Murder Mystery was conceived as a point-and-click adventure game, with Quicktime VR technology as its graphical user interface, Cascading Stylesheets to handle screen layout, and Javascript to perform processing.
In practice, Murder Mystery uses a single QTVR Scene, four separate QTVR Objects, four still images, a cascading stylesheet, and approximately 20KB of Javascript code.
The QTVR Scene was constructed from around 90 still images (5 nodes, each constructed from 18 images), all taken using a digital camera and KiWi tripod head. The images were stitched, blended, and converted into QTVR Panoramas using VRWorx, and then later assembled into a single scene (Also using VRWorx).
The QTVR Objects were constructed using 8 still images for each object, again taken using a digital camera. The objects were placed onto a "Lazy-Susan" positioned in front of a wall, and shots were taken of the front, left, right, back, and diagonal angles. The images were then pain-stakingly altered by hand using Photoshop, replacing the background with a uniform white, and finally turned into QTVR Objects using VRWorx.
The suspect photos were taken using a digital camera, by hand, with the subjects standing in naturally lit indoor areas. As with the QTVR Objects, the backgrounds of the images were removed by hand in Photoshop.
All the HTML, cascading stylesheet, and Javascript created for this assignment was writen using Windows Notepad.
The story line for each mystery is randomly determined at the start of play, meaning that if the Javascript random number generator is doing its thing, you should never play exactly the same mystery twice. Suspect alibis, the murder weapon, the murderer, what happens to the suspect you accuse at the end of the game, and even what happens to you at the end of the game, are all changeable factors. It should also be noted that due to the way in which I designed this system, it would only require very minor changes to add in new suspects, weapons (Although this would require changing the QTVR Scene), alibis, and endings.
So there you have it, 125 still images, far too many hours slaving over a hot Photoshop, the fun of stitching 960*1280 images together in VRWorx (I was too impatient to resize them first), and more Javascript than you can poke a stick at. But then, whoever said staging a murder was supposed to be easy?