recently created a virtual murder mystery deduction game with my friends over at Wonder and Joy for our church young adult community. We hosted this in a video calling site called gather.town, before I get into how to create your own, let's dive into what gather.town is all about as this is important in the building of the game.
An overview of Gather.town
Gather.town places you and other participants in little pixel style virtual environments. Each participant has their own little character that you can use to walk around the space, with your video above your character. It aims to mimic the environment of a real room in a way that you can have different conversations happening in one room depending on where you are. If you are close enough to someone, you can see their video and talk to them; if you walk away out of their vicinity, then their video and voice will fade away. The free version allows you to host up to 25 people and gives you unlimited interactive objects (more on what this means further down).
The Mapmaker
The great thing about this platform is that it allows you to edit the map which means you can build custom environments to suit your use. You can even have multiple rooms within your space, allowing your entire map to be quite large and perfect for exploration. You can choose an existing template and edit it from there or you can build your own space from scratch. The features that are included in this mapmaker are: Objects, Tile Effects and Walls & Floors.
Objects
This map editor has a whole bunch of furniture that you can place in, or you can upload your own objects, it then gives you several options of object interactions:
No interaction (it's purely decorative)
Embedded website (it will open the website within gather.town, there are limitations on what websites work though)
Embedded image (it will open the image you upload within gather.town)
Embedded video (it will open the video you link within gather.town)
External call (Links to another video call, for example a zoom link - I haven't tried this yet though!)
Note object (It will open a little note with text that you provide)
Tile Effects
There are 5 different tile effects can be placed throughout the spaces. These have different uses and come in handy when building the murder mystery environment.
Impassable (people can't walk through these tiles)
Spawn (indicate where people start when joining a space)
Portal (teleport people to other rooms or spaces)
Private area (only people standing on the same tile IDs can connect with each other)
Spotlight (people standing here can broadcast to the whole room)
Walls & Floors
There isn't much to this function. It gives you a variety of wall and floor types for you to build your rooms with. A good thing to note though is that if you choose a template that gather.town has, you won't be able to edit the wall and floors in that room as it'll remove any of the exiting one that belongs to the template. This is because most of their pre-built rooms have custom wall and floors that aren't found in the mapmaker. You can however use the templates for some rooms, and then build your own other rooms from scratch if you wish.
Using gather.town for the murder mystery game
We used a default gather.town map which was an island at night, this pre-existing map was already quite large and included 3 different islands, accessible through portals. The picture below is just part of the map and is considered 1 room / island.
The murder mystery game we created combined a narrative that we came up with and corresponding clues that we placed in objects around the island. These objects then have images, text or links to websites embedded in them. The objective of the game was for participants to go around island, look for the clues and then in their teams, piece together how the victim was killed, why they were killed and who killed them.
The flow of our game went like this:
Briefing on how the game works, what they can expect going around the island and telling of the narrative
20 minutes to explore the island and look for clues
15 minutes to discuss what everyone found within their teams
15 minutes to go back out to the island and look for more clues
20 minutes discussion and submission of their case file (we did this through Google Forms with the how, why and who questions about the murder)
Now that you have a basic understanding of how gather.town works and how to use the mapmaker. We can go into the steps of creating a murder mystery game.
Step 1: Coming up with a narrative
The first step to creating your virtual murder mystery is coming up with a narrative. We did this in Notion as we
could easily create different pages for different parts of the game (screenshot of the different pages on the left).
The narrative we came up with had 1 victim, 5 suspects and 2 culprits. We didn't tell them there were 2 culprits, we left this up to the participants to figure out. Your narrative should include:
The background of the story, why is everyone gathered together?
How all the suspects are linked to the victim - every suspect as well as the victim should have a back story too. How deep this goes depends on how complex you want your mystery to be. All suspects should have a motive to murder the victim but the non guilty people will have clues that will rule them out.
Who killed the victim and how they killed them
The motive for why the culprit/s killed the victim
You should also decide if the participants are going to be the suspects or these are separate characters. In our game we kept it separate as we had 20 participants in 5 teams which made it harder to allocate participants as suspects. Our narrative weaved in the participants as detective teams that came to the island and are tasked with solving the murder case.
Once you've addressed all the points above and you've come up with your narrative, you can start putting together a more detailed timeline. Not all these details will be in the actual game, but it gives you a good frame of reference to pull clues from.
Step 2: Coming up a timeline
The next step is to come up with a timeline. This lists down everything that happened in a certain period before the murder. For our game we started about 12 hours before the murder happened. In this timeline we listed things that the victim and the suspects did. Some are actual evidence that points to the solution, some are merely there to mislead (from our game experience - there should be a lot less of these as it will confuse participants if there are too many).
