Inspiration for Dean Boyer Murder Mystery
We began being inspired by and hoped to create text-adventure games. We chose to innovate these simplistic yet engaging games by using AI to construct brand new stories every time the game is run. We first planned to build a fighting and interaction-based DND game; however, we decided to pivot off this idea for an exciting murder mystery with interconnecting storylines based in UChicago and characters in each run.
Our retro-game inspiration came from dungeon crawler-esque text adventure games and old-school visual novel games. "L.A. Noire" also heavily influenced our theme of a murder mystery. "L.A Noire" is a 2011 action-adventure game where you follow a detective who solves murders by conducting interrogations and investigations on suspects. In our game, the player is a detective whose main method is to question the characters about their alibis to find the murderer.
What it does
Our game is like a typical murder mystery, but uses generative AI to help keep things interesting. Instead of a typical murder mystery where there could be set questions and replies that the game allows you, in this game, the player will be able to speak without preset choices (The AI will adapt to the player's input). There will be 1 murderer and 5 suspects. The player will be the detective who has to interrogate the suspects and find out who the killer might be. The player can guess who the murderer is through a button on the bottom right.
How we built it
We built this project using React.js and Python, using Gemini 2.0 to form the stories and character responses. We used Sora/ChatGPT to animate and make the images for the characters. The music was also free from YouTube.
Challenges we ran into
We had changed our plans multiple times throughout the project. For a long period of time, we didn't have a set goal, making it hard to execute. On the backend side, we had challenges with keeping Gemini AI's prompts consistent and at the length we wanted. Additionally, we also faced a challenge with the rate limit for the number of queries we were pushing. On the front-end side, we also had trouble with some of the animations and trying to keep the images generated by Sora compatible.
What we learned
We learned how to incorporate generative AI into our code, prompt engineering, and learned more about the applications of Flask, ReactJS, and Python.
What's next for Dean Boyer Murder Mystery
The history is completely on the backend side, but if we wanted multiple clients to be able to play the game, we would like to shift that to the front-end side instead.
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