Design Ideas

Since researching Mystery House I have now come up with some idea of what sort of game I would like to design.
I want to keep the idea of a murder mystery type story in an enclosed area such as a house. I think this sort of idea would best be translated using a point and click type game mechanic. This way I am translating the fact that it is a text adventure game into it's nearest modern relative.

I want to keep the game two dimensional because I think it would suit the genre and I would like to have quite a distinctive visual style, I think this would be more easily acheivable in 2D.

To get more ideas for the interface and controls I will research games that are similar to what I want to design. Such as Monkey Island, Hotel Dusk, Sam and Max and Proffessor Layton.




Visual Style


As the game is 2D I want a fairly simple style so I want to create something quite cartoon like and cute rather than realistic. But I do want the game to have a creepy feel to it so I will try to give the artwork a creepy, gothic edge while keeping it cute.

Initial ideas for plot/premise of the game

I want to keep the initial premise of the game the same as the original so I want to have the protagonist arrive at a house and have to solve a puzzle and find clues to catch a murderer. 

However I would like to set the game years after the crime took place and have the protagonist try to solve a previously unsolved crime. In order to make the game interesting and have a unique selling point I want the protagonist to have some sort of special ability. As the investigation is a long time after the actual crime I thought it would be interesting if you could question the ghosts of the people who lived in the house or were murdered. 

I also had an idea that perhaps there were ghosts who wanted to help you and some who wanted to hinder you. I think that in order to get the help from ghosts you would have to uncover clues or solve puzzles to get them to share with you what they remember. This could be an opportunity to have interesting gameplay, for example, the player could experience first hand what happened to the ghost while they were living by playing through their memories.