The Mystery Game Masterclass is LIVE!
How this course will help you overcome the 6 biggest problems you'll face as a mystery game developer.
Happy Mystery Monday!
I am incredibly excited to announce that the Mystery Game Masterclass: From Clueless to Creator is now available for purchase!
If you’re ready to buy, then feel free to click right here. Or if you’d rather learn a little bit more about it first, then continue reading below.
What is the Mystery Game Masterclass?
The Mystery Game Masterclass is something I’ve worked on relentlessly for the past 6 months, if not the entire past two years. Even beyond that, it feels like something I’ve been working toward creating over my entire game development career.
That’s because from 2010 to 2025, I’ve spent more than 15,000 hours learning how to make mystery games work.
That time spans everything from creating my first mystery game between high school and college classes from 2010 to 2013, to working full-time on a sequel from 2015 to 2017, to developing a custom game engine from 2019 to 2021, and then spending every day since 2023 studying the design of hundreds of mystery games in depth.
All of that effort came at a real cost — not just in time, but also in opportunity. I could have taken a steady software development career, earning at least the median American income of $70,000 per year. Instead, I chose to invest those same years into mastering this craft, experimenting with every system, engine, and structure that I could.
Nearly a full decade since graduation, that’s an opportunity cost of at least $700,000 — all to discover the frameworks that now power this masterclass. The result is six complete systems that compress my own 15,000 hours of trial and error into a step-by-step process of approximately just 15 hours of easy-to-understand video content.
The 6 Mystery Game Design Frameworks
Each system is built to solve a very specific problem that all mystery game developers face at one point or another. So let’s briefly go over each system, and how they will benefit you.
Problem #1: You’ve struggled to settle on a mystery idea.
It’s often hard enough to come up with or decide on the right idea. You might get overwhelmed by possibilities, or lose interest after only a few months or even weeks of development.
Most mystery games fail before they’re ever written — not because of bad writing or design, but because the core idea wasn’t strong enough to sustain the entire process. A mystery needs more than a premise; it needs a curious question that’s both intriguing and solvable. Without that, you can’t build tension, clues, or a satisfying answer.
That’s why idea generation isn’t just “the first step.” It’s the foundation everything else rests on.
The Solution: The Mystery Ideation System
The Mystery Ideation System gives you a structured process for developing ideas that actually last. It helps you find the intersection between what fascinates you and what engages players — so your motivation stays strong through the entire project.
You’ll learn how to identify a Curious Question (the unsolved mystery that drives the story) and a Satisfying Answer (the logical truth that makes it all click). You’ll also explore how to mix and match tropes, tricks, and twists to instantly anchor your idea in a recognizable subgenre, without falling into clichés.
This system teaches you how to evaluate whether an idea is strong enough to survive development before you ever start writing or coding.
By mastering the Mystery Ideation System, you’ll be able to:
Easily identify mystery games and what makes them fun.
Stop wasting time on ideas that don’t hold up, because you’ll know which ones are worth pursuing.
Stay motivated longer, because you’ll pick ideas that genuinely sustain your interest.
Avoid creative burnout, since you’ll always have a clear sense of direction and purpose.
Stand out in your niche, creating mysteries that feel both familiar and innovative.
Instead of staring at a blank page or cycling through abandoned projects, you’ll walk away with a concrete mystery idea that can carry an entire game from start to finish.
The Mystery Ideation System turns scattered inspiration into solid creative architecture. It’s not about chasing the perfect idea, but about building the right one, that keeps both you and your players curious until the very end.
Problem #2: You’ve spent more time planning your mystery than actually making it.
Once you’ve got a great idea for a mystery game, the next challenge hits fast: How do you actually turn that idea into something playable?
Most creators dive right into writing scenes or building puzzles, only to realize halfway through that the story doesn’t line up, the pacing feels off, and the clues don’t add up to a fair solution. You might have a brilliant twist or interesting characters, but if the structure isn’t airtight, the mystery collapses under its own weight.
It’s not just about organizing your notes, but about understanding how story and gameplay structure intertwine. A mystery must be solvable, not just surprising. It needs a rhythm that builds curiosity, delivers clues at the right time, and keeps the player one step behind the truth without losing them along the way.
So without a clear system to plan all this, you’ll constantly be fixing contradictions, rewriting dialogue, and cutting scenes that no longer fit. It’s frustrating, time-consuming, and demoralizing.
A mystery without structure isn’t a mystery, it’s just chaos. You can’t test it, can’t balance it, and can’t finish it. And every time you start a new idea, you’ll be rebuilding from scratch, just as aimless as before.
