We’ve recently been working on the structure and design of The Barlow Enquiry – sorting out the features of the Blog and the ways through which we plan to tell our story.
Bec and I have been trying to organise the Blog’s features in order to provide both a streamlined and player-friendly experience. We’ve begun working on developing the ‘flow’ of the Blog’s pages —> trying to subtly ‘railroad’ players from one page to the next. Free exploration of the Blog will of course be encouraged, however it’ll be important to guide players through the blog when they first begin ‘playing’.
We’ve also begun to discuss HOW the story/experience will actually end. The finale of the piece will be a crucial aspect of the project to get right, as we definitely want to provide players with a satisfying ending which neatly concludes the story.
At the moment we’re thinking of allowing players to make up their own mind regarding who the killer was. The plan is to narrow down the potential suspects to 2-3 and then provide players with a range of evidence and information which they can use to assemble their final theories.
In addition to this, we’ll provide ‘our’ version of the story, using a final post from Atticus to do so. He’ll write up his ideas and outline why he thinks his chosen suspect was the killer. This will help players write their own theories, AND MORE SIGNIFICANTLY allow passive audience members (who aren’t interested in forming their own theory) to enjoy a conclusion to the story that they don’t have to “work for”.
We’ve also continued to experiment around with the idea of bridging 1901 and 2016 with another investigation. This investigation (if we decide to implement it) will take place in the 1980s and will provide another source of valuable story information. I think this would add a lot of depth to the overall storyline and it’d make for an interesting turning point in the 2016 investigation.