hadn't thought of it beforehand. Now, it was on the player to separate the chaff from grain and truly become Sherlock.

Detectives are also usually very, very smart. The issue is that not every player is a gigabrained Sherlock. The simplest way to make someone feel smart is to make everyone else be really, really stupid.

In our world, thick police chiefs are thick on the ground. He literally cannot do anything without being told explicitly. Sometimes this can be frustrating, because we are tricked by the way he communicates and assume there's at least a shred of common sense. Rarely.

It was necessary to constrain the police chief this way because giving him any autonomy launches him into solving the case himself, an unfortunate quirk of the helpful LLMs.

The most important moment of the fantasy is solving the case to the shock of those around you. The game had turned out to be pretty difficult because, as it turns out, the game requires us Joes to have a detective's exceptional observational skills. So we introduced a support mechanic that increasingly nudged players towards the solution (e.g. the chief stumbles onto a clue). It was crucial that the hints felt organic and not patronizing.

Still, it was difficult, so we compromised by letting any right answer clear a story, so even a guess with mostly wrong explanations still succeeded. Yet we needed a way to reward those players who actually figure out the completely right solution.

We created a 3 star rating system. An accusation consists of the murderer, only this has to be correct, and in isolation it results in 1 star. Additionally a player can provide motive, opportunity and evidence. The more accurate information they provide the higher their score.