That’s the point where most indie developers fail: not because their idea was bad, but because their foundation wasn’t built for such an ambitious scope.
The Solution: The Mystery Planning System
The Mystery Planning System gives you a clear, step-by-step method for turning a loose concept into a structured, playable design. It’s built specifically for mystery games, where story, puzzles, and logic must all align perfectly.
You’ll learn how to define your story structure (what happens, and why), your game structure (how the player experiences it), and how to weave both together so that each scene, clue, and event serves a purpose.
This system also introduces the principles of fair play, pacing, and solvability — the cornerstones of mystery design. You’ll learn how to plan for nonlinearity, handle branching paths, and keep the player engaged no matter how they approach your story.
Instead of guessing your way forward, you’ll have a clear framework that ensures every part of your game fits like a puzzle piece.
By mastering the Mystery Planning System, you’ll be able to:
Turn messy ideas into clear blueprints that guide development from start to finish.
Catch logical flaws early, before they derail months of work.
Balance gameplay and storytelling so one never overshadows the other.
Plan for flexibility, allowing your mystery to evolve without losing coherence.
Build confidence in your process, knowing your design can stand up to scrutiny.
Instead of rewriting endlessly, you’ll move forward with purpose. The Mystery Planning System gives you the structure professional mystery designers use, scaled down to something you can apply right now. No guesswork, no confusion, no wasted time.
Problem #3: You’ve created a world that looks interesting, but lacks depth.
Even with a solid plan in place, many creators struggle to make their mystery feel real. The world feels hollow, the characters are one-dimensional, and the player doesn’t care about what’s happening.
You might have a detailed lore document, dozens of character bios, and pages of backstory — yet none of it connects emotionally or logically to the mystery itself.
This happens because most creators focus on worldbuilding as decoration, not as function. They create interesting worlds, but not mystery worlds — worlds full of secrets, contradictions, and relationships that generate questions worth solving.
Mystery thrives on hidden information. If your world doesn’t have layers, your players won’t engage with it deeply. Every locked door, strange rumor, or suspicious behavior should make them want to dig further. Without secrets, your game might look beautiful, but it won’t feel mysterious. Players will move through the story passively, instead of exploring actively.
The Solution: The Mystery Worldbuilding System
The Mystery Worldbuilding System teaches you how to construct settings and characters that don’t just exist, but also interact. It transforms your world into an active part of the mystery, where every location, object, and relationship hides a deeper truth.
You’ll learn how to design environments that produce clues naturally, rather than forcing you to scatter them later. You’ll create characters whose motives, secrets, and relationships generate conflict and tension automatically. And you’ll learn how to weave those threads together so that every discovery feels like peeling back another layer of truth.
This isn’t about adding more detail, but about creating meaningful detail. The kind that makes your players think, “Something about this place doesn’t add up,” and drives them to keep exploring.
By mastering the Mystery Worldbuilding System, you’ll be able to:
Create settings that feel alive, with their own internal logic and history.
Write believable characters who act according to their motives, not plot convenience.
Hide information in plain sight, giving your game depth and replay value.
Develop emotional stakes, so players care about solving the mystery.
Build a world that players want to return to, even after the case is closed.
Your mystery will no longer take place in a world, but will instead emerge from it. Every conversation, location, and object will contribute meaningfully to the puzzle, creating a sense of immersion that keeps players hooked from start to finish.
The Mystery Worldbuilding System turns lifeless backdrops into living, breathing ecosystems of intrigue, where every secret has a story, and every story hides a secret.
Problem #4: You’ve crafted a solution that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
You’ve got your setting, characters, and story outline — but when you start piecing it all together, cracks appear: the clues don’t add up. The solution feels forced. The twist doesn’t make sense in hindsight.
Every creator faces a moment when the mystery looks solid on paper, but the logic underneath starts to crumble. You might have a dramatic ending, but the chain of reasoning that connects everything isn’t airtight. And in a mystery, logic is everything.
Players will forgive clunky dialogue or rough visuals, but they’ll never forgive a broken mystery. Even one twist that falls flat, or even trivializes the time and effort that the player put into solving the case, ruins their experience and results in a negative review.
When players feel tricked instead of challenged, they stop trusting you, and so they stop enjoying the game. The emotional payoff collapses because trust is no longer there.
This problem ruins more mystery games than anything else. And that’s what separates a decent puzzle from a truly unforgettable mystery.
The Solution: The Mystery Theorycrafting System
The Mystery Theorycrafting System teaches you how to build your mystery like an engineer, not just a storyteller. It’s a complete logical framework for constructing, testing, and refining the chain of reasoning that holds your story together.
