How come there are no good detective games?

[vovan]

Umm... Bump?

[vovan]

Another weekend gone. How goes it, MattH?

Hehe, not rushing you or anything, just making sure you know someone's still interested in this idea of yours. I think it has quite the potential.

[MattH]

Well, I had too much work to do anything useful this week (cough splinter cell cough). Damn there's too much before easter! I started, though.

[vovan]

Well, the week-end is nearly over. Any luck with the undertaking, MattH?

[vovan]

That's fine. You've got to make sure the idea works first, any way, right? So, think of it as a "proof-of-concept" kind of thing. Don't have to be pretty.

[DrSpike]

If you do do it make sure you get someone else to do the advertising.

[MattH]

Don't get your hopes up... it'll be a poorly coded monstrosity at best

[vovan]

Originally posted by MattH
I tell you what: this weekend I'm going to try to code something very simple, command-line based in C/C++ and see how it turns out. I'll post it if it's anything worthwile.

I'd be interested to see that. If I wasn't so busy with school-related coding projects, I would have done something myself by now.

[MattH]

I tell you what: this weekend I'm going to try to code something very simple, command-line based in C/C++ and see how it turns out. I'll post it if it's anything worthwile.

[DrSpike]

I've always said you were a good poster.

[duke o' york]

I don' think that the game we have in mind is really the kind to attract illiterate shoot-monkeys from UT forums. As far as I'm concerned, dull is good.

[bipolarbear]

I've tried te demos for the law and order games, and to be honest, they really suck. I think that if there were dectective games that were sort of like that one part of KOTOR where you have to play detective on Dantooine, only waaaaaay more heavy on the detective end of things, then that would sell really well. It would have to include a little bit of gunplay too, just to keep things from getting too dull.

[bipolarbear]

There was actually a really great game for the NES called Nightshade, where you were a dectective, and you had to solve all of these mysteries. It was quite advanced as far as interactivity is concerned for a game of its time. It was really, fun, and it was really long too. The big downside though, was that there was no way to save your progress at all. I think that's why it never took off.

[vovan]

So, in NWN, you could essentially randomly generate events and quests at every replay of the game?

I guess what bothers me most about this is that you cannot really at present implement a truly flexible storytelling engine, without which such a game would suffer (and the adventure variety would be entirely impossible). What one would have to do it seems is essentially provide a bunch of pieces of story to the game to string together randomly into a whole. But to achieve a good replay value, like Jamski said, you'd have to have a LOT of these little pieces.

[DataAeolus]

Where in the World's Carmen Santigo was a great game back then.

While it's not your traditional detective story, a lot of skills related are used in the King's Quest series.