I’ve been working on a prototype or proof of concept of a particular kind of investigation game.
The central concept is making a decision about a person based on accumulated information rather than a single point of proof.
In this prototype, you are asked to evaluate a new student at school to determine if they are a nerd or a jock, but you only have the contents of their locker to decide upon.
This is a text adventure written in Inform 7, and will need an interpreter to open it. I have successfully opened it in Gargoyle and Lectrote, two currently available text adventure interpreters.
There are quite a few things I want to improve: better formatting of the information as presented, some logic around the evidence (making sure there aren’t a bunch of lunchboxes) and eventually broadening the variety of evidence) but the basic gameplay loop is complete.
Examine the evidence, and then give the Judge a vote of Nerd or Jock.
Please try it out and let me know what you think!
Is the inherent uncertainty, coupled with investigation, an interesting gameplay experience?
Here’s the current link and password to the prototype.
You can’t post a link to an itch site? They should actually onebox.
Even if it’s password protected it should allow the link here - or you can post the “Secret” URL which is a complicated link that allows anyone to follow it for access.
Ah, certain competitions require that entries not be released before the competition starts, and an open beta can count against that. But if there’s a password on it, that’s fine.
Oh, and I should also mention… this is a beta test of a gameplay loop!
The full experience shouldn’t take more than five or ten minutes! It’s procedurally generated, so repeating it would be preferable, but the main point is that the testing experience won’t take very long.
