The Blackwood Manor

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  Notebook

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  Home

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  Questions

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  Hall

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  Room

Inspiration

I wanted to build something fun, I wanted to see what a game could feel like if I went the other way, with no generated dialogue, no live inference, just a fully authored mystery you actually walk through in 3D instead of clicking past.

What it does

Blackwood Manor drops you into a first-person 3D manor with a body in the study and five guests who all have something to hide. You walk the halls, inspect six physical clues, and question the suspects using an authored dialogue tree. You get 15 questions total across the whole cast, so every one you spend has to count. Contradictions between what people tell you unlock deductions in your casebook, and once you think you've got it, you open the casebook and accuse someone. The game scores you on evidence found, deductions made, and how efficiently you used your questions. Every suspect has a fully voiced performance generated ahead of time with ElevenLabs.

How we built it

We leaned on AI a lot to actually write the bulk of the code. The engine is Three.js on top of Vite and TypeScript. The manor's geometry is procedural, dressed with a licensed Renderpeople photogrammetry cast and GLTF furniture. For voice, we used ElevenLabs, generated offline ahead of time, and also connected a live API key in case we wanted to try different voices — an offline generator sends our authored lines to ElevenLabs once and bakes the results into MP3s, so at runtime the game just plays those local audio files.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was finding 3D models for the cast — it was super hard to find free 3D models that were animated and appeared to be remotely similar. In the end, we were only able to find 2 animated 3D models, and attempted to animate the rest of the models without much success.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we were actually able to finish a complete playable 3D game, with custom voicelines, 3D models, and zero runtime AI dependency.

What we learned

Constraints were the best design tool we had. Committing to no runtime AI early forced us to think hard about what actually makes a mystery satisfying.

What's next for The Blackwood Manor

More cases with the same engine, so new mysteries shouldn't need new code. Proper animated 3D models and manor rendering. Implementing runtime AI so that we no longer have to choose from question prompts and can creatively come up with our own depending on what stage of the evidence-gathering process we're in, the characters can give vastly unique and surprising answers.

Built With

• elevenlabs
• three.js
• typerscript
• vite