The Operator is a crime game that comes complete with UI

The operator lets players solve complex crimes, but does so indirectly by having you assist field agents by using complex software to scour databases and analyze clues to help them make an arrest.

Game Developer caught up with Bastien Giafferi, the game's creator, to talk about what appeals to them about exploring the role of lab technicians and analysts in solving crimes, the thought process behind designing the various interfaces for different analysis tools and databases, and how the central points of the story influence the systems players use to navigate them.

Game developers: The operator Players assist field agents in investigating complex crimes. What inspired you to develop this game?

Giafferi: The idea for the game came to me while watching The The X-Files for the 10th time… There's this scene where Mulder and Scully find a strange sample in a dead body and ask a lab technician to analyze it. When the technician tells them the results, he's shocked and asks where they found the sample. At this point, I thought it would have been great to see the action from that person's perspective instead.

What made you decide to have players act as assistants rather than on-the-ground agents? How did that influence your approach to solving crimes in the game?

I think it was just more original. One of my biggest limitations was my skills. I can't necessarily do art, so I had to do something different. I quickly came up with the idea of ​​making a pure UI game, and it made sense that the player would be the assistant and not the actual agent. I really like 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. Essentially, it turned the game into a puzzle game.

What considerations went into the game's user interface? How did you design the overall look of the game to make players feel like they are working with complex, high-tech investigative systems?

My goal was to mimic a real operating system. Since I work with Windows, macOS, and Linux, I took a little bit of each. The UI was designed step by step, and with 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 that sample and feed it into a very sophisticated machine where you would have to make adjustments based on your sample. This would both create the gameplay and serve the story. Since immersion was one of my pillars for this game, I really tried to make sure the UI and 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 development and how would they make proof checking more interesting?

I chose the systems based on the ideas I had for each sequence. Most of the time, the ideas for a particular sequence were based on story goals 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 goal was to show that the FDI was censoring information and that this was the first time we were working with HAL and Agent Andrews. The only goal of this sequence was to prove that the accidental fire that killed Mia Cole was not an accident, so that the case could be reopened. With that in mind, I looked for a way to prove that a fire was not an accident. The best idea I could come up with was to analyze an ash sample and find out that gasoline was used to start the fire (not a big accident…). Then I developed the chemical analyzer for this exact use case.

What challenges did you face in making these systems interesting for the player without overwhelming them with options for how to proceed in a case?

I really wanted to make sure the game was accessible to everyone. I didn't want to put in gameplay that required complex knowledge. Some things are intentionally difficult and overwhelming, like the bomb defusal, but that serves the story. With the bomb, the goal was to make you feel helpless. It's your first day, you're not even supposed to be there, so of course it's difficult to defuse a bomb without the right knowledge!

I think the hardest part was coming to terms with my own limitations when it came to refining the game. A lot of my ideas were just too complicated to refine, so I focused on the obligatory evidence first. If a sequence was too simple or just too obvious, I would obfuscate the evidence a little or add more easy-to-create evidence to hide the important parts. Depending on how the information is presented to the players, it's really easy to hide the 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 too much away?

Honestly, the biggest challenge for me was my own ability to refine things. I had to cut out a lot of “taste” proofs because they were just too hard to refine. When I started developing, The operatorAI was just starting to produce really great results. For a small creator like me, it was a really great tool that allowed me to go much further. But as development progressed and ethical concerns about AI arose (especially regarding the data used to train the AIs), I decided to remove AI-generated content entirely. However, some evidence simply couldn't be replaced without a reasonable budget (like burnt photos of an apartment, for example) and had to be removed.

As far as “clue distribution” goes, I knew exactly what the player would know in each sequence and what I wanted them to understand. Once I found some gameplay or puzzle for the sequence, I decided what piece of evidence I wanted to put there. As far as player understanding goes, a lot of playtesting went into it!

Image via Bureau 81.

Can you walk us through the process of designing a case for the game with a concrete example? Tell us from start to finish how you came up with the concept and how you figured out how to tell the story through narrative moments and evidence.

I started with the plot twists I had in mind and the sequence ideas I really wanted to do. For example, I knew I wanted a sequence where you help an agent defuse a bomb over the phone (a bit like Keep talking and no one will explode). Then I created the story and characters to combine these ideas and twists in the sequence.

For example, in the evidence room sequence, the story goal was to recover hidden evidence from a previous case. This was a good opportunity to create a completely new UI, as we had to break into the FDI's evidence room to get to that evidence. I decided to go with an MSDOS-inspired UI. Since the goal was to stray as far from the base UI as possible, I decided to go with keyboard-only navigation.

For experienced players it's easy, but for non-technical players this is the first challenge of the sequence. Each available button is shown below the window, so even if you're not used to this type of interface, you can still do a little fiddling to understand how it works. It also made sense for this interface to be very technical, so it's harder to find what we're looking for.

There's also an overarching storyline contained within the investigation systems themselves. Can you tell us a bit about how you incorporated the story into the analytics systems so that players feel clever when they find these “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 to make it seem like an unimportant element. Some players probably noticed these details and figured out some plot twists sooner than they should have, but that's okay. For example (spoiler) at some point early in the game, you can ask Mike (your “friend,” except he's not) about his wife, and Mike tries to pretend it's a fact, but if you check the database at this point, you'll find that he doesn't have a wife. It's a hidden detail that almost no one notices, but when you do, you feel really smart.