Preparing for Launch: Masterclass Opens October 10th
What you need to know for the Mystery Game Masterclass on October 10th.
Happy Mystery Monday!
Let’s get right into the big news:
The Mystery Game Masterclass will be available on October 10th, 2025.
This masterclass is the world's first and only course that teaches you how exactly to make your own mystery-themed video game!
As much as I wanted to release the course on Umineko Day, it turns out that the laws of physics are making it literally impossible. There is actually so much content packed into this course that I need nearly a full additional week to make sure that it’s all presented in the best possible way.
Every time I sit down to work on this course, it keeps getting bigger. I always realize that there’s something else I forgot to include. So, despite being halfway done with the slides right now, I’m realizing that there are even more things I need to add in.
There’s a pretty good chance I’ll still feel this way after releasing it, too. Just so you’re aware, anyone who purchases the course will have lifetime access, and will receive all updates to the course for free.
But I just want to ensure that the course I release is the best possible job I could have done. While the previous deadline was great for giving me the motivation to get as far as I have, giving myself just a few more days is necessary to ensure the best possible experience for all of you.
I really didn’t want to delay it too much, but it wouldn’t be right to rush it out, either. So October 10th is the perfect middle ground.
15 years of lessons in 15 hours of content
The good news is that progress is coming along extremely well. It might be taking just a bit longer than I would have liked, but the results are showing that it’s worth the wait.
Just so you understand how much content is in the course:
50+ lessons teaching all about mystery, structure, worldbuilding, theorycrafting, interactivity, and prototyping
Approximately 150,000 words of script
Estimated 12 to 15 hours of video
Over 500 slides with even more words and pictures
Homework assignments and helpful handouts
Exclusive game design materials from my games
Bonus modules beyond the core content
I’m still in the recording phase, so those numbers are likely going to change a bit. But the reality is that this is the biggest project I’ve ever worked on, both in terms of ideas, as well as in terms of pure length.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’m putting everything I’ve learned over my 15+ years of making video games into this one masterclass. I’ve even learned a lot myself while building this course!
For example, over the past several years I’ve studied hundreds of mystery games to see what underlying ideas the best ones all share. From those observations, I’ve developed a series of frameworks to help anyone regardless of experience level better understand the complexity of the mystery genre.
Characters, clues, twists, and so on are complicated concepts. Most stories that people write don’t need to hold up logically, but mystery stories are held to a higher standard. It’s not just about keeping people engaged, but about surprising them with a moment of enlightenment at the very end. This task can seem incredibly daunting if you’ve never successfully done it before.
So, my frameworks are designed to quickly and easily create those parts of your story, and integrate them into each other — as well as integrating them into your actual game mechanics, puzzles, and programming.
Finding even just a course on mystery writing is hard enough. Mixing that with video game development and interactivity is such a rare combination that I feel genuinely honored to be the one putting this stuff together. It’s like I’m actually engaging in the process of being a detective myself: discovering new insights and presenting them to you in an easy-to-understand way.
What really blows my mind is the fact that my own little frameworks actually perfectly fit when applied to my very own game, Detective Butler: Maiden Voyage Murder, which I originally created and released more than 10 years ago. I was only a high school student when I began working on that game, and released it before my second year of college. I had no idea what I was doing — I only had the desire to make a really fun mystery game, and had the dedication to see it through.
Somehow I managed to strike gold with that first game — my second attempt was filled with many mistakes. So I often wondered what it was about the first game that resulted in such a successful product. I couldn’t have explained it at the time.
But now I have the language to explain it perfectly. And it’s the same things that all good mystery games — like those produced by the other members of our community — ended up doing just as well.
So the fact that I’ve created my own generalized frameworks, and can then zoom in on my own decade-old game and explain exactly how those frameworks worked together in harmony, tells me that I’ve discovered some important truths about the world.
And I couldn’t be more excited to share those truths with all of you.
10 Questions & Answers
I’ve already had some people asking questions, so I figured today would be a good enough occasion to try to answer some of them and set expectations for the course.
Q1: What will this course teach me?
A: You will primarily learn narrative design and puzzle design as applied to the mystery game genre. You will learn how to come up with a mystery game idea, how to structure your story and game, how to design your setting and characters, how to use clues to create twists, how to use game mechanics to create puzzles, and how to create a prototype to test your idea. By the end of the course, you will have a solid idea, the skills to make a playable prototype, and a mystery outline that can take you beyond the prototype stage and finish the full game.
Q2: Does this course teach programming or a specific game engine?
