Basic concept and design behind (pun intended) The Secret Door

Logic and deduction games

For a long time I have enjoyed logic puzzles and detective games. I have found that many detective games are heavy on narrative and thus do a lot of hand holding and prompting to move the story along, which makes sense. However I have not seen many slow paced detective games that are filled with random factual noise that needs to be filtered into what is actually important. In most games in order to make the game more accessible every clue and bit of information will be relevant at some point in the game. In real world situations where you need to solve a problem there are tons of completely irrelevant bits of information and also loads of incorrect or distorted bits of information. Using deduction once you have the facts is relatively easy compared to accurately discovering what those facts are versus what is a deliberate lie, a misapprehension or garbled nonsense etc. 

The Dream

The game I want to make eventually would be a random procedurally generated detective game where you interview suspects and witnesses to try and deduce the who, what, where, and when of a crime. All of these characters would have deep personalities and behaviors as well as personal and professional connections to each other and various levels of knowledge about one another. Some of them may lie to protect themselves or someone else and it may not even be about a crime.

The Secret Door

The Secret Door IS NOT THAT GAME just to be clear. But I think it's a step in the right direction.  I originally made the secret door for a weekly game jam but didn't have a polished enough version to release for said jam.  I spent a few more days after the jam tinkering with it and getting it so that a very basic concept was working consistently and then as what usually happens with jam games I didn't touch it for several months.

I recently went back through a bunch of my jam games and enjoyed playing a few rounds of The Secret Door and decided that I should continue to work on it and polish it up to be shared with friends and the gaming community. 

The inspiration for The Secret Door at its core is a grid based logic puzzle, like the ones you may find in crossword puzzle variety books. That's not exactly how the game turned out, but that was the principal idea I had in mind when I started development. The gameplay is pretty simple: get clues and use those clues to deduce which doors contain traps and which door is the exit. If you think you know what trap is behind a door you can use a key to disarm it and remove some of the information noise and gain some time.

Now as far as designing a game that actually functions this way I had some challenges to overcome. How would I make clues that are both random and accurate? How would I make doors that have enough features to be challenging and interesting?

Without getting into the technical and just describing the design, here are the basic steps that are taking place:

1. Create doors

2. Assign random values to doors (e.g. hinge type, color etc.)

3. Assign random traps to doors (e.g. spike trap door)

Whenever the player generates a clue:

1. Check if there are any trap doors left

2. Check if the clue has already been given

3.  Check if the clue is for an armed door

4.  Check to see if the clue is for the exit door

If all of these conditions pass a clue is generated and displayed

The Future

My hope for this game is that I can perhaps add more interesting ways of discovering clues. Perhaps adding a little more story and dialogue and decorated rooms. For now I have to finish some of the art assets like the clock and notebook. I would like to organize the notes a little better and there are some bugs in the HTML version when it comes to text. I've had some feedback from friends and family and I need to implement a sort of tutorial or gradual progression of complexity so that the player is not instantly overwhelmed. I think the complexity of it's current form is probably going to limit the amount of people that stick with the game beyond the first 30 seconds.

Thanks for reading and please stay tuned