Samuel J Thorp
Games Design
Murder on the R.M.S Tetley
Premise:
Murder on the R.M.S Tetley (RMS Tetley for short) is a murder mystery game set on a 1920's cruise ship
Players are detective Burt Blake and must solve the murder of explorer Keith Jones who has been murdered on the final day of the cruise, the player must solve the murder before the ship reaches dock and the killer escapes.
There are nine suspects all with possible motives and shakey alibi's and it is up to the player to deduce which one is the killer
Gameplay consists of searching the environment for clues and questioning the suspects until the player has a solid idea of who is the murderer, it is up to player to piece the information together
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Development:
The team for the game consisted of nine people including myself
Design
Sam Thorp - Lead Designer
James Cook - Writer/UI Design
Jack Carson-Fox - Dialogue/Mystery Test
Art
Kelli Stocks - Character Modeling
Adam Hadfield - Animation/Posing
Alex Valentine - Environment modeling
Jack Conner- Object Modeling
Programming
Jack Morril - Lead Programmer
Josh Holding - Menu Programming
We had nine weeks to complete the game
At the start of the project, the killer and victim were to be randomised but this led to an inconsistent story and a
very large amount of work for the programmers to do in a short space of time, it was decided on a single consistent murder plot with the option to expand later was the best way to approach the project.
We then moved on to the characters, nine characters/suspects provided enough variety without giving the player too much to do within the time limit of the game.
Each of the characters can be spoken to about their whereabouts, Suspicious activities and possible motives for the murder, Choosing to have dialogue options on the game gives the player a sense of investigation as opposed to players getting the information automatically, I created the characters and the personalities before me and designer James Cook charted out possible motives for each of the suspects and what their connection to the victim is.
we had to write how the murder occurred, we started at the end with how/who committed the crime and worked our way back from there, we planned where each character was at the time of the murder, what they were doing at the time, what their alibis were and what red herrings there were until we had a complete idea of the story.
All our suspects have a motive or a secret that they are trying to hide, some more than others, this was done to throw the player off and force players to think about who is the most viable killer, player will slowly cross suspects off their suspect list until they are left with only a few people who are possible murderers, the idea that the killer is framing someone was added to throw players off even more, likely thinking someone to be the killer only to find it's not so obvious.