An adventure stealth game where you plan the heist of the century in 1920's New York. You play as spunky young thief, Oliver “Silver” Fox, who by day gathers information about Marquis Museum of History, and by night goes and steals the museum's most valuable artifact. Using his skills of investigation, conversation, and stealth, Fox will stop at nothing to get what wants.
Exploring Branching Paths
When deciding the design of In the Night, the main focus was choice; cause and effect. The problem was how could a player plan a heist? I landed on the gathering of information, trying to replicate those short scenes in heist movies where the protagonist is at the target building during the day, snooping around. The player has two means of doing this, a map, which key information can be manually marked, and the Pry dialogue system.
The Pry system allows the player to select optional dialogue via selectable red text. The red text is always a subject. The optional dialogue options they bring up will always have to do with this subject. This acts as a way to "pry" information out of the character, information that can lead to keys and alternate pathways. To balance this, it's risky. Certain prying options will backfire, causing the character to cut off the dialogue exchange. It's not random and players can use cues such as context and the character's previous dialogue to take educated guesses on the reaction a option will give.
With the dialogue, I wanted to not only give the player the feeling that are getting information out of the characters, but that they are almost stealing it. Much as a burglar would pry open a window, the player pries open information out the characters minds.
With this system, a new problem formed: why not just try everything? Sure you may fail on a person or two, but we wanted to game to be replayable and if you could plumb every character there isn't much reason to play again or try to get different routes. So I created the day and night timer. The day timer prevented players from trying to burn through everything and the night timer required them to be prepared from the first phase. The only change that needed to be made was the making the day timer a counter. This counter only went down when you pried, so it still solved the problem without putting to much pressure on the player.
