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A good game needs memorable locations. Sneaking around in boring, everyday places would be yawn-inducing. Good locations add a lot of atmosphere to a game and keep players interested.

At the highest level, I’ll place the game in New York. Why? Because it’s a famous city with the urban feel I’m looking for and, perhaps more importantly, it’s a city I’ve lived in for a few months. I’m much more likely to get things right than if I set this movie in a city I’ve never been, like LA.

As for specific locations, films noirs are filled with cool archetypical locations we can use. Here’s a dozen that would make great levels:

• A manor
• A nightclub
• A gambling den
• A run-down factory
• A train station (Penn station or Grand Central perhaps)
• The maze-like streets of downtown Manhattan
• A boxing gymnasium
• A newspaper office
• A police station
• A refinery
• An opera house
• An abandonned amusement park

The obvious structure for levels is the typical mission-based levels: you go through a whole level to reach the goal in the end, like most games. I don’t want to use that approach for a few reasons.

First is that stealth games are slow-paced, so you’d get pretty long levels — that’s fine for consoles, but for handhelds it’s preferable to get shorter bits of gameplay players can sandwich between 2 activities. The second reason is that I prefer giving players more objectives than he has to achieve, so he can pick those he prefers and avoid those that are too hard or boring. That way the game adjusts itself to the skill and preferences of the players automatically. The third reason is that I’m doing this design for my own fun, so I’m not taking the easy way out.

A structure I like a lot is the one used in Mario 64: the game has a few levels, but each contains a number of stars to find. To find each star, you have to go through a short challenge. You don’t have to get every single star to go through the game and you don’t have to find them in order.

In Shades of Noir, our hero is a detective, so instead of stars he must find pieces of evidence. Each location has 7 different pieces of evidence, each in different parts of the building. At first only a few locations are available, but as the player finds more evidence the story progresses and new locations are unlocked. Every time the player returns to a location to find new evidence, the security level increases slightly — and so does the difficulty.

So who’s that private eye at the center of this whole game? Let’s call him James Harris. He’s an hard-boiled detective in his 30s who knows what’s right and what’s wrong, but mostly cares about what earns him enough to eat three times each day. He’s not a super-trained ninja-assassin, so his abilities are a bit more limited and realistic than those in Splinter Cell or Tenchu. This has the advantage of also simplifying controls, making them more approachable to new players.

Here are a few of those abilities:

• Use a blackjack to stun guards
• Shoot a gun (deadly, but makes a lot of noise that attracts attention)
• Hide himself or bodies in closets and such
• Pick locks
• Throw a pack of cigarette to lure a guard away from his post
• Throw a rock to attract the attention of somebody
• etc.

These abilities, while simple, can combine in interesting ways. For example, you could throw a pack of cigarettes where a guard will see it and hide in a nearby closet. Once the guard goes past the closet to pick the cigarettes up, you come out and blackjack him. You then hide the body in the closet you came out of. Small elements like that can combine to create deeper, emergent gameplay.
One last characteristic of the player character is the voice-overs used for tips. Films noirs are filled with voice-overs to bring the story forward. We can use those both to further the story and to give tips to the player. Facing a locked door, he could say “The door was locked, but old Dante Mancini wouldn’t have locked himself in place with just one way out — there had to be another way in.”

Just a few things left to wrap things up: the story behind this sordid affair, major non-player characters and odd bits and pieces. But it’s getting late, so that’ll wait until tomorrow.

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