The Red Rain Case

Game Concept

Crimson Rain is an experimental and stylized noir-detective style puzzle narrative game, where every character in the scene is mute, lacks facial expressions, looks identical, and is entirely ambiguous in terms of race, gender identity, class, sexuality, and any other distinguishing features. This is a means to address the rampant stereotyping and aesthetic bias that is rooted in classic detective fiction, as well as the motivated reasoning that is at the root of the perpetuation of hatred and bigotry in the current information age. By attempting to create an environment for players where that form of internal/motivated bias is impossible, the player has no room for motivated reasoning, and instead has to extract their own truth from a blank canvas.

 The intent is that practicing this form of objective reasoning and being rewarded for it in the context of this game would help players foster those very crucial skills. Players are tasked to deduce the game’s narrative solely through the characters’ actions, through the manipulation of time on individual characters’ timelines of events, requiring them to pay very close attention to detail. To solve the game,  players must observe every characters’ timeline, and place them all in chronological order through thoughtful analysis and observation, with the goal of uncovering, and subsequently erasing, the tragedy that occurred amongst the events they witnessed.

Playable Character

(Video above is a simple trailer for The Red Rain Case made for the London College of Communication MA Games Design Graduate Showcase)

Whenever a city is mired in the fog of lies and impending misfortune, The Detective, the cosmic embodiment of Truth, appears. As objectivity incarnate, The Detective does not have the capability of discerning between human faces and voices. In turn, The Detective has the power to exist beyond the absolute truth that is the flow of time, with the ability to stop, fast forward, and rewind time for any particular person.

Narrative

(Video above is early documentation of the alternative controller in action)

Under the watchful eye of an expansive eternal night sky and the gentle embrace of perpetual rain, a quiet city stands in serenity, yet afflicted with looming tragedy brought on by four young street musicians. The Detective is tasked with uncovering the truth of their fates, in order to reset the timeline and prevent any of those events from ever happening.

Mechanics

(Video above is that of the primary track of the game, a dynamic audio track that adds layers as the player experiences more and more of the game.)

Upon the presence of The Detective, a city becomes scattered in time across several timeframes that converge onto one truth. As you explore this city's streets, you will see several characters  that you can inspect. Upon inspecting characters, you have the option to take them outside the flow of time which stops time, and gives you the ability to view their prior actions and the future actions they are going to take in isolation. You must connect all of these individual pasts and futures, in order to piece together this case.

Aesthetic

The Red Rain Case harkens to a PS2-era retro stylization in regards to its aesthetic, with a postmodern flair through the use of surreal shaders and visual effects, that accentuate the abstract nature of the game's premise. The music plays a large part in this aesthetic hybridization between nostalgia and postmodernism, with an evolving soundtrack that mixes synthwave and noir jazz. The aim of blending two aesthetic styles is to further underline The Red Rain Case's inspiration from and deconstruction of Classic Detective Literature, through the lens of stereotyping and motivated reasoning.   

Showcase/Exhibition Features

(Video above is footage of the game in an exhibition showcase, with the alt controller, and the supplementary physical components all present)

This game has a special showcase variant, featuring several additional set pieces to accentuate the experience of play. The manipulation of time will be carried out using an alternative controller taking the shape of a Pocket Watch, built with an Arduino and alternative buttons. The exhibition version of the game will also feature a 2nd interactable touch screen that will be used to showcase the world map, a laminated map of the city, physical components to annotate that map with, and several aesthetic set-pieces to supplement the experience.

Research

As part of the creation of this game, thorough research was done on the way the flow of information is designed in Detective Games. Furthermore, research was also done on the history of stereotyping within Detective Fictions, and the basis for concern, on why the perpetuation of that stereotyping and motivated reasoning would be harmful for Detective Game design. A paper and a research abstract can both be found and downloaded below.

Thematic Core/Thesis

Detective narratives often prevent truth as inscrutable fact, however, in reality, truth is often muddled, complicated, malleable and subject to personal interpretation based on crucial contextual factors, doubly so when human lives, actions and emotions are involved. Due to the subjectivity of truth, it is quite easy to manipulate people into believing a harmful interpretation of said truth, rooted in hatred and bigotry. Especially within the current digital age, with social media algorithms designed to perpetuation negative discourse for the sake for traction rooted in outrage, and generative AI, which makes the spreading of falsehoods under the guise of truth trivially simple: people are more at risk than ever.

As a result, it's important to understand the fact that we have full ownership and authority over our truths as individuals, and our capability to cultivate those truths in a positive and constructive manner, that aids, rather than disrupts other people, is incredibly valuable. We are also incapable of knowing for a fact what is inside other people's hearts, and conjecture on eternally malleable and unknown truths in that vein, can only serve to perpetuate harm and misinformation. However, what we can discuss, is effect, and outcome, and doing so in a worthwhile and beneficial manner is the root of using truth as a tool for positivity, rather than negativity.

Full Gameplay Video

Further Scope

The following are details involving where I intend to take this project next, everything mentioned down below are, unless extraneous conditions prevent me from doing so, guaranteed to be implemented, and is currently being worked on:

The full scope of this game is for it to be a commercial steam release, presenting a far more ambitious narrative than the one within this student version. In particular, as opposed to myself doing the motion capturing for the game, combined with public domain animations, I intend to be hiring a genuine performance artist to act out the entire game. 

Furthermore, rather than covering a single insular event, the game would be comprised of several chapters, featuring several events across a multitude of timelines, all coinciding to feed into one overarching narrative regarding the perpetuation of bigotry that stems from the modern day digital age, the origins of the information age, and a future as to the worst case scenario projects, that have been formulated through extensive research. 

Another crucial change will be to the character models in the game, in particular, the faceless, voiceless non-playable characters. The intent for these characters is to be entirely ambiguous in terms of aesthetic traits, however, the model currently fails to convey that, as they have a stereotypically masculine build. To the point, that players instinctively call the characters by "he" and internalized heteronormative (as said so to me by players) caused them to miss a crucial part of the game involving a romantic relationship between these characters, due to said masculine builds. Thus, I will be working with a 3D Character Artist, to create a model that truly exemplifies the fully anonymous intent for these characters. 

This will be on top of general fixes that stemmed from the copious amounts of playtesting since the end of my MA Games Design course, from showcases at events, to privately organized and informal playtesting sessions. Ideally, the game would find publishing, so I am capable of executing the game's vision at a strong and comfortable level, however, even if it doesn't see publishing of that sort, I still fully intend to release the game regardless, as I believe it has a very important message to say, particularly in our modern context.

Build Details

The build below is  a prototype of the full game's demo case, built as a student project for the University of the Arts London's MA Games Design Course.

Controls: You are restricted to forwards movement, which you do by holding down the left mouse button, and for time manipulation, press S to stop time when an icon appears over an NPC's head, and during stopped time you can hold A to rewind or hold D to fast forward. If you press S again, you go back to controlling the detective. You can pull up the Case Timeline with right click, and close it again with right click. The Case Timeline is fully operated by mouse input.

Credits

David Gadelkarim (University of the Arts London) - Creator, Director, Designer, Developer, Writer

Tom Alchin (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) - Sound Effects Design

Yusei Hara (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) - Music Composition 

Showcased/Will be Showcased at:

-ZERO generative AI was involved in the creation of any of the game's assets, concept art, promotional material, mechanics, or narrative. There was also no "vibe coding"  in the process of developing the game.-