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BASIC NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Before I start on the full script and screenplay I’ll get to work on planning this out. I read and consume a lot of detective fiction, and the narrative trends of the genre are as follows. I will not be following these 100% to the letter, but it will definitely help me to have a roadmap to refer to while I write the narrative aspect of the game. I will edit this with updates to the story structure; as of the initial writing of this post I’m suffering from a really bad yeast infection and sitting for longer periods of time than 4 hours can agitate the itching. Sorry to the lecturers who have to read this, I know it’s TMI. (edit June 3: reblogging and adding multiple “continue reading” tabs makes for a bad user experience so I’ll just add updates and mark them throughout.)

PHASE 1: THE INCITING INCIDENT  This will be the event that starts the story. Every piece of fiction has them, and in murder mysteries they’re oftentimes the murder or the set up to the murder. For our purposes in mapping out my narrative, this will be the discovery of Vicar Henry Gravesend’s corpse -- this will happen in an introductory cutscene before the gameplay begins. 

PHASE 2: DETECTIVE ARRIVES ON THE SCENE  After all the initial dust clears and everyone can see that the victim is indeed dead, there is a call for someone to solve the crime. This is where the detective comes in, and in my narrative will happen directly after the opening cutscene and character builder. This will have one of three dialogue paths (one for each job). 

ACADEMIC: It’s a late night at the University and you’re busy in the library cramming to finish an abstract meant to be submitted for peer review the following afternoon when a student aide knocks on the door and informs you of the invitation down to Clemency Hill. Dialogue options would be stupid to implement from here, but it could be an interesting way to introduce the attribute scores’ effect. 

PERFORMER: You’re just coming off of your final performance for the evening. Your Guts and Likeability scores dictate whether you are a bareknuckle boxer on Wednesday and Friday nights in the big basement room underneath Ponder Road’s only decent pub, Battery City, or the singer and rhythm guitarist in a newly-minted garage band called The Cobras that play on Wednesday and Friday nights on Battery City’s main upstairs pub stage. As you wipe the sweat (and maybe blood) off yourself you hear a commotion and head outside (or upstairs) and the barman tells you you’ve been summoned to Clemency Hill. 

BEAT COP: You’re in between coffees 10 and 11 on a quiet night - your shift patrolling the cobblestone streets is about to start when your boss tells you that you’ve been told to report at Clemency Hill to investigate the murder of Vicar Gravesend, notorious gossip and pillar of the local community. When you try to protest and beg that they send Sergeant Guts and his sidekick, the commander informs you icily that you’ve been requested specially. 

PHASE 3: FIRST IMPRESSIONS  Once the detective arrives on the scene, the first thing they do is take stock of the surroundings and immediate vicinity of the dead body, and talk to any witnesses hanging around, forming initial conclusions based on circumstantial and incomplete evidence. My narrative will diverge from here because our player character’s girlfriend is already being implicated, so naturally she’ll take the time to talk to her first and get her side of the story before forming impressions of the situation in question. 

EDIT: June 3rd 2021

PHASE 4: INVESTIGATION PART 1 After an initial sweep of the scene and a quick moment spent forming first impressions, the detective will immediately start talking to people and getting a feel for the surroundings. This will largely differ based on economic background in my game, where the first of several clues will show up in dialogue depending on the options chosen. 

NOBLE BACKGROUND: As a noble, your first thought is to question those immediately in your social sphere. You talk to three NPCs and depending on the stats you chose (and how well an internal random integer generator from 1 to 20 rolls), you will glean quick nuggets of info that might later tie into evidence, before being summoned for an audience with Draconis Veride, smarmy patron of the current ruling political dynasty and real piece of shit, for a waltz (3/4 time rhythm minigame) to get you either up to speed or manipulated into his line of thinking - depending on those stats - filling you in on all the stuff he knows and batting away any questions as to his intent before sending you off to investigate the leads he is generous enough to bestow upon you should you succeed in his rhythm game (if the player fucks up the rhythm game 5 times he will consider the dancing a failure and you will go through this first investigation phase without his “help”).

