Narrative Design
The prompt for this project was to adapt a public domain story.
I ended up adapting two at once because I thought a werewolf Sherlock Holmes sounded like a fresh and interesting version of his drug addiction, and would help to separate it from the countless Sherlock Holmes adaptations out there.
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I've grown up such a fan of classic murder mysteries, but this was the first time I really got to write my own.
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I don't normally write via genre conventions due to my love of multi-genre media, but I will admit that working within a genre made structuring this plot significantly easier than if the story were something more experimental.​​​
It was very key to this game that players not be able to correctly guess who the killer was, but for them still to believe afterwards that it makes sense who the killer turned out to be.
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Going off of the (admittedly few) blind playtests that I have witnessed, I believe I was completely successful with this!
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​I had the protagonists focus on two core suspects who are character foils of each other, making sure that each got the same amount of attention and lacked provable alibis. While many players had a feeling that there must be some sort of trick behind this (for example, one thought that maybe these two characters secretly worked together to both commit the murder), none guessed correctly.
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I made sure to thoroughly introduce the real killer along with some suspicious dialogue in advance before the big reveal. I believe that I got away with it is because the focus when providing all that information was never actually on him, it was on using him as a tool to further flesh out the main characters.
Systems Design & Game Structure
As I first and foremost considered this game to be a chance to showcase my writing abilities, the design of the game itself very much revolved around that.
Because of this, and the fact that I only had a month to make such a long game, it is an incredibly linear experience. That being said, I still did my best to allow for player decision making whenever possible, and would incentivize this in part by concealing unexpected and particularly intriguing information behind different dialogue paths.
As I first and foremost considered this game to be a chance to showcase my writing abilities, the design of the game itself very much revolved around that.
Because of this, and the fact that I only had a month to make such a long game, it is an incredibly linear experience. That being said, I still did my best to allow for player decision making whenever possible, and would incentivize them to explore different options via concealing unexpected and particularly intriguing information behind eclectic dialogue options.
Ren.py's primary affordance as a visual novel development software is that it's very easy to create branching pathways, so although this story itself only has one ending, I utilized this to really try to make the player feel like a detective. (And not just any detective, but Sherlock's apprentice.)
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Whenever I was able, I let the player state what they thought was truly going on, and what they wanted to investigate in which order.
