<Inspect>
Leland “Shoe” Cordwain has few skills, even less motivation, and everything he knew was thrown into chaos when his childhood best friend Kay was found guilty of a string of gruesome killings. He’s drifting through life, only finding enjoyment in trying to solve true crime cases on the Internet. When a piece of crucial evidence changes in his hands, he learns he is an INSPECTor, an individual with the rare ability to alter items and force reality to align with the new truth.
- Inspect and alter story elements to solve the mystery and catch the killer!
- Will you be a paragon of justice or an arbiter of truth? With multiple storylines and endings, your choices matter!
<Inspect> began with a simple idea: Hey, remember when Tumblr began banning porn but falsely flagged a lot of blogs? But you could just right-click ==> inspect your blog and then change the isAdultContent value to false and then hit enter and it just un-banned your blog? Man, that was crazy! What if I did a story using that as a mechanic?
Okay, maybe not very simple, and not actually simple to execute, considering I am not a great programmer.
The goal of <Inspect> is to have an HTML5 interactive narrative that you read/interact with in your web browser. Due to the nature of browser dev tools, this is only feasible on desktop devices, but is otherwise browser-neutral (assuming you’re using a modern browser). The UX would be as close as possible to reading a “normal” story, so nothing flashy.
Narratively, it’s a single-narrator first-person POV speculative mystery “novel.” Whether it’s science fiction or slipstream or something else is up to debate, but as this is unpublishable by any sort of trade publishing house, I’m not too concerned with that. Themes include the nature of truth and the influence crime media (fictional or otherwise) has on our assumptions and approaches to the justice system. Inspirations include Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, Danganronpa (complimentary), and Law and Order (derogatory), as well as every horrible true-crime podcast and documentary I’ve ever subjected myself to.
<Inspect> is currently in alpha! You can check it out [here]. Feel free to bookmark that page, as that’s where all future versions will go.