Designer's Journal - Greystone Taken from www.malinche.net I have reversed the order of the diary entries so they end at the present day which seemed more logical to me ... Sue Madness, Mystery and Murder Expected Release - October 2003 After a series of brutal murders committed at the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital remain unsolved, local authorities have turned to the New Jersey State Police for help. You're a senior-ranking state trooper entering the facility undercover. Since anyone can be a suspect, you enter the facility as just another patient with a history of mental illness. No one knows your true identity, not even the executive director of Greystone. You must find out who is killing the staff and patients as you explore the sprawling facility with many abandoned as well as active areas. Greystone is a real mental health facility in the State of New Jersey. Opened in the 1800s, it was the largest single building in the United States until the completion of the Pentagon! Greystone is still an active facility to this day. Howard is taking you inside... Designer's Journal April 26, 2003 My background research on Greystone is starting to spook me. I am assimilating 150 years of history from dozens of different sources while I plan the first of several expeditions to Greystone itself. As I go over all of the material I almost feel as if dozens of ghosts from the past have come calling in my office; the crazed patient shot while trying to escape whose ghost is said to roam the tunnels, the unfortunate victims of abuse and neglect at the hands of irresponsible medical professionals, suicidal patients separated from their families, all but abandoned by their loved ones and other tales of woe. Brighter sides include a baseball league of sorts during summer, active basketball courts and other pleasant outdoor activities. A myriad of emotions are flooding all of my perceptions. A few rooms and a character central to the story have been coded as I use the game as a conduit for all of my thoughts and feelings on Greystone. I already envision Greystone being rather macabre and challenging with a very fulfilling endgame. The adventure begins... 15 June, 2003 The layout of the main building is nearly complete as I begin work on the labyrinth of underground tunnels that connect all the various parts of Greystone together. I think I'll implement the different outlying buildings one at a time as I lay down each tunnel for you to explore. The pungent smell of musty, ancient air and the dark, enclosing tunnels are going to be quite a handful for even the most ardent adventurer. The characters of Greystone run the gamut from young to old, male to female, nice to nasty and I can assure you that most of Greystone's inhabitants (staff and patients alike) will keep your mind busy for hours. The casebook, included with the Greystone folio edition, will contain background information and medical records of the main characters. These elements will prove essential in solving the case. 19 July 2003 Detailed work on the patients began as I expand the base code I implemented in April. Without giving away any details or spoiling the plot I'll only say that I am conducting extensive research into mental disorders and their treatments. My goal here is to accurately recreate the behavior and actions of Greystone's fictional patients in the game. So far, so good. Additional research has been conducted on the subject of patients' legal rights under various conditions, even when clinically insane. In the same vein I am looking at law enforcement measures in such situations as well professional and ethical conduct as practiced by mental health professionals. On the more interesting side of things, I just completed an abandoned cottage and I must say I found the exercise haunting in its own right. The tunnel system is coming along nicely. When you explore them this fall be sure to bring along a flashlight. The main building of Greystone is nearly complete and I advise everyone to stock up on graph paper and pencils; you'll be needing a good quantity of both! All the while a few background considerations such as day and night, the measurable passage of time and other important details are being carefully considered. The balance of the macabre with the mundane, the pleasant with the perverse is quite a tightrope I'm walking 16 August 2003 A Vision in the Desert During the course of last weekend, when I was in Las Vegas exhibiting at Classic Gaming Expo 2003, a flash of insight revealed to me who the killer in Greystone is. As the characters evolved through development I hadn't made up my mind yet as to who the murderer actually is. Several possibilities presented themselves but I hadn't made up my mind on who the culprit is...until now. The murderer in Greystone has been identified....to me at least! Altogether, development is going very well. The biggest challenge lies in deciding how far to go with implementation of Greystone. Having visited Greystone and explored the vast expanse of raw land