April 2023 - Ronan Jennings

This article was originally going to be a quick run through of the development process, a discussion of our main design pillars, and some of the challenges we faced, but it ended up being far longer than intended. So I’ve put the actual run through of the development process in another article, and here I’ll just focus on the key parts of our design, and how we made it all work.

The design of our rooms isn’t a straightforward one. It’s all in flux throughout the whole process, as we come up with new ideas for gameplay or story moments. Some of the main mechanics are based on thoughts we only had half way through development. But it was important that we didn’t lose track of our original vision of the game, or let the miasma of creation prioritise innovation over making a satisfying experience. So we had a discussion early on about what the core of the game was, what defined it, and what we needed to hit. No matter what twists and turns the game took, we had to deliver on these three things:

```
Feeling like a detective.
```
```
Player agency.
```
```
A sense of play.
```

Feeling Like a Detective

One of the main things people say after they play the Murder of Max Sinclair is that they really “felt like a detective”. That was great, and was something we wanted to expand on with Radio Nowhere.

The first thing you do in the game is assemble a list of suspects. You create a list of people in the opening chapter of the game, and one of those people is the killer. You’re guided through the process of narrowing the list down and gathering more information as the game goes on, but savvy players can start putting together pretty compelling theories from the moment they enter the room, some of which turn out to be totally right.

Don’t solve puzzles, solve mysteries. Who are your suspects?

The design approach here became to - at every step of the game - give the players WAY too much information. They need to assemble 4 suspects, but there’s 8 names being thrown around. They need to find one suspicious thing about each character, but there’s a dozen different unusual things going on. And it’s up to the players to cut through all that noise and recognise what information is useful. Rather than handing them the important information, they get to be the ones to have the “Aha!” moment, and make a connection that their teammates haven’t seen. A true detective moment, instead of just playing out the set piece that we’ve prepared for them.

This is difficult. Because information that isn’t useful is a red herring, and red herrings are rarely fun. So if we’re filling the game with extraneous info, we had to make sure that everything was useful in some way or another.

A poster for a band might not be relevant to you right now, but it lets you know the lead singer’s name, and tells you that he owned a guitar. An incorrect ID card found on the body might feel like it’s throwing you off, until you realise its true owner might be a suspect, and now you have all their details.

A key part of this is to put multiple solutions to each problem in the mix, so you’re not relying on players finding the exact needles in the haystack that you’re hoping for. We ask players to find one suspicious thing about each of their potential suspects, but each character might actually have multiple suspicious things to find. Someone might have been spotted at the scene, and also have a registered firearm. They might own a bloody jacket that was found discarded nearby, and also have sent the victim a threatening text. But because we’re only asking players to find one of these things for each person, they can explore the room however they like, sure to discover something useful no matter what.

We also gave players a place to start by giving them ‘Paramedic Notes’, and a set of items found on the body, with each item being a lead they can follow to a different suspect. Dumping players in the sea of information without a starting point might have been completely overwhelming, but by saying “Hey, maybe look at this first”, we can get the ball rolling and the cogs in their brains turning, while still letting them have the moments of revelation themselves.

Even towards the end of the game, we never hand the players the (metaphorical) smoking gun. We say that the killer needs a Means, a Motive, and an Opportunity, and eventually invite the players to make their case against a specific individual. They might not know for sure, but they can gather their evidence, discuss what they know, and submit their theories. Much more satisfying than unlocking a box with the killer’s name inside.

Player Agency

Next up is Player Agency. Because one thing that almost all escape rooms are lacking is some element of genuine choice. Some games might have a fun bit at the end where you choose to be good or bad, triggering a different voiceover for the finale, but they almost never have choices that truly affect the game.

With Radio Nowhere, we wanted to let the players feel like they were the ones driving the investigation forward, rather than following the trail we’d left for them. The above points about feeling like a detective tie into this: leaving multiple plot threads and points of suspicion for players to find means that players are never punished for tackling the case in a way that’s different to what we planned. You’re rewarded no matter the approach you take, or whichever parts of the case grab your attention.

But the biggest part of this is The Choice.

The video game Pentiment is an incredible game by the people who made Fallout: New Vegas, all about solving a murder in mediaeval Bavaria. But differently to most detective games, you don’t have unlimited time to dig into every possible suspect and put together a perfect, watertight case. Instead, every conversation you have causes time to pass, and you only have a couple days until you’ll be asked for your verdict. You might spend all afternoon talking to a suspect, only to realise they had a perfect alibi all along. It’s stressful, but it makes the stakes feel real. You’re not solving a puzzle; you’re interacting with real people, and your decisions have consequences. You’ll need to trust your instincts, work with incomplete information, and follow the leads you think are most important.

