ELDER71'S PROFILE

author=dinkledaberry
Now this is an article I can get behind! I'm working on a detective RPG of my own (although much simpler in scope when it comes to case-solving as I also have other elements of gameplay to incorporate) and have run into similar problems as those discussed. Your guys' conversation is similar to thoughts and concepts I've come up with so it seems I'm on a right track in that regard. Though I've recently felt I'm using too many red herrings (although this seems to be a side effect of being able to name and convict anyone as the criminal with enough evidence).

"Insight crafting" seems like the natural progression of old games like Clue and is definitely a prototype I'd enjoy seeing. And yeah, custom scripts aren't really necessary as far as I've seen in development in Ace(outside of mouse scripts and the like) since there are easy conditional branch and key item commands. Which should be more than enough to get something to show a prospective programmer.

Hope the project comes along in a useful way! I would love to see more authentic detective games. The genre needs some love.

author=Hasvers
I have a slightly different suggestion - it is not incompatible with what you suggest, but I feel it is a bit more elegant (as it does not force a dead end).

If you don't want the player to just find things at random, you can use combinatorial explosion.

Imagine an "insight crafting" system where you have to put multiple elements together, Clue-style ("Mr X" "bought" "cigarettes" "at the shop"), and if the recipe is successful, you obtain/unlock a new topic/action/something.

Even if you have only 5 characters, 5 actions, 10 objects and 4 places for the whole game, that gives you a thousand possibilities - more than any player should be willing to exhaust - while making the correct combination is obvious once you've inferred what was happening.

If there's more than a single template, or even almost freeform combination (X saw Y kill Z), exhaustive search is even less plausible. The only thing that a player might be able to brute force is one missing element when they're pretty sure of the rest of the formula, and that's really not so bad (even Sherlock sometimes proceeds by elimination!)