And here we go. Epoche talk 1

Here's the teaser for that project I was talking about... Alright I lied. This, as what happens with most of my projects on the drawing board. This is the cut down, hybrid, mutated, then twisted version of the inspiration of what the last project was. Simply because this one had less assets, less artwork, but more coding... Because I'm okay at the art but bad at coding... So.. for the first project I'm going to finish, I've given myself less room to work on the stuff I 'm good at, but challenged myself much more on the stuff I should start easy on... This first beta can only end poorly. But that's okay, that's what game development is.  So without further adieu, I'm going to talk about Epoche.

Epoche is a procedurally generated murder mystery set on a train. Picture the novel And Then There Were None meets the board game Clue, but set in a verb coin point and click.

(if you haven't you should really watch this film adaptation)

 

 

 

PLOT

 

The player starts out taking a trip, after walking around and chatting with a few of the other patrons the characters in the last three train cars realize the lock on the door has been broken and they are trapped to these last three cars. Soon after this the train goes through a tunnel and in the darkness one of the passengers on the train is murdered. From there it is a game of deduction and diplomacy to figure out who the killer is and have a solid enough argument to convince the rest of the passengers on the train. The catch is that each passenger will claim innocence, and you have to disprove their alibi to the majority of the passengers otherwise they might think you are the guilty party trying to shift blame. If you're just not convincing enough than the passengers will ignore you, the killer though, will probably take you out next. After that it doesn't matter if the passengers believe you. You have to figure out the crime within a certain time. You have roughly three murders to find enough clues at the crime scenes and from questioning the passengers before.. say he kills you. 

 

ALGORITHM

 

So the hard part of an Algorithm.. is the algorithm. I've got a list of features and what I have to do now is decide what I absolutely need to make this a functioning game. With a generated murder mystery it comes down to a balance of having clues that lead with necessity to the murder but not obviously, and leaving enough room for the player to doubt what they've found as happenstance, or even as a red haring planted by the murder to confuse him.