as well as buildings I am grappling with how far to go in laying out the vast campus that is Greystone. Here are some examples of what I mean by big: While Greystone is within the town of Morris Plains. New Jersey it is, in most respects, a town unto itself... it has its own zip code and post office, firehouse, police department, restaurant, medical facilities (all but surgery although Greystone was a fully-operational hospital in the distant past). Greystone also featured its own nursing school (now closed), on-campus residences for staff (now closed), a fully functional farm with livestock (now closed) and well, you get the idea. Due to its sheer size it housed, at one point, over 10,000 patients spread across more than two dozen buildings on over 600 acres of land. Infocom fans: If Lord Dimwit Flathead the Excessive was going to construct a mental hospital, Greystone would probably exceed even his own grandiose vision. Luckily, I am dauntless so players of Greystone can look forward to exploring a lot of terrain apart from the main, immense building itself. Stay tuned for my next update later this month - many pictures I took of Greystone will be shared as well as my experiences. Here's a preview.... ".I stood on the steps of Greystone among some patients as I waited for my guide to meet me. I learned later on that day that among the patients sharing the steps with me was a convicted murderer found to be criminally insane.. Due to patient confidentiality I have no idea which patient is the killer; over half a dozen people were sitting on the steps sunning themselves as I checked my watch. I am still not entirely sure how I should feel about this information .... Unsettling may do for a start." 7 September 2003 Expedition to Greystone Visiting Greystone forced me to call upon some of my more clandestine faculties as I made my way throughout the sprawling 600+ acre expanse that is Greystone accompanied by a staff member. Even though I had a chaperone I had to be very discreet with how I took notes (pocket-sized notebook, furiously scribbling short, cryptic notes to myself), took pictures with my Olympus digital camera, rapidly drawing it from my pocket and just as quickly storing it there to avoid appearing like a gawking tourist. In these brief moments I'd shoot fast and furious at absolutely any reasonable subject for a picture. Map- making I did while parked in my car on a standard-sized pad, working mostly from memory but also drawing upon whatever geography I could safely observe out the window. My feelings on Greystone are as mixed as its own history; at times impressed, sad, amazed, shocked or just simply overwhelmed outright. Learning from my tour guide how some women were unceremoniously dropped off at the front gate by fed-up husbands who quietly paid off the staff to admit his soon-to-be-ex-wife back in the 19th century to seemingly arbitrary performances of lobotomies in the first half of the twentieth century to the massive population explosion which forced Greystone to expand from being merely the largest single building in the United States to a full-blown campus with thirty-six or so different buildings when all was said and done. As I might've mentioned before, Greystone itself had a population of over 10,000 patients at its height which also required better than 2,000 staff to oversee it all. With a combined population of better than 12,000 Greystone truly was a small city in its own right. More astonishingly, when this zenith of population was reached in the 1950s, Greystone was operating at roughly thirteen times its original designed capacity! It is often pondered how many of those 10,000 "citizens of Greystone" were actually bona fide patients as opposed to being merely misdiagnosed or, even worse, wrongly and intentionally placed there against their will. Brighter spots of Greystone history include the advent of occupational therapy, the first widespread implementation of medication to treat the mentally ill Sadly, nearly every treatment for treating the mentally ill was theoretical; some notions (electroshock therapy, occupational therapy, etc.) proved to be very successful and exist, albeit in more advanced forms, even today while other methods (such as the infamous lobotomy) were scrapped altogether for being virtually useless. Ok, now to satisfy all the curious out there.... Game progress is going slowly at this point. Character development is occupying a lot of my time as I strive to bring incredible amounts of depth to the people you will encounter. Several of Greystone's buildings have been recreated as well as the tunnel system. This game is growing and growing in direct proportion to all of my feelings, impressions and experiences having walked the buildings, met many patients and staff and took in an incredible amount of history thanks to my tour guide. I am ever-grateful to this person who, sadly, I must credit anonymously to protect the individual. To read more of Howard's progress and read future editions of the diary go to www.malinche.net - o -