Design breakdown

Line them up

When I was design the flow of this game I wanted to thinking of it in sections. The first section would be the questioning phase. However I wanted to let each player be control in their own path through the narrative, so I made sure that you were able to give the player as much agency as possible when it came to the way they progressed. I also wanted the gameplay sessions to be quick and did not want all the information to given directly to the player so I limited the amount of question you could ask each suspect to three.

Led astray

To further enhance player agency, I wanted to give them the choices when came to the question they asked/ However they would have to be careful with their selection because sometimes the paths that can be taken won’t give information that is relevant to the case at hand. I designed the narrative this way to give weight to the choices that the player makes and to ensure that no two players have the same experience.

Put them away

After all 12 question have been asked it’s time to make the final choice of the game and choose who you think the killer is. During this moment I wanted to have the player recall any evidence that got during their questioning of the witnesses. I believe that the success rate was pretty high during the judging session at global game jam but there were a few who got it wrong. It was important to me that the player got to know if they have had the right decision or not. In the case of the example shown the player got it right but if the player had gotten it wrong the name would have turned red to reflect an incorrect selection.

A playable build can be found here