A Clockwork Enigma

This is an in-production, pre-alpha game.

Key Info

Platform	PC
Genre	Detective-Mystery, Steampunk, Narrative-Driven, Adventure, Thriller
Camera Perspective	First-person POV
3D or 2D	3D
Number of Players	Single-player

 

Short Summary

A Detective-Mystery-Thriller set in a Steampunk-inspired universe of Chicago. You play as Kate Warne, a young, independent Private Investigator who is in the throughs of one of the city’s most troublesome cases. A killer has been running rampant throughout the city, kidnapping, torturing until death, and wantonly dumping the victims’ bodies throughout the streets of Chicago. It’s been weeks with no leads and with the World’s Fair drawing near its peak, both Kate and her contacts at the CPD are beginning to panic. One night, Kate is summoned to the mayor’s home to discuss the investigation and is blind-sided by what she discovers.

 

About the Project

At the beginning of September our team began working on this “Detective Mystery” game. Our two designers had similar visions for a mystery-based action game inspired by the Batman Arkham games, Allan Wake, Observer: System Redux, Dishonored, and even the Nancy Drew games.

Pre-Production

When we began pre-production, we focused on a list of wants for each major aspect of the game.

In terms of aesthetics, we made vision boards to kind of corral the team’s mind to a similar thematic atmosphere:

 

 

These vision boards helped our artists create a style touchstone that they could use when creating assets for the game. The boards also helped our designers narrow down which specific features we wanted to include in the game, and how we wanted those features to look and feel like.

 

As a part of the pre-production process, we also researched games that had similar features to what we wanted to implement in the finished product.

               Item Interactivity For player-to-world object interactions we looked closely at the Resident Evil games, like Resident Evil 2: Remake, Uncharted, and The Last of us. More specifically however, we were interested in the push-and-pull feature where the character latches onto an object and either moves it in a specified direction or is able to move it through an area freely.

                Vaulting and Climbing We wanted to capitalize on the intricate nature that comes along with the general style and themes of a Steampunk universe. To do this we decided to implement a vaulting and climbing feature in which the player will be allowed to explore the city of Chicago in a more immersive experience. Again, to achieve this we looked to games like Uncharted and The Last of Us.

                Interactive Journal Since this is a detective game, it is quite given that the player is going to be collecting evidence and information throughout the game. We wanted to make this as diegetic as possible, so we looked to games like Alan Wake 2, and Shadow of a Doubt to design a Journal system that the player would use to re-examine discovered evidence, analyze interrogation dialogues, and review case notes.

                Narrative The entire story is inspired by a combination of true events and real people that actually lived roughly around the time-period that we are aiming to depict. Kate Warne is known as the first woman detective at the Pinkerton Detective Agency; Warne was part of the counterinitiative to thwart a plot to assassinate the president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861 by a coalition of secessionists. Chicago is well known for the World’s Fair, but not many know that there were actually two World’s Fairs held in Chicago, and even less know that at the end of the first one in 1893 the Mayor of Chicago, Carter Harrison, was assassinated by a newspaper distributor that Harrison had passed over for a position in the mayoral office. The cherry on top? The serial killer at the time, H. H. Holmes, was also present and active during the first World’s Fair. There are lots of sources of inspiration to draw from, and the time-period made perfect for a Steampunk themed story. While Kate Warne primarily operated with the Pinkertons in the New England area and died several years before the first World’s Fair, we believed that Kate would still be the perfect protagonist for a game of this theme and setting. With a little time-warping, anything is possible.

AI Notice: Some images used have been created using AI generation. These images are meant to be temporary stand-ins until the project is able to acquire the help of human artists to create 2D assets. The final product will not contain any permanent AI creations.