GMTK Insider special - Playing Detective (Patreon)

Hello! As promised, here's an additional bit of last month's GMTK Insider with notes on my latest video.

Research and writing

So, detective games are something I've always been interested in. I love detective fiction, and I'm fascinated by the clever ways that developers have come up with to let the player feel like a private eye. 

For this video, I wanted to show the inherent problems of a detective game and share the creative solutions I've seen in games.

Now, I've played plenty of detective games myself - obvious stuff like LA Noire and Her Story, and more obscure fare like Obra Dinn, The Trace, Detective Grimoire, Discworld Noir, and The Shivah - but I used Google to create a complete-ish list of detective games that people dig. 

I played as much as I could, taking notes on how each game worked. Eventually I figured out that different games were representing different parts of the investigation - from exposing lies to accusing people of crimes. 

So I made a nice list of different investigation activities and then listed games which did a good and less-good job of those things (like, for following leads, LA Noire automates the process and Blackwell forces you to Google people and places)

I decided that I would need some detective fiction to show the different parts of the investigation before revealing the gameplay equivalents. I watched episodes of Luther, Sherlock, and The Killing, before coming to Mystic River.

(Yes, it’s true, I didn’t do the episode because I watched the movie. I lied, I’m sorry! It was just a nice framing device). 

My initial set-up was to show one thing in the movie (such as exposing lies) and then show how games have handled it. But it ended up with lots of repetition and didn’t have a good flow.

Some notes from this episode

Instead, I settled on the structure in the final video: start with crappy detective mechanics, and then slowly make them more and more interesting until we get to the really good stuff like The Shivah and Her Story. 

I also wanted to talk about games that allow for detective work, without being detective games, like Gone Home and Analogue: A Hate Story but I dropped them for time and flow. They’ll come back later, I’m sure. 

Capturing footage

Most of the games are on Steam so it was pretty easy to record them. Thanks to my capture-capable 3DS and a video-out cable for iOS, it was also easy to get footage for Ace Attorney and Layton Brothers. 

The Trace was annoying. It has been taken off the App Store and there’s only an Android version left. I don’t have an Android, but luckily there’s a PC emulator called BlueStacks. For Discworld Noir I had to make a Windows 98 virtual machine and it took like 3 hours and I’m still mad.

Making the transition

I wanted to come up with a nice transition for this one. I knew the information would come in chunks and they needed a clear divide. I decided to take inspiration from LA Noire and use an old film reel. 

I created this one in premiere using this new thing I’ve discovered called “adjustment layers”.

Basically, it’s an invisible clip that applies effects to any layers underneath. This is awesome for quickly recolouring or resizing footage. But also for making neat transitions.

Here, the adjustment layer does an offset to essentially wrap the clip around top to bottom, like Pac-Man going off the side of the screen. If you change the clip mid-way through the offset it makes a nice transition. 

Then I made it look nicer by having it go black and white, use a film burn effect for when the colour comes back, put on a film border, add some dusty film effects, and play a sound effect. I think it’s neat, though a bit more in-your-face than my usual effects!

Here's a video to show how it all works. 

After Effects. 

This was the first video where I really used After Effects, which is a very powerful video editor specifically for effects, motion graphics, and the like. Here’s what I used it for. 

Throughout the Mystic River segment, I wrote and drew over the footage. This was for two purposes.

One is to highlight the important information, and used a notebook/handwritten metaphor to show that the cops are gathering this information. 

Two is to obscure the footage to reduce my chances of the video getting flagged for copyright by Warner Bros. I guess it worked! The video went through without a hitch. 

This effect is achieved by drawing a shape, and then using the “trim lines” addition to make the stroke around the outside of the shape slowly appear. I cheated on the text: it’s not being written down in a natural way but it’s quick enough that people won’t notice it. 

I used the same effect when highlighting bits of the screen in various games. I use a rectangle for the outline and a mask to dim the rest of the screen. 

And again here, for highlighting things in the otherwise dark and pixelated Discworld Noir videos. 

After Effects has some really nice page turn effects!

Other stuff

So, despite my best efforts I didn’t play everything and got my fair share of “you forgot X” and “I can’t believe you missed Y” comments. Some had less merit than others...

For music I went with music from the games featured, as well as tracks from Hotel Dusk just because it sounds nice and Noir-y. I guess I can understand the complaints that I didn’t mention the game itself!

That’s kind of about it. This is an episode I have wanted to do since GMTK started, and I have been writing about detective mechanics for years. I’m glad it’s finally out there!

Lemme know if you have any questions about this one.