Murder Mysteries were good in theory. You have Innocents and Murderers and the Innocents use deduction to find out who the bad guys are.
But nowadays, all the murder mystery servers play about the same:
"Wait around together 'til someone does something. Then start killing."
Sometimes people even skip the first step.
What I want is a gamemode where everyone is a detective to a single murder. Could take place in a mansion, train, or a whole city. Bots would take on the roles of the civilians and one would be the culprit. You can interview these bots: ask names, what they saw, personality, etc. You also go around collecting clues like fingerprints, weapons, etc. Your ultimate goal would be to be the first person to find out: Whodunit, how'd they do it, and why.
Obviously it would get pretty boring to solve the same murder over and over again, so it would have to be procedurally generated. I've found two significant entries for something like this:
One is an actual game called
Noir Syndrome on Steam (haven't tried it so I can't really say much about it).
The other is an entry in a
300 game mechanics blog.
This is what I would try to base the game around, where the whole event is played out up from beginning to murder to discovery of the body is discovered and each bot would have specific memories of what happened.
Tl;drA Murder Mystery where you find clues and interview suspects to find a culprit.
I'm gonna see how far I can get in making this game with my moderate coding skills. If you have any suggestions or concerns about gameplay, post it.
I actually started thinking about this project 18 months ago. I managed to model a magnifying glass, loop the first part of
this music, and started building a mansion:
