VectorStorm Blog

I just spent the last five minutes tracking down a bug which resulted in a fresh corpse occasionally (about one time in three) wandering into another room after being killed.

Algorithmically generated content can be really tricky to get right, even when it’s as simple as this! :)

It’s really weird, sitting here and writing code for simulating what’s essentially a rather old-fashioned ideal of an Agatha Christie-style dinner party murder mystery, while listening to an old radio show “Night Watch”, which is basically a 1950s version of “Cops”, on the radio.. in this episode, the police were interrogating a murder suspect. (Who in the end turned out to have done it, but in justifiable self defense)

Next up on the schedule, “Dragnet”. And I’m in the middle of writing code to make the murderer try to find somewhere to safely hide the murder weapon, after committing her crime (it’ll be found when the police turn up, but the other guests won’t see it in the meantime). It’s gonna be an odd evening. :)

Apparently somebody has chosen to spoof my e-mail address to send spam. How do I know this? Well, my mailbox is bulging with “delivery failure” notifications; about a dozen in the last hour, and I’d be surprised if the rate doesn’t increase overnight. Not really what I wanted to be dealing with when I’m under a deadline, even self-imposed. :(

The spams advertise an online accessories shop, which has been registered on about half a dozen domains, all registered on March 31st, all by one person using a Chinese address.

In case anybody’s here because they want to complain about receiving one of these spams, it’s not my fault; I hate spam as much as anybody else; the criminals have just stolen my online identity to throw people off their track (and this can easily be verified by those who know how to inspect the spam’s e-mail headers).

For everyone else.. does anybody know of an effective way to avoid this problem in the future? Has anyone had success with things like SPF or Sender ID to actually keep spammers from spoofing your identity? For right now, all I can think to do is to set up a procmail rule to throw away the delivery failure mails, and wait for the spammer to move on to some other victim…

Well, the code’s finally to the point where the game can actually randomly generate a murder timeline. As it turns out, Bill killed Sam at approximately 12:15 AM, in the bathroom. Unsurprisingly, he used the Nondescript Murder Weapon(tm) to perform the dastardly deed. (When oh when will they learn that Nondescript Murder Weapons can be dangerous, and should be kept locked up? :) )

Now I just need to fill out each individual guest’s memories of the night (as opposed to the factual, actual events of the night), and then.. you know.. put in some sort of interface for the user to actually play the game, rather than analysing the events of the night by inspecting variables in a debugger. :)

I’m finding myself growing more and more surprised at just how much code needs to be written for this mystery game, even as I continue to pare it back to make it achievable in the time limit, and just how little of the code actually puts anything visible up on screen.

Here’s the current state of play:

I’m planning for this game to be the first of two “Games in a Week”;  the second will build on the first one, to make a more well-rounded game, but the first one will be a fully playable game in its own right.

This first game (as yet unnamed) uses a static, fixed mansion layout, currently seven rooms.  There
are also a fixed set of seven “guests” at the mansion.  The events of the evening, however, will be generated randomly.  The player gets the opportunity to replay the events of the evening from each surviving guest’s point of view by using an “interview guest” interface, but guests may have faulty memories or may be lying (due to being the murderer).  In this interface, the player will see the guest’s memories of his movements through the mansion on the evening, along with where they saw other guests, and where they saw the murder weapon.  Once the player has compared the memories of the guests, he will have the opportunity to accuse one of the guests of being the murderer, and optionally to nominate the time at which the murder took place.  Get the murderer right, and you win.  Get the time of the murder right for bonus points.

As you’ve probably noticed, this first game entirely abstracts away the concept of motives, and of determining a murder weapon.  It also removes navigation (as characters can move instantly from any room to any other room;  the hallways are not counted as locations), and theplayer never moves around the house himself;  the game is entirely driven by menus and other interfaces, rather than giving the player a direct avatar within the world.  I’d like to add all of these things into the second game.  But trying to randomly generate a solvable puzzle is turning out to be a big enough task without also worrying about collision detection and pathfinding.  ;)