NARRATIVE, QUESTS & DIALOGUE
This page explores the background narrative of the game, how we came up with it, the process to designing the quests, and a breakdown of how the dialogue was made
Early Ideas, Characters and Motivation for murder.
A lot of the early narrative work for the game began with fleshing out the characters. As murder mysteries always contain a varied and strong cast, every member of the team began brainstorming and creating multiple characters, each serving different roles in the context of the mansion, and the relation to the man who was murdered. We had a butler, the recently-widowed wife of the deceased, her eccentric and mysterious lover, and a maid. Each of these roles were relatively commonly seen in murder mysteries. We then gave them small backstories, to colour them in a bit, and give them a motivation for being the murderer.
From that, us designers took over, working backwards. For each character, we treated them as the murder suspect, and created a timeline of events that led them to murder, when the game started, and all of the evidence the player can collect, including any red herrings. Once those were complete, we decided on which of the suspects we felt had little (but not the least) motivation to kill, and that was our murderer. We brought this to the team to see if there were any objections or alternative viewpoints. We eventually came to a conclusion though, and moved to the next stage of writing: The dialogue.
DIALOGUE
As this was somewhat of a visual novel-style game, a lot of dialogue had to be written across multiple stages of the game. The player character would also speak occasionally, guiding the player after they interact with certain items, or to guide them in completing the various puzzles. We would divide the dialogue into several categories: Tutorial dialogue (for the start of the game), puzzle dialogue, and character dialogue.
Puzzle dialogue is where the player character speaks to himself in order to guide the player. Character dialogue would be the various interactions the player has with each character: When they first meet, when they are presented with evidence that strongly ties to them, and when the player accuses that character. The designers would split the dialogue responsibilities via each designer taking on the dialogue based on characters and puzzles.
Once the dialogue had been written, we met with each other to consolidate our work. We looked out for misleading or incorrect information, inconsistencies in tone, or excessive hints towards solutions, as we didn’t want to hold the players hand through puzzles and towards the solution. Once everything was in order, we handed everything to the programmers for implementation
JOURNAL ENTRIES
As an additional tidbit for players, and to help them track information, there was also a journal. The journal listed all of the suspects, giving a small description of them and their personalities. It would also include all of the evidence the player had obtained up until that point, describing it in more detail. For some of the evidence, primarily letters, I also wrote their contents, which gave more detail into the potential intentions of some of the suspects and expanded the background narrative slightly.
GALLERY
Screenshots of some of the dialogue, the timeline of events, and some of the written journal entries
