In this post I will explain more about the creation of Detective Trowel, our main character and his story based on The Rotten Posy in the small town called Bloomstead. You can probably pick up the underlying theme of flowers, this is a narrative thread that members of the group found fitting due to how the storyline later plays out, resulting in all the characters being named after various plants and flowers.
I worked on constructing the narrative alongside a fellow group member, Jimmy Rammelkamp. I assisted Jimmy in helping string together the main narrative thread. This took quite a while to finalise and complete as we aimed to create a narrative that had many plot twists and red herrings in order to conceal who the murderer was till the end, to make the story interesting.
I initially tried to create the plot-line by working from beginning to end, this quickly proved to not be a very effective method and lead me to noting down what our key elements we wanted to have in the story. I then placed these in a rough sequence to determine what other factors and elements needed to be introduced before and after them.
(Spoiler alert: I will be discussing the plot-line in detail and reveal who is the murder, apologies)
I began working on the plot with the basic story idea that we had decided as a group and built on it. I laid out the murderer (Miss Rose) the weapon (deadly nightshade) and when she administered the poison. We as a group had agreed to have Miss Rose poison Mr Tulip, at dinner time in her house, who then went home as he wasn't feeling well. The story then played out that Mrs Tulip would explain to the police at some point that he was not himself - which would point towards Miss Rose as he was with her before he came home in a state. We had also agreed that there were underlying factors such as the waste dumping the river which Mr Rhubarb (the farmer) would see.
I then built up on these elements with having Mr Tulip being the one with greed and he stuck a deal with a coal factory that they could dump their waste in the towns river for a price. To play to his character I had him sign all his letters with "Ms R" so that if all things went bad he had already got a scapegoat.
Where the story starts to intertwine is the events leading up to Mr Tulips death. There are multiple factors that happen and some could be seen as a coincidence. Miss Rose had threatened to Mr Tulip that if he did not leave his wife then she would put an end to it. The evening before Mr Tulips murder, he came and broke up with Miss Rose, that is when she poisoned him. Mr Tulip had also previously arranged with Mr Rhubarb to meet the morning of his death to discuss the waste dumping.
A back story of Mr Rhubarb is that his crops have slowly been dying and now his wife has fallen gravely ill. With the information about the waste dumping Mr Rhubarb is quite angry as he knows what is making his wife ill and depends on Mr Tulip to do something about it. Therefore, when he arrives at Mr Tulips office and asks for help and Mr Tulip offers to pay him off to be quite, he is enraged and shoves Mr Tulip. Mr Tulip stumbles back but is fine, when he rightens himself the poison kicks in and he topples over backward.
The smaller details that are key to this story are the letter from Mr Tulip to Mr Rhubarb, the sleeping tonic Mrs Tulip has and the small quantities of Deadly Nightshade that Mrs Foxglove gives Miss Tulip.
We thought it might be fun to have a botanist in the town who also grows plants that could be deadly. A signature of this is the fact we decided to have our botanist grow lots of foxgloves as they are her favourite flower, hence her name Mrs Foxglove. She maxes the sleeping tonic for Mrs Tulip and gives Miss Rose the deadly nightshade as it can be used to dilate pupils giving the appearance of being in love. Mrs Foxgloves character however, loves her plants and hates it when people misuse them, hence she will only give out small amounts of the Deadly Nightshade.
Another element we were confronted with was the reports, the biopsy and the toxicology report. We decided to have them spread out and make it that the player needed to talk to specific people to unlock the ability to receive these reports. This helped me in determining which people the player needed to speak to get the most relevant and important information.
For the final scene of the story I had planned to have a final interrogation with Mr Trowel and Miss Rose. This is the point where the player has all the information and can choose who killed Mr Tulip, with what and why. The correct answer is Miss Rose killed Mr Tulip using a high dose of Deadly Nightshade and she did it because she was madly in love with him and he didn't love her back and was in fact leaving her. In this final interrogation she also learns that Mr Tulip has the whole waste dumping scenario blamed on her. He got everything he wanted and she was left with the blame. She concluded that he deserved what he got.
However, due to limited time and capacity we were unable to implement the last few sections of the game but still managed to get enough information across to show that Miss Rose could be a very promising suspect.
When this was complete Jimmy moved on to writing the script based on the plot-line and I worked on the character portraits.
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