Pentiment. Make your choices, regret them later.

We wanted to capture this feeling with Radio Nowhere. Once you’ve assembled your four suspects, you’re asked which two of them you want to prioritise. You get to read one last statement from all four of them about the murder, but then you have to make your choice.  Choose to investigate someone, and you’re given the key to their personal staff locker, containing more information about them, and a puzzle to find out the truth of whether or not they were involved in the murder.

If a group is moving quicker than expected, we’ll let them choose a third locker after they’ve done their first two, but 90% of teams will only ever see two of the suspects. Players are given a choice, they have to make it, and the next half hour of the game changes dramatically based on their choices. The difficult thing here was to make sure that there were no wrong answers. If you pick the real killer then you’ll find some pretty damning evidence, but what if you don’t? What if you pick two people that had nothing to do with the crime? We had to make sure the contents of each locker reveals the secrets of the person you’ve chosen (usually giving them an alibi), while also giving another hint in the direction of the true killer, letting you have just enough information that you can piece the truth together with any combination of suspects.

Sense of Play

Our third pillar was ensuring there was a consistent sense of PLAY. Most escape rooms have a huge focus on time limits and leaderboards, which always feels like a shame. All this effort has been put into building a world and a narrative, so how come we’re usually encouraged to blast through it as quickly as possible, and punished for taking the time to soak in the details?

With Radio Nowhere, we took the exact opposite approach. We want you to mess about, immerse yourself, and have a good time.

There’s a lot of little ways we applied this, like a puzzle that requires the players to wear cool sunglasses, or asking them to pick their own DJ names before the game begins, but the big one is in the name of the game: The Radio Station. What started as a joke idea turned into a core part of the game, where there is an almost fully functioning radio station for the players to run. They can play music, talk into the microphone, and entertain their listeners. We added a “live listener count” that goes up and down depending on how much of a show they’re putting on. If players are having a lot of fun with it then we’ll send over some fan mail, or phone them up and request a song, dropping some hints about the murder along the way.

Host your own radio show. The murder can wait.

We never want people to feel like they’re paying attention to the “wrong” part of the game, so slipping in plot details and character information into these calls and fan letters is important. Players can make progress in the mystery because they’re messing about on the microphone, not in spite of it. Encouraging these playful moments is important, both by giving the players the toys to mess around with, but also by celebrating their actions every time they choose to play in the space. Working on a puzzle has a clear benefit, but a player might feel like they’ve wasted time by hosting an impromptu interview segment. So every time a player makes that choice, the listener count immediately goes up, and a message from their “producer” will compliment their hosting skills. Calls from fans will directly reference the things players have said on air, and gives opinions on the exact songs they’ve played. There aren’t actually thousands of people listening to their broadcast, but the GM is listening, and being an attentive and receptive audience is important to encourage our players to put on a show.

Between phone calls and fan mail, the live listeners count, and a projector showing messages from the producer, there’s a lot of points of interaction between the GM and the players. This means there’s a lot of room for improv. Prompted to give an interview on air, a recent player claimed credit for writing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, calling Andrew Lloyd Webber a fraud. We took this and ran with it, pumping up their listener numbers due to the scandal, giving them angry notes from the producer, and eventually making a phone call AS Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. The players demanded piles of money, and there were a few more twists and turns along the way. It was incredibly silly, and purely for the fun of it.

We’re being caught off guard almost every day by players coming up with something new and unexpected. People aren’t just solving puzzles, they’re genuinely pretending to host a radio show. Fantastic.

Radio Nowhere is hugely experimental as a game. We originally just intended to dip our toes in the waters of experimentation, but getting carried away, we found ourselves pushing the boat out, diving right in, and probably even more water metaphors too. There were a few points where we took a step back and realised we’d gone too far, or lost sight of our original intentions, but having these three design pillars meant we never strayed too far from the path, and always knew how to get back on track. And when we were coming up with new ideas like the ones listed above, we were able to identify which pillar we wanted each idea to support, and give ourselves some guidelines going forward. Radio Nowhere could have been a mess, but by identifying what we were trying to achieve right at the beginning of the process, we made a hell of a game that does some crazy new things.