I''m gonna develop a detective game on the internet. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks!

Well, my first suggestion would be to write down your ideas and show them to the forum. If you offer more details about what you have in mind, people will start thinking about it. If you''re too vague, people will not want to design the whole game for you.

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Ditto. My suggestion is to get to work. One thing that can help a fledgling design mature is to go to a peer-review forum, like the one at GameDev.net and present your ideas to other game design enthusiasts. But before you jump online and start a thread on one of those forums, it helps to have some semblance of an idea to present.

For detective materials, you might want to check out mystery novels, both classic and modern, and find some good writing resources. You''ll find a writing forum specifically directed toward video game design at GameDev.net, but some of the members there tend to get sarcastic and rude if you just post a vague statement of intention or plea for advice instead of proposing a coherent idea or asking a clear question. They''re generally good people, but they aren''t professors (mostly). They aren''t interested in giving you a lecture on the nuances of web-based interactive detective stories just because you think you might have the chops to make one.

Sorry about my vague.

My idea is to divide the players into two groups. One is group of detectives. The other is group of murderers, thieves, robbers or even kidnappers. In the game world, there may be some one offers a reward for killing some one or finding the killer or something else. For example, if you were a thief, your goal is to steal a treasure and get the reward. Later other detectives will go and collect evidence. We also allow a team to accomplish a task. So murdering some one is more or less like the ¡°Commandos¡±. Of course, some clues may left for the detectives.

An interesting concept. However, I fear that unless you include some random chance into it, it would be a short time before the criminal element learned enough about the game to commit the perfect crime each and every time.

If you could balance it very well, then I think this would be a lot of fun. You''d have to put a great deal of effort into the forensic side of things, but if the game was implemented at its best, it would be so sweet that it couldn''t help but do well. With all the interest in investigating TV shows and books, a game that accurately portrayed investigative procedures and forensic techniques would be a smash hit.

I hope you get this done. It would rock.

would the game be in real-time or turn-based?

The game is real-time. And in the game world, everything is not 100% certain. So there maybe some cases that the detective can¡¯t find enough evidence.

These days I am thinking of allowing player from one group hide into the other. That is the detective may be among the killers to fetch information. Also the thieves may plant some secret agents in the police. But I fear that the game is much too difficult to be balanced if we introduce this point.

Another is the evidence. What kind of evidence shall be introduced in the game? My solution is to divide it into 3 groups: when, where and how. The NPC may catch sight of the crime. So the time and place shall be no problem. But what about the ¡°how¡±? I provide skills and equipments for the killers to forge the scene of a crime and for the detectives to see through it. But I don¡¯t want it to be like the ¡°Diablo¡± which overly relies on the skills and powerful weapons. Are there any other methods to deal with the evidence?

Thanks!

If you only have police and criminals in the game, then it would make interviews and interrogations very difficult. But nobody would want to play as an innocent bystander. Maybe you''d be best off throwing in NPCs capable of answering questions, but that would require a very good information sharing system. Whew. This is a tough nut to crack.