Into the Deep: A Command F Murder Mystery

Inspiration

We chose to explore the deep sea, as there is almost nothing on our planet that is more unknown. Many things lie just below sea level, including that which was lost, or never even discovered. Heavy inspiration was taken from popular murder mysteries like “Knives Out”, but we also wanted to implement a unique traversal method to add to the mystery, similarly used in the game “Her Story”. All of these elements combined led to the creation of “Into the Deep”.

What it does

After a brief introduction, the player types in words to search through the story. A sentence containing that keyword is shown to the player, as well as a couple words from the sentence before and after. Sentences are chosen based on the likelihood that they will lead to other parts of the plot, with key-word heavy sentences having a higher probability of appearing. Once enough of the story has been revealed to the player, they are given the true ending.

How we built it

The entire game was built using Python. For the look of the game, the Rich library was a huge help.

Challenges we ran into

As some keywords would show up multiple times in the story, we had to devise a means of keeping track of what had already been revealed so that the player would be able to get important details and move through the story. There were also some challenges arising from finding a way to get the context around a sentence in the first place - we ended up storing the story in a list that could be traversed and calculating how much context to show based on surrounding punctuation. The surrounding indices logic also meant that we ran into some out-of-bounds errors that we fixed that would result in certain words crashing the game.

Finally, we didn't commit as often as we probably should have, so we ran into a few merge conflicts over the course of the project that had to be fixed manually.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how engaging the traversal method is for uncovering the story. Every player will experience the story in a unique nonlinear manner. It is exciting to type in a word you think may be in the story and reveal a sentence full of clues. This can take you on so many branching paths, and we were excited to see how much intrigue this can create. This traversal method works perfectly with the slow unfurling of clues in the murder mystery genre.

What we learned

Most of our team already had experience in using python, but to build the UI in the terminal, we learned how to use the Rich library to make the terminal look more visually appealing. Additionally, due to the nature of the hackathon, we learned how to write, storyboard, and code a text-based game all within twelve hours.

What's next for Into the Deep

If we were to continue development on Into the Deep, we would definitely flesh out the story a lot more and add greater complexity. The current story is a great starting point and is a very good step in the right direction. We could also benefit from working on the UI and adding more elements to better assist the player. For example, adding messages to print when the user got all sentences possible for a certain keyword. We hope that one day we can take Into the Deep on to a website or app instead of the command line. In that environment, we could add more UI/UX elements like a spotlight that shines when a sentence is revealed, sound effects, and even an actual 80s simulation graphic of a computer desktop.

Discord: mik#2081