You’ll learn how to design clues that lead naturally to deductions, create false leads that still make sense, and weave multiple theories through your story until the truth emerges as the only possible answer.
This system takes the guesswork out of making your mystery make sense by giving you clear tools to analyze every cause, effect, and connection before you even finish your game.
By mastering the Mystery Theorycrafting System, you’ll be able to:
Design mysteries that reward deduction, not random guessing.
Build confidence in your story’s structure, knowing every clue has a purpose.
Deliver twists that hit hard, because they’re grounded in logic, not shock value.
Craft mysteries that stand up to replay, where players appreciate new details each time.
Earn your players’ trust, making them feel genuinely clever when they solve the case.
Your story will no longer rely on coincidence or contrivance. Instead, it will earn every moment of surprise. Players won’t just finish your mystery; they’ll study it, analyzing how every piece fit together so perfectly in the end.
The Mystery Theorycrafting System turns creative intuition into rigorous design. It’s how you make sure that players can’t stop talking about your game even long after the credits roll.
Problem #5: You’ve only made a passive story, not an interactive game.
Many creators reach this stage and realize something’s off. The writing is sharp and the logic is sound. But when people play it, it feels passive. Players click through dialogue, read clues, and watch the story unfold — yet they don’t feel like they’re actually investigating.
That’s because most developers design the mystery as something to be told, not something to be played. They think about plot and puzzles separately instead of seeing them as one system.
The result: games that look like mysteries, but don’t feel like them.
The player is reduced to a spectator, following breadcrumbs instead of uncovering them. And when that happens, even the most brilliant story loses its impact.
Mystery games are defined by participation. The moment the player stops feeling like an active detective, the illusion collapses. You can’t build tension, satisfaction, or immersion if the player isn’t engaged through action and decision-making.
When your game doesn’t offer meaningful interactivity, it stops being a mystery game and becomes a mystery story disguised as one. That subtle difference determines whether your game gets remembered or forgotten.
The Solution: The Mystery Interaction System
The Mystery Interaction System bridges the gap between narrative and gameplay. It shows you how to take the logic and story you’ve built, and translate it into mechanics that feel like investigation.
This system helps you design player actions that naturally reinforce your mystery’s core themes. Whether it’s questioning suspects, connecting evidence, exploring environments, or testing hypotheses, you’ll learn how to make every interaction meaningful.
You’ll also master difficulty balancing, feedback design, and puzzle integration — ensuring that every challenge feels fair, intuitive, and rewarding.
With this system, your game stops being a passive narrative and becomes an interactive experience of deduction.
By mastering the Mystery Interaction System, you’ll be able to:
Turn passive storytelling into active gameplay that players can engage with directly.
Design puzzles that reinforce your story’s logic, not interrupt it.
Balance frustration and satisfaction, keeping players immersed for hours.
Make every choice and action meaningful, tying player input directly to narrative payoff.
Create the kind of immersion that only true interactive storytelling can achieve.
In other words, you game will make players actually feel like detectives. They won’t feel like they’re watching someone else solve the case; they’ll feel like they solved it themselves.
The Mystery Interaction System transforms your design from static to dynamic, from narrative to participatory, from “a story with puzzles” to a story that is a puzzle.
It’s the difference between something people admire once, and something they replay, analyze, and recommend for years.
Problem #6: You’ve wasted hours of effort building systems that don’t matter.
Many developers make it this far only to lose themselves in endless development. They start building, and suddenly the clear vision they had becomes buried under a pile of unfinished systems, placeholder art, and half-working mechanics.
You tell yourself you’re “making progress,” but weeks go by and nothing feels finished. The story isn’t playable yet, the puzzles don’t flow, and every time you fix one thing, you break something else.
This happens because most creators don’t define what success looks like for a prototype. They try to build the whole game instead of building the core experience. Without clear boundaries, the project grows endlessly, and burnout follows close behind.
When you get lost in building, you stop learning from your own design. You delay feedback, waste effort polishing things that don’t matter yet, and lose momentum before you ever see your game in motion.
Mystery games especially require iteration, because the logic of deduction can only be tested through play. If you can’t quickly test your ideas, you’ll never know whether your mystery actually works.
The Solution: The Mystery Prototyping System
The Mystery Prototyping System gives you a roadmap to escape the development maze. It teaches you how to identify your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — the smallest possible version of your game that still demonstrates your mystery’s core loop.
You’ll learn how to prioritize what matters most. You’ll know what to leave out, what to fake, and what to refine later. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to measure whether your prototype should actually be developed into a full game.
