Havelock Holmes, Consulting Detective
Assist the reclusive detective, descendant of Sherlock Holmes, in this interactive, tokenized mystery series set in present-day San Francisco.
Solve Mysteries with Holmes
Havelock Holmes is the descendant of Sherlock Holmes, whose affair Irene Adler as remained a secret–until now.
Reclusive, some would say agoraphobic, young Havelock lives alone in secluded Victorian on San Francisco’s iconic Telegraph Hill. From his home–a combination steampunk reliquary and hacker lab–he will take on only those cases that interest him.
But he cannot solve them alone. Despite his mastery of modern technology and his deductive brilliance, he needs someone to assist him. Someone who can move about freely in the world, talk to people, fit in when needed, all things he’s incapable of.
That assistant is you.
Havelock Holmes is being created, written, art directed, and developed by:
Ron Martinez, Headcanon founder and media inventor, and a pioneering narrative game and simulation designer, producer, and developer. Ron, former VP Intellectual Property Innovation for Yahoo! and creator of book retailing platform, Aer.io, also brings a continuing focus on novel commerce and distribution models to his work in narrative systems design.
Designing a story world.
Unlike interactive stories built as branching structures that, while frequently engaging, limiting the range of a user/protagonist capabilities and experience, Havelock Holmes mysteries live in a physical world of objects, locations, and characters that provides users with a set of general abilities with which to act upon that world.
Havelock Holmes, Consulting Detective is being built atop the Headcanon StorySim system.
This story simulation system is rooted in pioneering interactive fiction system our team developed for Star Trek and other stories in the early days of non-linear storytelling.
And it can be used for a range of entertainment marketing, and commerce-centric story experiences.
Havelock’s house on Telegraph Hill
Tokenized Design
The world of Havelock Holmes is closely aligned with your condition as user/protagonist. You must be the eyes, ears, and hands of a man who cannot leave his home for fear of engagement with the outside world. He only engages through speech, asking you for your reports and conclusions giving you choices as to what to pursue next. And what he finds irrelevant he will summarily dismiss.
In this way, our intent is to empower you, the user, to embody Havelock Holmes through your experiences, expressed through a range of media tokens you choose or discover as you unravel the mystery.
Visual Design
Though not primarily a visual experience, the imagery of Havelock Holmes’s is what we might think of as sketch noir, generative AI-assisted, illustrated naturalism in black, white, and shades of gray. The style reflecting the experience of the detective who seeks absolutes within an atmosphere of indeterminacy, even unknowability–the gray netherworld of shifting illusions.