GDC Vault is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC
This is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
The Burden of Proof: Narrative Deduction Mechanics for Detective Games
The fantasy of playing the master detective is compelling but brings difficult problems both for players and narrative designers, the biggest of which is the problem of proof. Having uncovered a complex crime full of twists and turns, how can the player show the game they've solved it? And what if they haven't? inkle's most recent game, Overboard!, is a detective game where you aren't the detective (you're the murderer), but its design suggests a novel approach for allowing the player to assemble and refine a solution from evidence and speculation that could be more widely applied. In this talk, narrative director Jon Ingold will outline how Overboard!'s deduction system works, and show how it tackles the problem of proving specific feedback without removing the need for player creativity, and he'll demonstrate how the approach could be applied to more right-way-up detective stories.
Did you know free users get access to 30% of content from the last 2 years?