For the past year, I have been developing a game called The Investigation. The problem with I’ve stumbled across now, is that I’ve failed to make it exciting. Sure, the current concept might be fun to play for a day, but it doesn’t hold up.
How have I failed to make it exciting?
I’ve made the idea for the game too bland, there’s nothing that makes it different from it just being “Another” Among Us type-game.
There’s no originality in the concept-idea, the first idea of the game was to make it a 12 people sitting around guessing who the murder is type game, and the current idea of the game is to make it exactly like Among Us just without the things like Sabotage, Kill whenever, Emergency Meetings.
No matter what I try to think of, I just can’t think of any ideas on how not to make it; Bland, Orginal & Non-RNG-Based.
Of course I know that this should be what I should’ve had in control when I first started making the game, but my ideas just failed.
So is there anyone out there who has plently of ideas for an Detective-Thriller game?
You should conceptualize some interesting mechanics. I have something that could be useful. I have this chatbot algorithm. It’s designed for a player to ask it questions. You could customize it easily adding commands if the player gives the command. This script uses a large table of synonymous words and phrases to understand better what a player is asking.
For ideas I would reccomend you brainstorm some ideas with Bing or ChatGPT. It could help you create large tables of strings about the detective thriller scenario since their are a lot of books on the subject that it had been trained on.
You could even even implement a voting system to allow the players to influence the map of the next place with a list of keyword variables.and allow the player to be able to use a diverse set of words to describe it.
I do agree that using interesting mechanics is a Good way to make a game original slash exciting, but I’m not sure where an AI/chatbot fits into that exciting part.
I would say I am too imaginative so off the top of my head, include hidden guns among the houses that only those who are deeply searching for clues will find. The guns are used as a shield but to suit your theme of the FBI, guns are better than saying shields. If someone with a gun is attempted to be murdered, queue a screen than says something like "Someone tried to murder you, luckily you scared them off with your gun, but you wasted all your bullets and you didn’t see the culprit’s face - Your gun is now useless (aka shield is gone).
Another one I had is to include anonymous bribes that traitors can deliver to people in exchange for something such as money. Off the top of my head, a traitor bribes a player anonymously with 1000 in game currency to transfer their vote to the traitor or something like that.
Not gonna lie, I’ve nearly given up on the game. The scripter bailed on me. But both of your ideas are really good, would you care to try and make some more ideas? Cause I’m all out of ideas.