The original idea for this game was to offer a HardyBoys-style mystery in a Luigi’sMansion-style world. I’d been wanting to make a game with my pal Jonason for a while, and thought his web comic James and Robot was ripe with great characters and comedy for a dark murder mystery. (he has the domain jamesandrobot.com but took all the comics down to prep for uploading remastered/re-inked versions. You can sneek a peak at one of the old versions here: http://jamesandrobot.com/page1.html ).

I thought it would be cool to make an AR board game where you could only see one tile at a time, but if you looked at it from all sides, you could see what was waiting in each adjoining tile. Like a scary dude leaning against the door with a knife, or a bag of sweets behind a wall painting. I figured that was a cool gimmick that fit in well with the current appeal of AR (which is: seeing shit on your desk, from all angles).

This is for PigSquad’s Summer Slow Jame VR/AR event, which has the theme “Change of Perspective.” I googled the word ‘perspective’ and ended up deep in a wikipedia page about the current perspectives on where crime comes from. So I pitched Jonason on making a game that starts with this document on crime, and some Law&Order style serious music.

Then you’d see a body flung out of a window at the top of a haunted mansion. James and Robot walk up to this body lying in the garden and leap at the chance to investigate a murder mystery. After some training tiles in a hedge maze, they’d come to the front of the mansion and see 4 mysterious figures in the remaining windows, representing the 4 supposed motivations for criminal behavior (social, biological, personal psychology, social psychology). These would be a chicken, an old man, a hobo, and a suit of haunted armor (though it would turn out that the old man was inside the suit of armor).

I thought it’d be cool if a detective walked up to warn you off before you went inside. Then you’d kept bumping into him inside where he’d tell you to quit and go home before he arrests you. We’d suggest that maybe he represented the 4th crime motivation. You’d ultimately win by convincing this fellow to throw away his career and confess to the crime (after you kill the other suspects).

Talking with my friend David Medlock and his brother in law at a dinner party, they suggested it’d be funny if these kids kept collecting clues but had zero interest in using them to solve anything (…and David kinda shit all over the comic linked above for being nihilistic entertainment emblematic of bored people with first world problems). I agreed to put their portraits in the game if we used their idea.

And I obsessed over one final overly wrought twist: if you thought about it, since the detective was an innocent man, and the old man WAS the suit of armor, that means there were only 3 representations of the 4 criminal motives we’d setup (because… james and robot are the 4th! boom!).

Anywho, Jonason agreed to collaborate, but thought it’d be cooler if James and Robot just had a normal after school job, like delivering newspapers. And instead of a haunted mansion, it’d be a some old guy’s normal looking suburban home. And you’d be snooping around inside to see about getting paid. So the game went a different direction. But there is still some crossover. (nudge nudge).

We also discussed a VR game idea based around going to the beach, finding a cool cave, and ending up descending into the rings of a Hieronymus Bosch style hell. Hopefully tackle that NEXT TIME! (assuming this time, the AR game is completed on time, and anyone thinks it’s cool)