It starts with the dinner; several people are sitting around the table, represented as multicolored shapes -- squares, diamonds, circles. You tab through the up and down keys, cycling through them, learning their names, getting aquainted. Then you play with the left and right keys, moving through time. Two people leave, then another, then the dining room is empty, and the narrative unfolds. Daisy discovers the body in the study.
You're a police investigator; before the game starts, you're told the time the body was found, the location of the body, where the murder weapon was hidden, and where it was originally located. Your mission: interrogate the witnesses and find the killer, as well as the time of the murder and the time the weapon was obtained.
This is a game of procedural narrative told retrospectively. My first thought playing it was to just follow the story of the dead guy, and see what he said. Turns out, he's dead -- the plot thickens. Then I figured I'd just follow everyone's story until someone incriminated themselves. Then I realized, someone was lying to me. By checking who corroborated the other persons' stories, and seeing who was alone around the critical time window, I could figure it out fairly well. I also speculated about what Bill and Sally were doing together.
The real potential here is in a game that involves social play and logical deduction. Since it's logistics based -- who went where with whom -- it fits with this casual-social cognition that could really hit with a broad audience. Imagine this game with great cel-art and character design, and more embellishments allowing you to project your own narrative speculation into the mix. Personally, I think this could be the next Mystery Case Files, but you know, with legitimate gameplay. There's a lot of potential for this mechanic to be applied in other contexts, such as an adultery situation where two people are lying. Hopefully someone will hit up Trevor about this, because it's a tremendous creative and business opportunity.
Thanks for the nice write-up!
Actually, the game you suggest was exactly what I'd been thinking about, and is why I added "The Early Years" to the title at the last moment, to imply an upcoming sequel.
The idea was to add nice graphics and give the player an avatar. The player would walk around to explore a randomly generated mansion, find murder clues, and interrogate suspects. Interrogating the suspects would work basically like The Early Years does, but you'd also need to locate and identify the murder weapon, instead of being told what it was at the start of the game.
Of course, all of this was before the whole MMORPG Tycoon thing came up and distracted me. I'll get back to Nicholas Spratt soon, but I'm doing all this in my spare time and so I don't have nearly as much time as I'd like.
Mean ol' landlord, always wanting rent to be paid. ;)
Anyone else seeing this being uber-slow?
I'm getting about one frame per second -- can't even get through the initial "VectorStorm presents" screen in less than a couple of minutes. This on a year-old mac laptop.
Anyone else seeing this?
Mac OS 10.5
The game won't run on Mac OS 10.4, with the slowness indicated by ggould; it runs fine since I upgraded to 10.5.4