Criminal Minds

How to rock a great IP

Creative Director and more
Involvement: ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥
Release: 2018

Criminal Minds – The Mobile Game has a special place in my heart. There is so much to tell about this game. It was Blue Giraffe’s only flirt with another publisher than GameHouse and it was our only game where the IP was from outside our own studio. Next to owning the full game design and most of the level design I also produced the game and helped the story. The development of this game taught me so much and with only 6 FTE (scattered through about a dozen people) we managed to create a well received and highly regarded game with a well known IP on time and within budget.

The official Criminal Minds – The Mobile Game trailer

The Criminal Minds TV series is well known throughout the globe. Our partner FTX came to us as they were impressed with our time management games in the Heart’s Medicine series and requested us to do a reskinned version, with the same kind of gameplay, same amount of levels and same way of telling stories. After some thought and tries, it became apparent that a reskinned game wouldn’t do us or the IP any justice.

Why a reskinned version wouldn’t work

The Heart’s Medicine games had a single protagonist and the player controlled that character alone while she went from patient to patient.

The Criminal Minds main cast consists out of 8 character, of which we made 7 available as character to play with. We reserved a special role for Garcia, the IT and hacking specialist of the BAU.

Heart’s Medicine used the Hospital Rooms as the backdrop for most of it’s story telling. It’s almost like a theatre play or a sitcom like way of telling the story.

Criminal Minds story required larger environments that mostly take place outside.

Talking about environments. If you tell a story in a hospital, you only need a couple of environments. In case of our Heart’s Medicine game, we had 6 main environment and only a couple of supporting environments.

With Criminal Minds, a homicide investigation story requires way more environments. As we had 6 story lines to tell ended up with a massive 41 environments that often spam multiple screens!

Honoring the Criminal Minds Brand

The investigation tasks required agents to do the actual investigation

Each of the tasks required any of the agents OR a specific agent, creating some nice agent management.

Each of the agents had their own specialties. and players are free to choose whoever fits their style the most when replaying the levels.

I wanted the player to feel part if the BAU team and feel like the invisible agent on the scene. Active involvement from the player was required and helped with setting up the time management play.

Some action required the player to hold down their finger for a while (preventing them to do another action, which meant these actions needed to be strategically planned).

Other actions could be sped up while holding your finger on them, such as making your agents move faster.

Symbiotic Gameplay and Storytelling

Telling a story as part of the gameplay, in the middle of the investigation gameplay

And making sure that everything that we do tells a story. Such as this investigating minigame where we see the player filtering a crime database with Garcia. The items that are selected tell a miniature investigation story on its own

Or our suspect interviews mini-games, even without words, we can see this lady is hiding the answers we seek and the player is literally digging through her story

But we also included iconic raiding scenes where the whole team would move in on the suspect to arrest them, adding more action and tension.

Sense of world

We created a new system where anything in the world could potentially be a task for our agents to investigate. This was quite a departure from our Heart’s Medicine games where we needed explicit game object to have this kind of functionality. This allowed us to create a mire dynamic investigation scene.

We also made sure we used the crime scene themselves as a canvas for some of the investigation minigames. In this example the player needs to find the footsteps of the possible suspect.

Heart’s Medicine was originally developed for PC and some of its gameplay wasn’t always adapted or optimized for mobile devices. For criminal minds, we made sure that we took on a “mobile first approach”.

New actions such as dragging items to hand them over to the agents are an example of that apporach.

Or combining 2 items through swiping them

To serve a casual audience we made gameplay less punishing by making sure the player would always add progress, even if the player didn’t perform optimally.