Un-reality: Movie-watching

Today's movie day :D It's probably too fun to be work, but there shouldn't be a reason why work can't be fun. Anyway, this is our brain food for watching the movie.


And this is our little setup in the hallway. We moved out of the studio so that we won't disturb the other groups while they're working.


After finishing watching the film we went back to brainstorming on how the murder mystery would work. I'll admit we were a bit lost on how to go about it, so we started designing bits of the murderer first. The most popular aspect was drawn from the book/film where Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is the collector type of serial killer. He collects the scents of beautiful virginal girls to create the world's most exceptional perfume and to give himself a soul. A strong theme in both the book and film is the idea that the scent equals the soul, where scent is what makes a person human (Süskind, 1985; Eichinger & Tykwer, 2006). There's also the idea in the book that Grenouille is not human as he possesses no scent of his own, this is marked as a sign of the Devil. So there's as link to that and his collector approach as a serial killer.

Bits and pieces of ideas that we had was:

The player is given a scent at the beginning, and is required to find the ingredients that make up that scent. I liked this, thought it would be more fun than simply looking for clues. It has a strong interaction with the scent as well.

The player gets framed for the murder or better yet, the player IS the murder. If the player is the murderer instead I think that would make it more fun so it's not completely like a cliche murder mystery because it would be the other way around since the objective would be to kill people.

An idea that went quite far today was this one:

Murderer (the player) makes a deal with the Devil. Devil gives them a full scent at the beginning and they need to find the ingredients to recreate the scent. Ingredients happen to be the souls (scent) of people. Murderer must kill and obtain scent within a certain time limit, or else the Devil will come for their soul.

There's a few things we still need to think about if we do that idea. For example, what's the relationship between the Devil and the Murderer? How does the Devil turn up in the game? Why would the Murderer want to make a deal with the Devil in the first place? What does the Murderer gain? What's the incentive to kill?

We had a little brainstorm on that too. Maybe the Murderer is on the brink of death or maybe it's the Devil's sick game. The latter doesn't sound strong or convincing enough to be honest. Or perhaps the Devil promises the Murderer something he/she desperately wants.

There's no definite decision on exactly what we're doing yet, but at the moment we like the idea of the player being the murderer and setting a time limit for the completion of the game.





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References:

Eichinger, B. (Producer), & Tykwer, T. (Director). (2006). Perfume: The Story of a Murderer [Motion picture]. Germany: Constantin Film.

Süskind, P. (1985). Perfume. Germany: Penguin Books.