3 Steps to Become a Mystery Gamedev
A short guide for anyone wanting to make their own mystery game.
Happy Mystery Monday!
Have you ever wanted to make your own mystery game, but just didn’t know where to begin?
Today I’m going to break down the process into 3 simple steps to help you get started.
1. Choose your Idea
First, you can’t begin to make a mystery game unless you have an idea for one.
So, where do good mystery game ideas come from?
The truth is that good mystery game ideas are all around us every day. We just need to be actively looking for them in order to get inspired.
Whenever you encounter a situation that makes you ask yourself, “I wonder what that’s all about?” then you’ve got the starting point of an interesting idea.
In other words, you need to think of a curious question, plus a satisfying answer to go along with it. If you consume enough mystery entertainment, you’ll gain a strong intuitive sense of how to come up with both. Train yourself to start making these kinds of observations, and you’ll end up with more ideas than you’ll ever have time to work on.
So that means what’s truly important is having a way to choose the right idea.
And that boils down to truly understanding yourself — your goals, your passions, and your skills. Make sure your idea helps you long-term, keeps you motivated, and is something that you can realistically make.
Don’t worry too much about originality. Every game has to borrow ideas from the games that came before it, and a game that strays too far away from what’s familiar just isn’t going to land well. Successful ideas set up expectations, and then do something interesting and unique with them.
2. Plan your Outline
Once you’ve settled on your idea, you need to write a mystery outline.
Mystery games are intentionally complex and confusing, which can often be a problem for their creators. If you don’t maintain a document to write all the facts down, you’re eventually going to forget about them and accidentally confuse yourself.
So, even if you’re the kind of writer who just enjoys making things up as you go along, you absolutely need a mystery outline!
Your mystery outline should contain the following sections:
A story summary section that explains the overall structure of your story. It should provide an overview of your story in terms of acts and chapters.
A worldbuilding section that thoroughly describes the setting, and maintains a list of all relevant characters, their secrets, and the relationships between them.
A theorycrafting section that lists all clues found during the story, when and where they are found, and how they connect together to form theories that either mislead the player or reveal the solution.
And an interactivity section that describes your chosen game mechanics, as well as the puzzles using those mechanics that the player will need to solve in order to proceed through the game.
While you should aim to mostly stick to your outline, don’t worry about having all the details figured out. Often, the remaining details will come to you as you make the game, or parts of your outline may need to be changed if they contain contradictions.
The goal is to just have a document that you can easily follow, like a set of instructions to help you create the entirety of your mystery.
3. Build your Prototype
Once you have your outline ready, you can begin to build your prototype.
Start by identifying your minimum viable product. Your prototype only needs to be long enough and detailed enough to prove to yourself that the idea is worth working on. Your prototype should only cover the bare minimum that you can realistically complete in order to deliver a fun experience.
Then, choose the right tools for building it. Pick a game engine that fits your idea and is easy for you to work with. You might have to learn some programming if your idea requires it, but many game engines let you build without writing a single line of code.
Once you’ve built the systems that cover each step of your game loop, you can play through your prototype and evaluate your idea. You might need to rework the code, pivot the idea, or drop it entirely. But it’s also possible that your prototype really is fun, and your idea is something that you genuinely want to keep working on. And your mystery outline will help you continue development, all the way to the finish line.
So, that’s all there is to it!
At this point, you’ll have chosen a solid idea, built a playable prototype of that idea, and have an outline that you can reference while developing the rest of your game.
If you can do those 3 things, then you’re well on your way to being a Mystery Gamedev!
Now you might be thinking, this all sounds like a lot of work — and you’d be right! Mystery games are definitely challenging to make, but they’re also very rewarding.
So, that’s exactly why I’ve built the Mystery Game Masterclass — a self-paced online program that teaches you how to go from clueless to creator, exactly how I described above. You’ll learn the things I wish I knew when I was starting out, avoid the mistakes I ended up making, and even gain access to my special design documents for my mystery games that I’ve never shown anywhere else before!
The Masterclass will be available starting Friday, October 10th. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter: look forward to a special email from me announcing the launch! Keep an eye on your inbox over these next few days, because you won’t want to miss out!
Thanks for reading!
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