A: This course is designed to be game engine agnostic, since there are too many different options to just pick one for this course. Instead, you will learn the underlying programming principles that apply to all mystery game prototypes. Although you will be taught how to choose your game engine, you will ultimately be responsible for learning your choice of engine and actually building your game. Pseudocode will be shown to demonstrate these concepts, so you will need to adapt what is being taught to your choice of engine or programming language.
Q3: Who is this course designed for? How much experience do I need?
A: This course is designed for anyone who wants to learn how to make a mystery-themed video game. You don't need any game making experience or story writing experience in order to benefit from this course. It will cover the basics of story structure as well as game structure, ensuring that you know all the basics before diving into deeper topics. Even experienced game developers will benefit from this course if you're looking for easy to understand frameworks and techniques that drastically reduce your time spent and effort involved.
Q4: What's the difference between a mystery game and a puzzle game?
A: A mystery game is a type of puzzle game where the story is the puzzle. The puzzles are designed to use the story as context to set up an interesting question, and the answer rewards the player with a greater understanding of the story. While you could make a puzzle game with no story or a story game with no puzzles, the unique combination of both is what makes a mystery game so unique to create and so compelling to play.
Q5: Do I need to write a novel to make a mystery game?
A: Not at all! Games can tell mystery stories through visuals and interactions. Although many popular mystery games tend to have a lengthy wordcount, there's no strict wordcount you need to hit. Your story is your setting, characters, clues, and events — you don't need a novel-length script. This course will ensure that you've designed a mystery story that you can integrate seamlessly into your gameplay.
Q6: Do these lessons apply to all kinds of mystery games?
A: Yes, I believe they do. While different subgenres will have more specific requirements that would take too much time to examine in this course, the same core underlying principles that you learn in this course will apply to all of them. There are different depths of mystery: games that only use mystery tropes, games that have a mysterious atmosphere, mystery games with open-ended solutions, and mystery games with highly detailed solutions. We're going to cover that last type of mystery, which should train you properly so that you can easily create the other three levels of mystery. When you learn the deepest and most complex type, the other kinds are just a simpler version of what you already know.
Q7: What if my mystery game isn't a traditional murder mystery whodunit?
A: You will still benefit from taking this course. Mystery games are about seeking the truth, so as long as you've got secrets hidden in your game and have characters who are working to uncover them or keep them hidden, then the lessons you learn in this course will still apply.
Q8: How much time and effort has gone into making this course?
A: I've spent the past 4 months actively building this course full-time, but I've also spent the past 2 years studying mystery games and talking with many notable mystery game developers. And beyond that, I've been making mystery games since 2010, and all of the lessons I've ever learned have culminated into the creation of this course. So I'd really say that 15 years of hard work have gone into making this masterclass a reality.
Q9: Why buy this course if I can find this information online for free?
A: There are very few free resources on mystery games, but even of the ones that do exist, they only cover a fraction of what you need to know. Compiling and organizing everything would take you months or even years of time and effort, assuming that information is even any good. Ask yourself how you're going to know what you should even be looking for. And what you won't find anywhere else are my personal experiences, design methods, and insights from making my own award-winning mystery games. I'll teach you the lessons I wish I knew and how to avoid making the mistakes I made when just starting out.
Q10: Why not just give away this information for free?
A: I have a big list of plans for Mystery Gamedev, and I want to be able to work on Mystery Gamedev full-time. Purchasing this course — essentially a culmination of my life's work — enables me to dedicate myself 100% to improving the mystery game genre. My goal is to continue to put out educational content, build efficient tools for developers, organize community events, and spread awareness of mystery games to fans that want to play them. When you buy this course, you're making a direct impact on the future of the genre, and helping the Mystery Gamedev community grow and prosper.
Conclusion
So, that’s all I’ve got for today.
If you have any questions about the course, feel free to comment below or ask in our Discord community, and I’ll be happy to clarify.
The more I work on this course, the more excited I get about it. And I don’t want to tease too much or overhype things — but like I said, I keep naturally coming up with so many ideas for course content that I’ve already planned out more for the future. I feel like I’m actively solving a real mystery every time I sit down to work on it, and it feels incredible to actually make progress every time.
Also, the more time I’ve spent working on this course, the more I’ve come to genuinely enjoy the process of writing scripts, creating slides, and recording videos. I guess this was the training I needed to become comfortable creating other kinds of content in the future. My only regret is that I didn’t start any of this sooner.
Anyway, with all that said — please look forward to October 10th!
Thanks for reading!
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