Another example is a potential witness who remembers hearing a scream when walking through the park, but they can’t remember anything else. What would happen if they retraced their steps? Maybe this would jog their memory. Perhaps they would then remember other details about what they heard.

The memory of a particular event is not related to objects. It can be related to any of our senses. Sometimes prompting a NPC with one sense can reveal a piece of memory about something related. An example of this would be smelling coffee in the morning and remembering that donut you had yesterday.

NPC’s will store almost everything, but access to that memory may be conditional. It’s your job to discover the best ways to get the information you need.

Each character has multiple relationships which would make sense. There are the typical family relationships, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles. There are bad relationships and good ones, the jealous husband, the spoilt child, the happy family person.

There are also friends and enemies. Who likes who, who has a grudge? Did some kid pick on some neighbors kid at school? Is the local butcher jealous of the young man who ogles his wife? The list is endless.

At the start of every new game, these relationships are tested and a likely murder victim is chosen. Depending on game difficultly level a complex murder mystery will be generated. As stated before, each experience with Pop 55 will have a different victim.

By using your detective skills and natural understand of human relationships you can investigate until you discover the murderer. Talk to anyone you want. Did anyone have problems with the deceased? Did anyone have anything to gain? The blind man heard screams and the murderer flee from the crime scene – but he didn’t see anything. A woman was walking through the park and may have seen something important but she can’t remember. Perhaps going with and retracing her steps will jog her memory?

All of these scenario’s can be played out.

- Fun, exciting & easy to play
- Each game experience is unique and personally tailored to the player
- Every game has a different victim and different murderer

Do you want to be the good cop? Or, the bad one that beats confessions out of people?

It’s the dead of night and you’re driving down a winding road. In the distance you can make out a small coastal town. As you drive, your headlights flash upon a sign that reads ‘Cove – Pop. 56′. Scored out with red blood, written next to that is 55…

This is the beginning of Population 55. You come upon a small coastal town where someone in the town has been murdered. It is your job to discover who did it.

Over the next few days I’ll be outlining the concept and general direction of the game.

As previously stated I’ll be tweeting each step in the development process. As a practical matter I’ll very likely have links back to this blog for posts that need more than 140 characters…

Just a minor fix for both of them. You can now attach / remove the headset on the iPod touch 2G while running Light Tunnel without problems now.

You can read more about Light Tunnel here.