A mystery at Murder Manor

There were seven guests at the dinner party tonight.

Sam runs a business with his friend Billy.  He was hosting dinner for a few of his employees;  Tom, Daisy, and Mr. Green.  Also in attendance is Sally (a secretary who works for both Sam and Billy), and Sally has brought along her father as well.

There are some tensions among the employees;  they don’t really get along very well (presumably, they’ve been competing for promotions), and Sally’s not very happy with Sam, due to some workplace indiscretions.

By the end of the evening, Sam is dead.

So I took a little break from 3D maths tonight to work on the motive generation algorithm for a follow-up to Nicholas Spratt;  it generates characters and relationships between them, along with motives for murder.  And it surprised me just how well it’s working (the above is the very first plot+characters+situation generated by the system).  Where the original Nicholas Spratt game was a gameplay concept to see whether a murder could be unravelled solely based upon the memories of the suspects (with one suspect lying), adding motives will provide extra clues, and give individual guests secrets for the player to discover over the course of each game.

Also today, I fought my way through Gnomeregan with a few friends.  I find that for me, WoW is kind of a more social version of Bejeweled;  Non-stressful and not particularly challenging.  But it’s a good excuse to spend time with your friends at the end of a long day.