Detective Z is an information game created from scratch whose foundations lays in a procedural way of generating environmental storytelling through a multi-agent simulation. The game was developed for my master thesis at IST in Lisbon. This the description of the game:
Zombies are part of our world.
While humanity has managed to survive a deadly virus that turns everyone into angry, flesh-eating corpses, there’s no cure. And so the threat of a stronger wave of infected that could wipe out human civilization still looms.
Governments around the world have dispatched strong containment protocols to prevent, manage (...or destroy) possible infected zones. For now, despite the loss of several cities in the initial wave, these measures seem to be working out.
Part of these efforts include a special force dedicated to investigating possible infection zones, places where zombies have killed people. These professionals are tasked with piecing out the details of what really happened in hopes of having a better understanding of zombie behaviour, and how the virus works.
You are one of these professionals, and you’ve been sent to a house that has become an infection zone. Your task is simple: piece out the order of events, and fill in your report.
You are Detective Z.
Link to Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo3Dzeu0JkA
Once the simulation is over, the player is placed in the scene and it will have the task of exploring the environment in order to discover what happened during the attack. For that, they will have to interact with the clues left in the environment and interpret the event that caused it to later connect them and create their own version of what happened during the attack.
To interact with the clues the player overlays the mouse cursor with the clue, it is scaled, and a text message that describes it appears.
- To play the game, just double-click the Detective Z.exe file.
- To move the character, use WASD or the arrow keys.
- To highlight the storytelling elements, move the mouse over the element.
- To close the game, press the Escape key.
- To play the simulation(story generation), press the P key.
- To rewind the simulation, press the I key.
- To stop the simulation, press the O key.
- To go back to the from the simulation, press the L key.
After closing the game a log file will be generated inside the Detective Z_Data folder with this format LOG-yyyyMMddHHmmss.json
- Carlos Martinho, researcher supervisor.
- Adrian Rodrigues, researcher, programmer, game designer and writer.
- Fabio Diaz, game designer and writer.
- Malbanyat, sound designer.
- Marco Rios, artist.
- Assets pack: https://limezu.itch.io/moderninteriors
- A* Pathfiding Project: https://arongranberg.com/astar/