Step 3: Setting up the spaces
If you want to extend the map or add additional rooms, you can do it through the mapmaker. I left most of the island untouched except to add more tents in, one for each of the suspects and the victim. These then had portals that led to rooms ("the inside of the tent"). You can think about where certain clues would go or what spaces you would need.
In addition to spaces that fit into the narrative, we turned one of the central spaces into a discussion area, this is where teams came back after each stage of the game to discuss what they found.
Another space that we created to facilitate the game is a briefing room, this is where everyone spawns when they first enter the island. We tell them not to leave the room first until the briefing is done. Once they exit the room, they enter into the discussion are where we started the game. Make sure to put a door / portal on the island back to the briefing room so you can re-access that room if needed. We did this so at the end of the game, everyone headed back there to present their case files.
Step 4: Coming up with witnesses
Now that you have a timeline of the day of the murder. You can turn these into witness accounts.
I created 'witnesses' in this pixel style avatar maker: http://www.avatarsinpixels.com/.
The different witness statements based on our timeline were created in Google Slides. Simply create these by drawing a box, then typing out your text, finally export it as a JPEG
The little witness pixel characters are then exported as PNGs and placed in the Mapmaker. Embed an image and upload your text JPEG that you created in step 2.
Repeat these with different witnesses throughout your map
Using the pixel style avatar maker, we also created avatars for each of the suspects and placed them into the game, embedded with each of these avatars is a profile of the suspects.
Step 5: Coming up with other clues
The witnesses point to what happened on the actual day of the murder. However the suspects all have back stories and connections with the victim. These parts of the story should be included through other clues around the island. These clues that we created are mostly objects. I found pixel artwork on google image search (we used these as this game was a personal thing - not for commercial use) but you can always create your own pixel artwork on apps or websites such as pixlart. We then place the object of our choice and embed the corresponding clue; it could be an image, a note or a link to a website - we used all of these kinds. You can place in an object based on your image by clicking object > upload new > uploading your image then setting up the object interaction you want. Do note that you will have to resize your image accordingly, 1 tile in gather.town is 32x32 pixels and your objects should be smaller than that. I resized mine in Photoshop but you can find a lot of image editing tools on the website or use Google Drawings.
Types of clues we used:
Image
We created our image clues such as this birthday card on Procreate, exported it as a JPEG and embedded it as an image within a pixel object:
Any kind of "photo" clue that included pictures of the victim and suspects, I used an app on called Avatoon. I created an avatar for each of the suspects, victim and any additional character that may come into play for the clues. Then put them in different poses / scenarios according to the clue, for example this clue where participants are meant to investigate the body of the victim:
Interactive Images:
Some of our clues such as the phones of the suspects, we put together an image using Google Drawings, this allows participants to click on hyperlinks that will lead to more information such as other images or files. In the phone example below, we blurred out everything else but two apps that they can click on. One is the recording app which opens and embedded sound clip and the other is the messaging app which opens an image of a text message conversation. This kind of clue adds another level of complexity to the game.
Step 6: Getting ready for the game!
Once you have all your clues and witnesses placed throughout the game, it is a good idea to do a run through with some people that are not going to play the actual game. We did a test run with a smaller group of people who gave us feedback on the difficulty and the narrative. This helped us to improve the final game.
Some items we prepared for the game:
Briefing notes - write everything you need to tell participants here including rules and the introduction to the game / narrative
Briefing slides - this is optional but having these with main points of the briefing and suspect profiles will help everyone understand how the game works and launch into the game more seamlessly
Invitation images - we prepared these with their name on it and which team they would be in. This helped us to save time sorting people into teams on the actual day
Case file form - this is the form that teams' submit with their deduced solution. We had everyone submit their forms but also present it to the rest of the teams
A list of conclusive evidence that point to the solution - no one actually got our solution fully correct so it was good to have these so we could reveal what the solution to the murder was and each piece of evidence that pointed to it. Even if you have teams that successfully solve it, it is also a good idea to read through this part as not all teams would have found every piece of evidence
Conclusion
This is a great way to do team bonding whether it's with your church group, friends or colleagues. It does take some time to prepare but it is definitely a fun experience for everyone. Some important things to remember is to do a test run, if you can't, at least run the narrative and clues by a fresh pair of eyes. You want your participants to have a challenge but also want the evidence to make sense and ensure that they can piece things together. Have fun creating your own murder mystery game and send me a message if you do, I would love to hear all about it!