 URCHIN BACKGROUND: You can choose to try to question either the help ir the guests first, but the guests (bar a few) will be dismissive of you in this first section because rich people are like Southern moms - if you don’t measure up to their expectations they will let the poison drip unabated from their mouths while disguising it as honey. Depending on your Street Smarts stat you might be able to figure out something a rich NPC might not want you to know - but for most part your first section will likely be spent chatting to the help. This will further diverge depending on your job:

BEAT COP: As a beat cop most of the help are already aware of you and will have no problem complying with your sleep-deprived demands because they know you could have them incarcerated. Tolliver Stupples, the butler, holds you in particularly high esteem and asks everyone to help you as best they can, but the younger staff are distrustful; cops are a violent wing of the law that oppresses the poor and the marginalised with few to no actions taken towards upper class perpetrators - the judicial/carceral system is vicious and they have seen too many of their friends fall prey to the law to trust you or speak frankly. Trying to prove yourself trustworthy as a detective working within the criminal justice system will not be easy. 

PERFORMER: While some of the older guard below decks are slower to trust you, the younger employees are entirely enraptured with you. They all watch you on their nights off at Battery City and they’re very big fans, so when you ask them questions they won’t try to lie through falsehood. The older generations will take some time to cajole into honesty but most have already let their guard down somewhat because they can see you speak frankly and can handle manual labour (blistered fingers, bruises and bandages can be par for the course as either trade). 

ACADEMIC: No one will trust you initially because most of the help will see your standing in academia as a sign of privilege and therefore disdain towards the working classes. Talking to one miss Daisy and offering night lessons in art history and painting or one mister Mortimer and offering night him lessons in toxicological studies and properties of poisons at the university will help you gain a foothold in your investigation and make it a little easier to talk their peers specifically. Getting others to trust you may not be so easy, but it won’t be impossible.

PHASE 5: CLUES AND FOLLOW UPS This will largely consist of finding things the other characters have mentioned. In the game this will take the form of going to the locations of said clues and working through a minigame to come up with a fragment of evidence that will go on the evidence board for the final solve. These will be dictated by the occupational background you chose. 

Aspects of Phases 4 and 5 will repeat a number of times, each time depending on the outcome of the last time you spoke to an NPC or if you found a clue. Christine, the evening’s entertainment, is capable of fluttering between social strata and becoming your bridge to investigating the other half of the party; you meet her after the first Phase 5 puzzle in both Noble and Urchin backgrounds. 

PHASE 6: THE TURN  Often in detective fiction investigation of initial clues will point to a perpetrator, but this conclusion often gets overturned narratively somehow: sometimes they are working for someone else, or else the evidence will turn out to be circumstantial and not actually relevant to the murder at hand. However, because this is a game, and different occupations will lead to different clues, there will be different turns depending on the character build chosen at the start of the game. A turn can happen at any point in the game’s narrative depending on whenever the player chooses to try for the final solve - they will almost always get it wrong, but I will allow for a small pool of options. This will lead into a Phoenix Wright style interrogation sequence, but like, classier and more serious. 

Edit: June 5th 2021

PHASE 7: POST-TURN INVESTIGATIONS  So if the initial suspicion is wrong, the character often re-examines their clues and hunts around for more, recombining and re-evaluating until the true culprit prevails. This will be for the most part exactly the same for mine, although if the player has jumped to a conclusion about someone’s perceived guilt, they will lose that NPC’s cooperation and help for any clues they may require moving forward. This will be one of the easier things to code. 

PHASE 8: THE UNMASKING  After all the examining and re-evaluating and data gathering, the story climaxes with the final unmasking and social trial of the guilty party. This is where all the clues are finally connected together in a way that makes logical sense and in context works with the guilty party, who is in effect apprehended by the local constabulary. My version of this will work two-fold: the Presto, a final timed version of the red yarn evidence board puzzle; and a final witness interrogation mini-game with the murderer. I will of course be adding in dialogue to show my values surrounding policing and the carceral state regardless of whether or not Vanessa’s chosen background is a cop or not.