Hello from the writer!

Hello! I'm Leo/ArcanaXIX, narrative lead, game designer, & writer for Robot Detective & the Case of the Automurderated Intern!

This project was incredibly fun and challenging. I learned a ton from working on it. I love mystery games, and I'm in the process of writing a very very very long and huge and ambitious one that's all melancholy and such. But I heard about the Mystery Jam, and thought it would be a really good opportunity to take a month-long "intermission" from that and do something low-stakes to learn more about the process of writing mystery. I wanted to just focus on writing, and not art or music or code, so I could really improve at the craft.

And I most certainly did learn a lot. The final script is at least twice as long as I ever intended it to be, because the problem with designing a theoretical mystery and then revealing it is that in order to reveal it in a way that isn't boring, there must be a dialogue about it. That dialogue involves a lot more words than just "X did Y at Z, case closed"-- the characters themselves are pieces of the puzzle, each with their own perspectives and motivations. Because of all this, and the fact that we (myself and our background artist, who also helped design the murder) had come up with this cartoonishly complicated crime, I was over 300 textboxes into the "Final Deduction" tab of my dialogue spreadsheet when I realized I wasn't even halfway through revealing everything.

Part of this is certainly the time constraint: only having a month to make the entire game meant there weren't many opportunities for editing. The mystery wasn't finalized until halfway through the month, and I wanted to give S1x (our build/implementation engineer, AKA the guy who actually made the game) as much as possible to implement as soon as possible, so I wrote most of the words in about a week. I did find some things to cut, and I did fix the most glaring pacing issues, but there remain a lot of places where I could improve the flow and bring runtime down a little. That's not even touching on the "please don't think too hard about this point" aspects of the mystery, but again... a month! A month is not a long time to construct a mystery!

So because it was a losing battle to try and write a perfectly-paced and perfectly-constructed and perfectly-satisfying mystery in a month, while also coordinating and discussing limitations with artists and dealing with platform limitations... I prioritized writing a game that, regardless of the mystery's quality, would be really fun to play.

(Now, I do actually think the mystery itself is pretty good! "Pretty good" with the caveat "please remember we had a month to do this and it's a miracle it all came together," but pretty good nevertheless. I encourage you to try to theorize what happened while playing! And let us know if you figured it out, or what surprised/frustrated you, or what glaring plot holes you found!)

At any rate, I couldn't possibly avoid some instances of "annoyingly obvious" or "moon logic" in the reveals given my lack of experience in the genre, so I leaned into humor and character writing to keep the journey entertaining throughout. I tried to add characterization or jokes in the "wrong evidence" dialogue trees so it wouldn't feel punishing to be wrong. My main priority was always keeping the game fun. I would listen to Zee's tracks while writing, and if it felt like one track was playing for too long, I used that as my cue that I had to change something up in the narrative to excuse a BGM-shift and renew interest. I actually have a background in music, not writing, so I used what I know about pacing from a composer's perspective to inform how I pace things as a writer. Zee's music cannot and should not be considered set dressing for this game. Their tracks were absolutely foundational for how I structured the entire second half of the game's narrative.

This is somewhat of an aside, but that sentiment really goes for just about every aspect of the game. So much of the narrative was brainstormed while AReallyFrog and I were on a voice call with them sketching out backgrounds, talking about what silly convoluted things might be feasible in the space they were drawing. And S1x added SO much extra humor and life to the game in adding pauses for dramatic effect, tweaking some text for flow and engine limitations, and writing supplementary flavor dialogue. Kat's designs for the player character and Robot Detective shaped the voices I found for both. I wrote most of the words in the game, and I wrote most of the mystery, and I designed the overall structure... but every single person with "non-narrative" roles directly contributed so much to the narrative. The fact that I had to give Valigarmander a finalized and concrete list of icons to draw by a specific date forced me to actually make concrete FINALFINAL-FINAL decisions about what was important and why, which is part of why this game ended up being finished at all. This is what's really fun about collaborations with small groups! We had enough people for "specialized" roles, but even so, my work was shaped by everyone else's work in a way that makes the narrative I wrote here so different from anything I would write alone.

Back to the main point: I found myself over 300 textboxes into that final deduction with the realization that I had way too much left to reveal. (From the length and rambliness of this log, you probably have a sense for how that happened.) I had a strong feeling that the scene had overstayed its welcome. So... what to do?

I remembered to keep the game fun. I shifted gears; I changed the scene! Once it felt to me like the player had deduced enough, then... I stopped making them deduce things. The remaining reveals didn't have to be deduced by evidence. They could be revealed by means of Very Dramatic Climax! The absolute last thing I wanted was to ruin my own work by dragging the case on beyond its welcome, so I thought, well... what if I just [SPOILERS]? I felt that as a player, I would want [SPOILERS]. So I decided [SPOILERS]. And I think it worked!

There are many things I would do differently in my next mystery work, and intend to. But despite any ifs, ands, or buts... I wrote a mystery in a month! And it's mostly coherent, even! WOOHOO! You should play it. It's pretty good.