The operator where players have to solve complex crimes, but do so indirectly, by helping field agents sift through databases and analyze clues using complex software to help them make arrests.
Game Developer sat down with Bastien Giafferi, the game’s creator, to talk about what attracted them to exploring the role of lab technicians and analysts in solving crimes, the thought process behind designing the various interfaces for different types of analytics tools and databases, and how the story beats would help shape the systems players would use to navigate them.
Game Developer: The operator sees players help field agents investigate complex crimes. What inspired the creation of this game?
Jafferi: I got the idea for the game while watching The File X for the tenth time… There's this scene where Mulder and Scully find a strange sample in a body and ask a lab technician to analyze it. When the technician gives them the results, he's shocked and asks where they found the sample. At that point, I thought it would be nice to see the action from this person's point of view.
What inspired you to have players act as assistants rather than field agents? How did that influence your design for solving crimes in the game?
I think it was just more original. One of the biggest limitations I had was my skill set. I can't do art per se, so I had to do something different. I immediately came up with the idea of making a UI-only game, and it made sense for the player to be the assistant rather than the actual agent. I really enjoy using my limitations as a creative tool.
The biggest consequence of this decision is that the player has a better overview of the cases than the agents themselves, so it became clear that there must be a conspiracy somewhere. It also works better because I can present a situation directly to the player, with limited access to a subset of evidence, and ask them to solve a specific problem. It essentially turned the game into a puzzle game.
Image via Bureau 81.
What thoughts went into the game's interface? How did you design the overall look of the game to make players feel like they're working with complex, high-tech investigation systems?
My goal was to mimic a real operating system. Since I work on Windows, macOS, and Linux, I took a little bit from each. The interface was designed step by step, and for each part I tried to think about how the software would actually work. For example, with a chemical analysis software, it made sense to have a place somewhere in the FDI where the samples would be stored, and an automated system that would take this sample and put it into a very sophisticated machine where you would have to input settings based on your sample. This would create both the gameplay and the story. Since immersion was one of my pillars for this game, I really tried to make sure the interface and the software were as believable as possible.
How did you choose the analysis systems that players would use in the game? What ideas went into their design and how would they make checking the evidence more interesting?
I chose the systems based on the ideas I had for each sequence. Most of the time, the ideas for a specific sequence were based on the goals of the story and had to be different from the previous ones. I didn't want to use the same system twice in the same way.
For example, in the first case with Agent Andrews, my narrative goal was to demonstrate that the IDF was censoring information and that this was the first time we had worked with HAL and Agent Andrews. The sole purpose of this sequence was to demonstrate that the accidental fire that killed Mia Cole was not an accident, to reopen the case. With this in mind, I looked for a way to demonstrate that a fire was not an accident. The best idea I had was to analyze an ash sample and find that gasoline had been used to start the fire (not exactly an accident…). So I created the chemical analyzer just for that use case.
What challenges did you face in making these systems interesting for players without overwhelming them with options for how to proceed with a case?
I really wanted to make sure the game was accessible to everyone. I didn't want to include gameplay that required complex knowledge. Some things are deliberately difficult and overwhelming, like defusing the bomb, but that serves the story. For the bomb, the goal was to make you feel helpless. It's your first day, you shouldn't even be there, so obviously defusing a bomb is difficult without the right knowledge!
I think the hardest part was managing my limitations when it came to polishing the game. A lot of the ideas I had were just too complicated to polish. For this reason, I focused on the mandatory evidence first. If a sequence was too easy or just too obvious, I would blur the evidence a bit or add more easy-to-make evidence to help hide the important parts. Depending on how the information is presented to the players, it's really easy to hide key information or make something more obvious.
Image via Bureau 81.
What challenges do you face when creating the evidence you give the player in the game? How do you give them enough clues to figure things out without giving them too much away?
To be honest, the biggest challenge I faced was my polishing ability. I had to cut a lot of “flavor” tests because they were just too hard to polish. When I started developing The operatorAI was just starting to get some really great results. For a small creator like me, it was a really cool tool that allowed me to go a lot further. But as development progressed and ethical concerns about AI grew (especially with the data used to train said AIs), I decided to remove AI-generated content entirely. However, some evidence simply couldn't be replaced without a proper budget (like burned apartment photos, for example) and had to be cut.
As for “clue distribution”, since I knew exactly what the player would know in each sequence and what I wanted them to understand, once I found a gameplay or puzzle for the sequence, I decided what evidence to put there. As for what the players understood, a lot of playtesting was done!
Image via Bureau 81.
Can you walk us through the process of designing a case for the game with a specific example? Tell us from start to finish how you came up with the concept and how you figured out how to convey the story through narrative moments and trials.
I started with plot twists I had in mind and sequence ideas I really wanted to create. For example, I knew I wanted a sequence where you help an agent defuse a bomb over the phone (kind of like Keep talking and no one explodes). I then created the story and characters by combining these ideas of sequence and plot twists.
For example, in the Evidence Room sequence, the goal of the story was to recover hidden evidence from a previous case. This was a good opportunity to create a completely new interface, since we had to enter the FDI evidence room to access this evidence. I decided to go with an MSDOS-inspired UI. In terms of gameplay, since the goal was to get as far away from the basic UI as possible, I decided to use only keyboard navigation.
For experienced players it is easy, but for non-technical players this is the first challenge of the sequence. Every available key is displayed below the window, so even if you are not used to this type of interface, you can still do a little trial and error to figure out how it works. It also made sense that this interface is highly technical, so it is harder to find what we are looking for.
There's also an overarching storyline contained within the investigation systems themselves. Can you talk a little about how you wove the story into the analysis systems in a way that would make players feel smart for finding those “secret” items?
I think it's actually the other way around. I wove the systems into the story. Since the story was laid out first, I knew exactly what I could hide and where, so it would feel like a minor element. Some players probably noticed those details and figured out some of the plot twists before they should have, but that's okay. For example (spoiler), at one point early in the game, you can ask Mike (your “friend,” except he's not) about his wife, and Mike tries to act like it's a fact, but if you check the database at this point, you'll see that he doesn't have a wife. It's a hidden detail that almost no one notices, but if you do, it makes you feel really clever.