Most importantly, you’ll learn how to actually build what makes a mystery game an actual game. Any mystery game prototype is going to need discovery mechanics, deduction mechanics, and decision mechanics in order to represent one full cycle of the gameplay loop. Building these parts of your game efficiently is a key part of rapidly prototyping your mystery game ideas.
This system helps you build smarter, faster, and with purpose, so that every hour of effort moves your mystery closer to completion.
By mastering the Mystery Prototyping System, you’ll be able to:
Avoid endless development loops by setting clear and achievable goals.
See results faster, motivating you to keep improving instead of getting stuck.
Gather useful feedback early, before investing time in unnecessary polish.
Identify and fix design flaws while they’re still easy to change.
Finish projects with confidence, knowing you’ve built something functional, testable, and fun.
Your project will finally move from “someday” to something real. You’ll stop spinning your wheels in endless development and start making measurable progress toward release.
The Mystery Prototyping System replaces overwhelm with clarity. It’s how you go from building endlessly to building intentionally, turning your mystery from an idea into a playable reality.
All that, and even more!
If all of those systems and frameworks sound like something that you could really benefit from in order to learn how to make a mystery game, then I have some great news for you.
All six of these systems are exactly what you’ll find in the Mystery Game Masterclass!
When you purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass, you will receive:
The Mystery Ideation System (Module 1)
The Mystery Planning System (Module 2)
The Mystery Worldbuilding System (Module 3)
The Mystery Theorycrafting System (Module 4)
The Mystery Interaction System (Module 5)
The Mystery Prototyping System (Module 6)
Each module comes with one quiz, one homework assignment, and helpful handouts to ensure that you truly learn and understand each system, to make real and meaningful progress toward your mystery game development goals.
The first two modules will be instantly available, with the next two modules unlocking after one week, and the final two modules (and bonus content!) unlocking after two weeks. Each pair of modules is roughly 5 hours of content, so you can spend 1 hour of focused learning each day to keep up a decent pace — or go slower if you prefer.
You will also receive a 90-day free trial of Mystery Gamedev Academy, where you can ask other enrolled students questions, and attend weekly Q&A sessions where you can ask me directly for help on the course, or any other question about your mystery game projects you might have ($75 value).
Also, as part of a limited-time launch bonus, the first 25 people to purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass will receive one complimentary (free) 60-minute Mystery Gamedev Coaching Session ($125 value).
And last but not least, also as part of a limited-time launch bonus, anyone who purchases From Clueless to Creator before January 1st, 2026 will be granted free access to the follow-up course From Prototype to Product when it’s eventually released, which will cover even more advanced topics including:
Art and sound design
Workflow and team management
Demo development and testing
Marketing and monetization
Launching your game
From Clueless to Creator focuses on the essentials of all mystery game design that novices will enjoy, while From Prototype to Product focuses on making a complete mystery game experience aimed at more accomplished developers. Both courses are two halves of the Mystery Game Masterclass, and so like I said above, all early buyers (prior to January 1st, 2026) will receive the second half as soon as it comes out at no extra cost.
Think of it as a way to support its development, while getting a great deal for yourself in the process.
So, the question that you are probably wondering is, of course, how much is this going to cost you?
Maybe a better question to ask is how much it’s going to cost you not to buy the Mystery Game Masterclass.
Remember, I gave up the safety of a stable software career to spend 15,000 hours mastering one thing: how to design mystery games that truly work.
You don’t have to.
Instead, you can access every framework, every test, and every lesson distilled from over a decade of firsthand experience for just one single payment of $497.
You’re not just buying a course. You’re reclaiming the years I already spent figuring it all out. You’ll still need to put in your own effort and do the actual work to build your game, but at least you’re starting on a solid foundation and with someone to help you out every step of the way — from clueless to creator, and from prototype to product.
If this sounds like the best thing you’ve ever heard, then you can purchase the Mystery Game Masterclass by clicking right here.
Or if you’re still on the fence, you can read through some of my previous posts on the topic:
Otherwise, I’m still going to provide you with all the free content that you’re used to receiving from me. Whether it’s these newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, the mystery game database, or game jam events, I still want to keep creating things for the community.
So any financial support I receive will enable me to continue my work on Mystery Gamedev full-time, and to keep those things freely available for everyone else.
And so as always, I greatly appreciate all of your support, no matter who you are or how you’ve managed to help. Even though I’ve done so much work, Mystery Gamedev is just not possible without you.
So thank you for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, and in return, I hope to be able to give the same to you.
(Click here to buy the Masterclass now!)
Thanks for reading!
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