I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on: DetectivesGame, a detective experience that leverages AI to push the boundaries of traditional investigation gameplay.
What is DetectivesGame? It’s a web-based mystery game where you step into the shoes of a lead investigator. Unlike traditional “point-and-click” or fixed-dialogue-tree adventures, this project focuses on dynamic interrogation and evidence synthesis.
Key Features:
Dynamic Interrogations: Use your own words to question suspects. The AI-driven NPCs respond based on their unique personalities, hidden motives, and the evidence you’ve uncovered.
Logical Deduction: The game isn’t just about chatting; it’s about connecting the dots. You’ll need to cross-reference statements with physical clues.
Structured Narrative: While the interactions are dynamic, the core mystery is designed to ensure a satisfying and solvable logical conclusion.
The Tech Behind the Mystery: I’ve integrated LLM technology to handle the conversational layer, but I’ve focused heavily on “guardrailing” the AI to ensure it stays in character and respects the logic of the crime scene (avoiding the common “hallucination” issues in AI games).
Not to be presumptuous, but I think most users here will be unhappy about having to create an account, about the AI-generated reviews, and about the monetization.
Yeah, occasionally I take a peek at these LLM-powered parser games to see if anyone’s cracked making them engaging yet (still a no so far), but “free players can use basic investigative techniques, premium players get access to additional investigation tools” sounds like a hard no.
This community is generally frosty about AI, especially commercial AI (we’re mostly starving writers who want personal, human art), but if you can put that aside, this is actually a pretty cool demonstration of how LLMs can be put “on rails” to serve as actors within a story constructed by a human author. IMHO, the system is actually pretty successful at facilitating a type of interaction (natural English conversation with witnesses) that would be impossible in conventional parser- or choice-based IF, without lapsing into the directionless lucid-dreaming seen in something like AI Dungeon.
It’s unclear to me how much of the actual case content is human-authored (certainly the graphical assets aren’t), but my point is, it could be. If this is the IF equivalent of an Edgar Wallace novel (detective pulp written to spec, mostly meaningless but fun for the right audience), what might a Dorothy Sayers novel look like in the same framework?
I’ve been saying for awhile now that the future of LLMs in IF is not fully-hallucinated stories, minor parser enhancements, or conventional games written by AI, but rather fundamentally new types of interaction that use LLMs “on rails” to deliver experiences authored by a human author. This might not be exactly that, but technologically, it’s the vanguard of things to come. I expect to go down in history as a lazy prophet, someone who saw the future but couldn’t be bothered to make it happen. /s
I have also speculated, for long time, on LLM-driven detective game.
Actually I realized a game with a different focus (it’s a dungeon crawler) but, for me, an interesting idea would be to try to imitate Phoenix Write Ace Attorney and add, after the investigative phase, the interrogations, a phase to be played in court in which you have to… convince the judge and jury of the guilt of the defendants!
Best wishes for your project!
Hello. I tried it out. Some of it looks pretty cool and the presentation is good. Coming from an IF direction, i found it a somewhat overwhelming being presenting with all the information at once rather than as the story unfolds.
Unlock exclusive premium cases with more complex scenarios, additional content, and challenging mysteries in our interactive detective game collection.
Free players have access to a limited selection of cases and basic investigation tools. Premium cases and special features are reserved for Premium members.
Thanks for your very valuable feedback! We are trying to make the gameplay´s information-flow a little more dynamic instead of dumping it overwhelmingly all at the beginning of the case. But thats future music. We will definently implement more Text-to-speech options for the user..
I loved Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series (in particular the first episode). When the first AI games started to come out (AI Dungeon or Dreamio), I immediately thought, “A game like that with free-form dialogue where the judge, the defense attorney, and the defendants are all AI would be amazing.” But pure investigations are also interesting… if/when you have Italian among the possible languages, I’ll gladly give it a try.
..we do have have Italian as language option for the menu´s and so on. You can choose the language in the upper right corner. And we are working on italian cases aswell coming out very soon..
