2000:1: A Space Felony and Designing Space Mysteries.
This is a piece I wrote last year as part of Greg Buchanan’s Newsletter. That month’s theme was about setting stories in space, and you can find my words alongside contributions by Heather Antos, James Swallow and Micheal Moreci right here.
The trick to telling a story in space is to ground it.
That was a joke, but it’s also the truth.
It’s important to set the rules. Even if they’re far from the rules of reality, establishing them clearly is incredibly important for a space-based story. For us at National Insecurities, we settled on something close to reality, but made concessions where necessary.
2000:1: A Space Felony is a sci-fi murder mystery courtroom comedy set in space. An interplanetary ship loses contact with earth, and you are sent to find out why. Upon arrival, you find everyone on board is dead, aside from the AI, and it’s your job to investigate, snap pictures of evidence, and cross reference the AI as the lead suspect for these murders.
You can get the game here, it’s pay what you want, and around an hour long. Spoilers ahead, but I promise what follows doesn’t give the whole game away.
Here is the first piece of art I ever sketched for the game, back when it was just a silly joke I’d never sink any real time into. It depicts two things that would become key to the final version: a man hanging by his neck in space, and a giant wheel shaped ship. I didn’t know it at the time, but these two elements would become fundamental to establishing the rules of our game’s reality.
Let’s start with the simplest of the two, the hanging spaceman.
The imagery is a contained mystery in itself. In zero gravity, how does someone get hung by the neck? Well, if the door to your spaceship opens, you’re pulled out at great speed, as if falling. If there’s a rope around your neck, space becomes your gallows. This is a simple application (of my basic understanding) of how space works.
Where the game deviates from reality is in its presentation. It’s been a year since it happened, but the rope is fairly taut, the astronaut striking a pose that implies struggle. If this happened in reality, both the rope and its victim would likely both have quickly settled into a more relaxed position. So why didn’t we do that?
For a start, it wouldn’t have looked half as good. But much more importantly, it wouldn’t have communicated the events anywhere near as clearly. Our game is a murder mystery, which means that we not only need to tell a story the player understands, we also need the player to be able to tell the story back to the game. Ambiguity needs to be applied very selectively here, or the game doesn’t work.
Now let’s look at the other thing in that original sketch, the big wheel.
Though many familiar with the science fiction genre (or just science) would be quite aware of this method of approximating gravity in space, it’s not exactly common knowledge. So when factoring it into the mystery, we had to assume the player wouldn’t know it.
The concept is introduced to the player via narration as soon as they first enter the wheel for the first time. It doesn’t explain everything, but does let them know the basics — as long as you’re in the big spinning wheel, there is gravity.
After entering the centrifuge, the game then introduces a new mystery to you: there is a dead person at the bar with an overturned glass.
There is also a puddle of an illicit liquid way across the room. This person was poisoned. But deducing this depends on two factors:
1. Identifying the substance on the floor as poison.
2. Identifying the substance as having originated from the dead woman’s glass.
The first, we communicated to the player by making the puddle and a nearby container of poison the same colour, and reinforcing the obvious connection through the narration. The player can’t mess this up.
But connecting the poison puddle’s origin to the glass in the dead person’s hand is less obvious, and unlike the hanging man, this does not operate by rules the player is likely to be familiar with before playing the game. And so the game has to introduce the player not only to centrifugal force, but also to a side-effect called the Coriolis effect.
Although a spinning wheel can approximate gravity to anything placed on its inner surface, there will always be a slight sideways push in the opposite direction to which the wheel spins. This wouldn’t make much difference to solids, but it can affect liquids in perceivable ways. The water in a container might lean a little left, and any spilled illicit substance might slowly make its way across a bar, across the concave floor and settle in a corner somewhere.
The above is quite a lot to explain to the player without giving away the answer, which is no good for a game about deduction, so we decided on having a very literal demonstration of the Coriolis effect in the form of a fish tank on board. The distinct lean in the water is very visible, and when you snap a photo for documentation, the Coriolis effect’s impact on the water is explained through the narration, without its connection to the dead person’s glass or the puddle on the floor being made explicit. It is then for the player to take this newly learned information and apply it to the other pieces of the puzzle.
In this way, 2000:1: A Space Felony establishes rules specific to its setting, and then has those rules play a role in the game’s mystery and deduction mechanics. The rules are scientific, but we are not scientists, we’re storytellers. It’s unlikely our game accurately depicts the correct amount of lean in the water for a centrifuge that small moving that fast. But it doesn’t matter. We based it upon reality, then shaped those rules to our needs so that the player could learn them, apply them to their deductions, and express their findings back at the game.
In the end, the clarity of our rules was more important than the rules themselves.
As you can tell from the above text, I make games sometimes. You can find 2000:1: A Space Felony as well as our latest release, Once Upon a Crime in the West, right here. And if you enjoyed these game thoughts you can throw me a dollar or three via ko-fi. Thanks for reading. ❤
