Design Diary: The Martian Investigations: Deep Fears (Case 2)

After Case 1 of The Martian Investigations was met with a lot of positive responses, I've been spending the past couple of months, very slowly working on Case 2. I decided that I want to start pushing the boundaries of what these deduction style games usually offer. If you've played Case 1, or other deduction games such as Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, then you'll understand that deduction games generally do have a limited experience inherent in them. If you haven't played a deduction game before, then check out this post for a more detailed description. Anyway, a couple of issues with the medium:

• They cover a snapshot in time. Because the game maker has no control over the order in which scenes/locations are visited, the case cannot really evolve the plot over a single case, until the very end when the case is wrapped up.
• They are susceptible to wild plays by crazy players - players can simply take the map, pick a spot at random and visit it. This could potentially crack the case wide open if they hit on a vital clue early in the game.

In case 2, I've tried to work on these two issues in two ways:

• I've greatly expanded the map. Case 2 now uses 3 maps in total - the main Banks Settlement map, a map of the Noman Security HQ and a map of the Banks Mohole. Whilst doing this, I've tried to make things a little harder for the wild player (because there are so many locations now), whilst also making the maps more interesting to use - now there are locations that are not in the directory, but look interesting enough on the map for players to pick out and visit.
• I've included locations that are on neither the map, nor in the directory. They can only be found by talking to characters in other locations. This means that I can really reward certain lines of inquiry, and I can be sure that some locations will not be visited until a later point. Thus, I can have a plot that evolves during the case.

I'm already working on Case 3, which will stretch the mechanics of this genre even further, by using a timer mechanic which evolves the case as time goes on. The biggest hurdle will be how to offer different scenes in the same location as time goes on, but I don't want to elaborate too much on that in this Design Diary. Expect to hear something by next month, hopefully.

You can find Case 2 of The Martian Investigations here.

You can also get a twin pack, with Cases 1 and 2, here.