THE PITCH
It's 1890, London. You play Lisa Menéndez, a newly appointed detective in the Homicides Police Department, with an inherited and deeply inconvenient skill: she can absorb the mental traits of people who have recently died. Not their memories, their capacities. Intelligence, memory, empathy, eloquence and so on.
The brief was to build a game around a crafting system. So instead of crafting swords, Lisa crafts people. Two harvested personality profiles fuse into a new one that she can equip, and whichever personality she is wearing decides which dialogue trees she can even see. Which means the investigation becomes a resource problem: to open the doors this case needs, she has to have taken the right traits off the right corpses.
DESIGN PILLARS
THE PREMISE
The Illuminati exist. They are an elite group of extremely wealthy individuals with supernatural skills that give them advantages over everybody else, and they have a self-imposed control system about who they mate and engage with, because they don't want those skills to become mainstream. But obviously, people make mistakes, have affairs, etc.
Lisa's grandmother was one of those mistakes, the result of an affair between an Illuminati and a housemaid, kept hidden for fear they would kill her. She inherited one of the most powerful, but also one of the most inconvenient, of the many abilities the Illuminati have: absorbing the mental traits of dead people.
Lisa's father is a retired mafia boss who acquired his own skills by killing hundreds of people, and whose turbulent past meant he always had to keep a low profile. Wishing a different future for his daughter, he raised her on books and bedtime stories about heroic detectives capturing evil serial killers, and pushed her towards becoming a crime detective, because he knew the job would expose her to lots of fresh corpses she could absorb from. That way she would get the skills without becoming an assassin, a monster like him.
The problem was the “quality”. In the father's view, criminals, drug addicts and people who tend to commit suicide are not the best targets for his daughter. So once she finally got accepted into the Homicides Police Department, he went out and started killing the right people for her, planning a case that would both feed her and work as a test:
To get him, she'll have to absorb a lot of skills and become an extraordinary person. Then, when she is ready, she will climb the social ladder and become what he could not: famous, rich and powerful, extremely powerful.
The game opens on Lisa's first days in the department. A serial killer starts murdering people, and the first corpse comes with a very cryptic message that mentions her by name. She is on the case before she works out that she is the point of it.
THE LOOP
ASSIMILATION
This is the core verb. Lisa can absorb the mental traits of a “fresh corpse”, AKA one that has been dead for less than 9 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds. Miss that window and the material is gone, so she won't always be able to use her skill; some victims are simply found too late. It's the one hard constraint in the game, and everything else is built on top of it.
Six traits are harvested, and each one is scored from -50 to +50. A theoretically perfectly average person would have a zero in all of them.
Attitude is read in bands rather than as a raw number, because how assertive or fearful somebody is makes a lot more sense socially than as a figure:
CRAFTING A PERSON
Each assimilation gives you a Personality Profile. A profile can be used on its own, adding its trait modifiers to Lisa's, or combined with another one to create a Crafted Personality. There are exactly two crafting slots, so you can only ever combine two different profiles, and it only works one way: once a Crafted Personality is created, it can't be combined any more.
Storage is deliberately tight. Lisa can carry up to 10 Personality Profiles and up to 5 Crafted Personalities. The scarcity is the design, really; the player has to commit, compromise and be resourceful with whoever they happened to reach in time.
A CRAFTED PERSONALITY DOESN'T WORK UNTIL YOU'VE SLEPT ON IT.
This is the part that turns crafting into a decision rather than a menu. The moment you fuse two profiles, the new personality appears in the Crafted inventory in black and white, and it is inert. Lisa has to rest before it comes online. So you can't stand over a corpse, assemble the perfect interrogator and walk straight into the interview; you have to guess a day ahead of the conversation you think is coming. Once it does activate, it can be dragged into the Favourites slots for quick access.
The harvest itself is diegetic rather than a menu action. A viable corpse gets highlighted in the world, and clicking it sends Lisa to kneel beside the body and place a hand near the victim's head, with post-processing and sound carrying the moment. The crafting menu then opens on the new profile, highlighted, and the loop closes.
Some sample profiles, which show how sharply specialised a single harvest can be:
DÉJÀ VU POINTS
Conversations are committed. You choose a personality before one starts and you can't swap halfway through, and once you make a choice in the dialogue tree you can't undo it. Each choice counts, which would be unbearable without some kind of release valve.
That valve is the Déjà Vu Point. Spend one and the conversation restarts from the beginning, so you can either equip a different personality or walk a different branch with the same one. And if the second attempt goes worse than the first, you can undo the déjà vu and go back to where you were, which permanently removes that second version.
CLUES AND DIALOGUE TREES
Main Clues are the milestones. They open new areas, unlock NPCs and start quest lines. Directional Clues sit in between them and just point the player in one direction or another, and they come in two flavours: leads, which are the good ones, and misleads, which divert the player into false investigation paths.
The dialogue trees are where the whole system pays off, because it's a narrative and investigation based game. Lisa has to raise her stats to unlock the lines that find new clues, so a locked conversation is a puzzle rather than a dead end.
Main and side quest dialogue have distinct visual cues, so the player can choose between focusing on the main story and going off hunting for material.
Whenever a conversation ends with locked content still hidden behind it, Lisa says so out loud, so the player knows to come back better equipped instead of assuming the NPC was a dead end:
"I think he's hiding something." · "She's keeping something for herself." · "I have the feeling that was half of the story." · "Hmmm… is that all?" · "My gut tells me there's more to it."
THE CRAFTING UI
The screen is laid out around the decision it exists to support. Collected profiles line the top, the crafting area sits in the middle, and the finished Crafted Personalities collect below. The right-hand column is the important one:
The inspector matters a lot more than it looks like it does. Fusion is irreversible and the result is locked behind a night's sleep, so letting the player read the outcome first is what keeps the mechanic demanding rather than just punishing.
Looking at this draft now, the Craft button clearly has to be a lot more visible, and probably belongs at the side instead of the middle, and it doesn't need the Cancel button at the bottom. But otherwise, it's pretty much how it's going to look.
WHAT THIS PROJECT WAS FOR
Deadly Smart was a university brief: design a game around a crafting system, and document it to production standard. The interesting part was refusing to read "crafting" as inventory management. Turning it into a social mechanic meant the economy, the progression and the narrative gating all had to be one single system instead of three, which is a much harder document to write, but a much better game to argue for.
Version 1.2. Design documentation, systems and UI by Ignacio Garcia Zea.