Holistic Game Design: Creating Supernatural Detective Abilities

By: Carson Hurwitz (Game Designer / Producer)

In designing The Shadows That Linger, a narrative-driven indie mystery game, it was important to me that every aspect of the game was as purposeful as it was thematic. With this attention to detail in mind, one of my main challenges was to design mystery-solving mechanics that fit within the game’s world for the player character, Ilana. Ilana is a detective figure and spiritual medium who can perceive and communicate with people’s shadows, which represent their inner darkness. Ilana’s two supernatural abilities are “Shadow Vision” and “Shadow Dialogue”, both of which consume her energy when used. The player can restore energy by performing acts of self-care in-game such as drinking tea, petting the dog, playing the piano, etc.

Before getting into the abilities, let’s lay out the framework of The Shadows That Linger. I was designing a 2D point-&-click mystery game with a focus on a paranormal noir story and an immersive aesthetic consisting of a grayscale world, graphic novel-esque characters and UI, spooky sounds, and jazz music. The only objects that appear in color in this game’s world are those with spiritual essence, such as remnants of the victim or clues involved in her death. Sticking to my holistic approach, Ilana’s mystery-solving mechanics had to not only feel good, interact with our energy economy, and help the player learn information, but also make sense from a narrative standpoint and support the rest of the game’s charm. Bearing that in mind, here is how I designed Ilana’s ethereal powers:

• Shadow Vision is a cursor-proximity-based clue-searching mechanic that highlights hidden items with spiritual connections. Moreover, the closer your mouse is to a clue while using the ability, the brighter your crystal ball glows. To peer into the shadow realm, the player can activate Shadow Vision by clicking on their crystal ball, a diegetic UI element that is always available during exploration. I designed the ability this way because my goal was to create a clue discovery system that feels unique for a mystery game while still being understandable for players, and that is challenging (requiring the player to look all over rooms) but also supports the narrative (via Ilana’s method of interaction with the occult).

• Shadow Dialogue is an interrogative ability that allows you to perceive the true forms of characters' shadows which possess their darkest secrets. This feature's design required much iteration because I wanted to make it simple enough to use while also balancing its involvement in the game’s energy system as well as progressing the story. I ended up turning this ability into a unique dialogue option in conversations with NPCs that appears when certain narrative variables are checked, lowering the energy cost of its usage, and redefining its function to hint at lies told by the characters.

By designing holistically, I attempted to make every feature of The Shadows That Linger make sense within the game’s world and function together harmoniously. This design approach holds all aspects of a game to equally high standards and requires a lot of time and early planning to execute effectively, but has great potential to give players an exceptionally full experience.