Detecto-Bot: A Robo Murder Mystery - CS50 Fair 2025 at Harvard

Alright, hi everyone, I'm here with Ian, a member of the class of 28 here at Harvard College in Fho House, and he's going to tell us about his project Detectiveot today. So yeah, just a quick summary, what's your project? Yeah, sure. So Detective Boot is an AI powered procedurally generated murder mystery strategy game, and basically if you've ever. Played like Secret Hitler or Clue or diplomacy, it's basically similar. It's a game where you try to figure out who the murderer is based on talking to various suspects, and the trick here is that the suspects are all powered by AI. You're talking to an API for ChatBT and also the mystery itself is also generated. So if you want to come in closer here. We have, uh, this is the welcome page where you can select your difficulty, uh, if we select hard, um, which is the recommended version, it gives you 5 questions per round, and at the end of each round, um, you have to, uh, eliminate, uh, 11 of the suspects. OK, so what we know so far, OK, so this is kind of long, but basically, uh, let's see, it's, uh, the, the crime happened at midnight. Uh, it's in an alley in a warehouse. There's a kitchen knife involved. There is a coat and descriptions is generated depending on certain prompt we can talk to the suspects. So for example, Nancy where you can also if we scroll down, she will give an answer for us. Um, and certain characters will give alibis if they were selected as the murderer at the beginning. Um, others will try to help you out depending on the difficulty. Um, and then once you finish your line of questioning, you can end questioning and make an accusation. Say I think it's daring Dave. I can click on him and accuse him, but if I was wrong, I can continue my investigation. Dave is now dead and I lose a point, and I can keep asking questions until I'm confident who the murderer is and hopefully find the right guy. So yeah, as a lover of Clue, what kind of inspired you to make this game? Yeah, so I've actually never played Clue. I did see the musical in LA. It was pretty good, um, but I was originally going to do a game called Diplomacy. Some people might know it. It's based on a lot of trickery, but it also has a really difficult game board to design, so I was like it might be easier if I just had a text box and some characters, and actually it made it sort of more creative for the AI because it could also come up with a story and everything. Um, so overall it turned out really well. Awesome, incredible project, Ian. Thank you so much. This was CS 50.