Making a Case for Mystery-Themed Automation Games
What if solving crimes was a scalable system, not a one-time puzzle?
The popular game development blog How to Market a Game often talks about “crafty buildy simulationy strategy” games as being one of the best-selling genres on Steam. Rather than designing the game around a limited amount of content, these games are designed around infinitely replayable systems in which content naturally emerges.
Not only do players enjoy the infinite content, but in the modern Internet age where content is king, these games are highly valuable for content creators (streamers, influencers, etc.) who can get your game in front of their audience.
Of course, mystery games almost always fall outside of this “crafty-buildy” category. Which is a shame, because that’s one big marketing disadvantage. But does it really have to be that way? I’m not so sure.
Today happens to be the start of Steam’s Automation Fest, which naturally features a large number of these kinds of games (when there are systems, there are always ways to automate them). And, unsurprisingly, the number of mystery games included in this fest is… zero!
As usual, I’m tempted to ask: What would a mystery-themed automation game look like? And why hasn’t it been done before?
What are automation games?
An automation game is a game where the primary objective is to design and optimize self-sustaining systems. You start by manually acquiring raw resources, with the goal of building machines and systems that automatically transform those inputs into useful outputs.
Note that automation games are different from idle games: Idle games place emphasis on “waiting” — minimizing the time to wait and maximizing outputs from doing so. Automation games might also involve time as a resource, but instead place the emphasis on building and designing efficient systems to accomplish those tasks, while working as much as you can in parallel instead of idly waiting around. Idle games also often feature one-way progression, while automation games allow your machines to break down if they were built or planned poorly.
Automation games require a deep level of analytical, mathematical, programming, and engineering skill, as making one small change to your setup can drastically reshape your progress (in either good or bad ways).
For example, when I recently played Factorio, my first run — a very sloppy job — took me 50 hours to complete. After several more attempts, I was able to reach the end in just under 15 hours.
But in those failed attempts, it was clear that I had no chance to improve my time if I didn’t restart right away, because automation effects compound over time. Making a series of strategic choices at the beginning of the game can seriously impact the difficulty of the rest of it. A powerful lesson that applies to the real world, too.
Why do people play automation games?
The reason people enjoy automation games likely comes from the same enjoyment derived from automating real-life processes: “the factory must grow!”
We all like to see numbers go up. When you can accomplish the same results in faster time and with less effort, you can make your numbers go up higher and faster. There is an incredibly satisfying feeling that comes from taking a problem that once gave you a lot of trouble, and turning it into something you can now completely ignore.
Even beyond that, it’s satisfying to have come up with your own unique solution to the problem. You can design your automations in an endless variety of ways — though some are certainly more optimized than others. But the fun comes from being presented with an open-ended challenge, and responding with a solution that is entirely your own.
Additionally, most automation games offer a relaxing way to unwind after a busy day of real life. There is always something more to do in the game — always a new goal to achieve. It’s a low-stakes way of challenging yourself to do better than last time, and solve problems that you weren’t sure how to solve before.
Last but certainly not least, these games can be addicting. They might even become a lifestyle. They aren’t the kind of game you can just master overnight, if at all. Sharing strategies or automations with online communities provides players with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and status.
Are automation games a good fit for mystery?
There is actually a pretty decent overlap with what players expect from mystery games:
Emphasize organizing order out of chaos
Use logic, reasoning, and pattern recognition
Encourage creation and testing of theories
So if they are so similar, then why haven’t any mystery automation games been made before? I suspect the answer lies in the one key difference: automation games tend to lack any narrative development at all.
In automation games, story does not matter beyond an excuse to start building things. Your reward for finally launching the rocket in Factorio is a just congratulatory pop-up with the option to either quit or continue playing.
All stories naturally have a beginning, middle, and end. But automation games are meant to be endless. And we can’t let a story get in the way of letting the factory grow.
This is where things get tricky: to truly make a mystery-automation game, we need some kind of narrative development. We need our automations to answer the questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how.
One obvious answer is to just wrap some cutscenes around our automation progress. Every milestone, play a cutscene revealing a bit more of the mystery. Technically it works, but it’s not truly blending the genres together. We can do better.
My proposition is to have an infinite number of stories (mystery cases) that each start and stop as you solve them. If you want to keep playing, you can always solve more. But each case has its own narrative (who, how, why) as well as the overarching (and emergent) narrative of your factory’s growth and overall case management.
Creating an infinite number of mysteries requires procedural generation, and only a handful of procedural mystery games have ever even been attempted. The programming systems required to string all this narrative complexity into an already-complex genre, as well as the fact that most people making mystery games are likely to be storytellers over engineers, is a pretty plausible explanation as to why there aren’t yet any games of this kind. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
(BTW, if there happens to be a mystery-automation game that I couldn’t find, let me know!)
Adding story into automation
As a programmer, I’ve done a lot of automation in real life. And solving mysteries is a lot of work that could certainly be automated. So if we approach our game design from a real-world perspective, we might want to design systems that automatically:
Collect evidence
Analyze or process evidence
Construct theories from evidence
Prove or disprove theories using evidence
Like mining deposits of iron ore and smelting them in furnaces, we can “mine” a crime scene for clues and process each piece in a forensics lab. We can call these our “mystery automation machines.”
One machine might be able to convert 50 units of crime scene residue into 1 unit of DNA evidence, and another machine might require 5 units of DNA evidence and 10 units of suspect information before crafting a theory about whether or not that particular suspect was at the crime scene.
Taking it further: testimonies get parsed into time-stamped facts, and contradiction detectors compare timelines. Each module in the system pushes the narrative forward without any cutscenes, and the story is naturally embedded into the gameplay.
When the automation is complete and the final theory is confirmed, the mystery is solved not just by the player, but through the machine they constructed. That’s the real fusion of genres: it’s crime-solving of a different kind.
Dealing with time and scale
One key component of automation games is time management, an often overlooked gameplay mechanic in mystery games. Not only do tasks require in-game time, but they often require real-world time, and so the player is naturally incentivized to automate them away to reach their goals faster. But faster growth comes at other costs: loss of the resources used to build the improvements, and higher upkeep. When used properly, saving time leads to a virtuous cycle of growth.
In a mystery game, time can absolutely be a key component of investigations:
New crimes occur over time if each culprit is not caught
Allocate resources to prioritize which case to solve first
Enemies periodically attempt to destroy your automations and evidence
Clues decay or change over time
Suspects move based on schedules
Another major part of automation games is scale. The cost of resources grow exponentially over time — you only need a few dozen raw materials to start, but by the end you’re consuming hundreds or even thousands each minute. Managing so many resources is near-impossible on your own, so you can enlist the help of bots to do some meta-automation on your behalf.
In a mystery game, scale can look like:
Hiring other detectives (costing money)
Building robot detectives (costing electricity)
Transporting evidence across long-distance physical locations
Solving hundreds or even thousands of crimes
Solving crimes beyond one location (“crossing state lines”)
There is so much more that mysteries can integrate with automation games, that we are really just scratching the surface. But even this much — just the basics — should be plenty to work with for now.
Final thoughts
Automation in mystery games is a completely unexplored topic, but that’s exactly what makes it ripe for innovation. Considering the automation genre is so popular among Steam gamers, it seems like blending mystery and automation is the perfect opportunity to level the playing field for the mystery genre.
Thanks for reading!
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