From an empty space to a crime scene: how we bring our scenes to life

Anyone who has ever opened an empty 3D scene in a game engine knows the problem: technically, everything is there. The walls are up, the furniture is placed, and the lighting works. And yet the space still feels sterile and somehow wrong. Real places don’t look like that.

That’s exactly why, in the development of Forensics: Crime Scene Detective, we spend a surprisingly large amount of time “dressing” our scenes. This step is especially important for our crime scenes. After all, we don’t want players to feel like they’re moving through a level, but rather like they’re investigating a real location.

A good example of this is the apartment crime scene from our tutorial, shown in the current screenshots.

At the beginning, the apartment only contained the essential elements: walls, doors, windows, and the furniture relevant to the case. Functionally, the scene was already playable. However, that alone is not enough to create a believable crime scene.

The next step is what we call cluttering. This involves scattering a large number of small objects throughout the environment: books on shelves, cables behind furniture, half-empty coffee cups, remote controls, mail on the dining table, or a pair of shoes in the hallway. Most of these objects have no relevance to the actual case. And that’s precisely why they matter.

In reality, a room is never made up only of things that are relevant to an investigation. People leave behind countless small traces of their everyday lives. These details help make an environment feel believable.

It’s not just about the number of objects, but also about how they are placed. Spaces quickly feel artificial if everything is perfectly aligned and neatly arranged. That’s why we deliberately introduce small imperfections. A chair is slightly askew, a stack of magazines isn’t perfectly parallel to the edge of a table, or a charging cable disappears halfway under a cabinet.

In a forensics game in particular, this creates an interesting challenge. On the one hand, we want to build realistic, lived-in environments. On the other hand, important clues must remain clearly readable for gameplay. Too much clutter can easily cause players to miss relevant evidence or become frustrated.

That’s why we always try to strike a balance for each crime scene. The environment should feel believable without obscuring the readability of the actual evidence. You could say: the apartment should look like someone actually lived there, not like a level designer carefully placed every object for the camera.

The tutorial apartment is a good example of this process. Many of the objects in the current screenshots were added relatively late in development. They don’t change the gameplay or the solution to the case. And yet they play a crucial role in making the apartment feel like a real place.

And that is ultimately the goal: before players secure their first piece of evidence or analyze their first fingerprint, they should feel like they are stepping into a real crime scene.