With two weeks to go, we needed to complete our story and get our heads around the ins and outs of the different aspects of the flow of the story. We have already decided on some crucial elements to the story such as who gets murdered (Mrs Clement) and who murders her (Mr Clement), but in order to add a bit more depth to our story we needed to look into the typical conventions and tropes of murder mysteries.
We looked into the concept of red herrings being “a misleading clue that directs the sleuth away from the true villain. The red herring also distracts the reader from figuring out the real culprit and may lead them to draw a false conclusion about someone innocent instead” (Yang 2022). This is something that we definitely wanted to include in our game to make the plot more engaging and keep the audience guessing. We decided that the cleaner was going to be our red herring and we started to brainstorm how we could portray this.
We dotted clues along the story hinting that the cleaner has something to do with Mrs Clement’s death such as;
- the police report stating she was found dead in the cleaner’s closet
- the coroner’s report stating that she was killed by bleach poisoning
- bank statements between Mr Clement and the cleaner with transactions of large amounts
At first, we wanted it to appear as though Mr Clement was having an affair with the cleaner but then decided to just make it as though he is trying to frame her for purposes of story translation in the game.
References
Yang H (2022) What Is a Red Herring? Definition and Meaning, prowritingaid.com, https://prowritingaid.com/red-herring#:~:text=In%20detective%20stories%2C%20a%20red.