Chronicles of Crime - Scenario Editor


Welcome to the Chronicles of Crime's Editor - Community Edition!

We are very excited to release this editor, to allow YOU to make your own scenario of Chronicles of Crime. We strongly believe this system can open the door to many exciting additional stories!

You will find on this page 10 videos that will teach you how to use the software to create your own scenarios. We invite you to watch them at the same time that you reproduce the same steps inside the tool you downloaded, to better understand what's going on. Let's dive right into it!

 

While we have officially signed the app, because it's brand new and hasn't been downloaded many times yet, you may receive warnings from Windows or your antivirus. As long as you download it from the button above and from no other source, we guarantee it is safe.


Minimum requirements:

  • Microsoft Windows 7/8/10
  • .NET Framework 3.5 (download it)
  • .NET Framework 4.6.2 or newer (download 4.7.2). Version 4.7.2 is already installed if you have Windows 10 up-to-date.

1- Author's philosophy & writing advice

In this first video, the author David Cicurel gives his philosophy and his advice on how to approach the writing of a scenario in Chronicles of Crime.






2- Introduction

In this video, Vincent dives into the tool and explains the foundation of a scenario:

  • Selecting decks
  • Basic Scenario Settings
  • Creating Locations
  • Creating Characters
  • Creating Items
  • First introduction to States



3- States & Debugger

In this video, Vincent explains critical points of the tool and the game:

  • Manage the different state of Locations, Characters or Items
  • Test your scenario in the editor's simulator



4- Rich text

A short video to explain how to enrich your text with icons, information and styles. Please note these won't show the end result in the Debugger (there you will still see the "code" version), only once you have Baked and loaded your scenario in your actual phone (more on that in video 8).


Code Result Description
@ - Creates a new page
  Home icon Adds the Home icon
  Location icon Adds the Location icon
<loc=A> Location A icon Adds the Location icon with the letter A
  Character icon Adds the Character icon
<char=01> Character 1 icon Adds the Character icon with the number 01
  Special Item icon Adds the Special Item icon
<itm=01> Special Item 1 icon Adds the Special Item icon with the number 01
  Evidence Category icon Adds the Evidence Category icon
<cat=01> Evidence Category 1 icon Adds the Evidence Category icon with the number 01
your text here your text here Puts the text in between in bold
your text here your text here Puts the text in between in italic
<ui=frame_name> - Allows you to change the frame of the UI, useful if you want to display several pages of text for a single scan, and some of these pages need to have a different UI.

For instance, first page "You receive a phone call" with default UI, second page "Hey Officer! Go back to the crime scene!" with the Phone UI. It would look like this:
You receive a phone call.@<ui=PhoneEvent>Hey Officer! Go back to the crime scene!

frame_name can be:
  • Default
  • Location
  • Interrogation
  • PhoneEvent
  • GenericEvent
  • Tutorial





5- Scenario ending

In this video, you will learn how to setup the end of your scenario:

  • Create end-game questions
  • Create multiple endings based on states of objects
  • Create optional scoring based on states of objects



6- Advanced concepts

In this video, Vincent goes into more advanced concepts:

  • Create Events
  • Localization



7- Variables

Learn how to get a lot of freedom with your scenario:

  • Use variables



8- 360 pictures and Baking

In this video, prepare your scenario for the export:

  • Setup 360 images
  • "Bake" your scenario
  • Test your scenario on your device



For the 360 pictures, we recommend that you start with a placeholder picture that you find on the Internet, where you place your clues (also found on the Internet) in a very ugly and obvious way. See this example of the first picture made for the tutorial by the author. The goal isn't to make something beautiful at first, but just a picture that will do the job to allow people to play and move forward in your scenario. You can see in this example that it doesn't even have to be 360 at first. This is how every single official scenario was made: in their first versions, they had very ugly pictures setup.

You should only make a proper beautiful 360 picture when your scenario has been tested thoroughly at least by yourself, if not also by your friends. Our artists usually use Photoshop for that, you may try to get help on BGG if you don't know how to do it yourself.

You can check this tutorial by Hall Hammer on how to make a 360 picture.

Recommended size and ratio:


  • Minimum: 4096 x 2048 px
  • Maximum: 8192 x 4096 px
  • Ratio: always 2:1 (twice as wide as the height)

Want to have a look at a completed scenario? Download the file of the official tutorial.




9- Noir

In this video, Vincent explains how to:

  • Create the Money feature
  • Setup the Bribe, Shadow, Intimidate and Break-In cards

Want to have a look at a sample scenario? Download the template file.




10- Welcome to Redview

In this video, Vincent explains how to create Tests like in Welcome to Redview.




Want to have a look at a sample scenario? Download the template file.




Share your scenario

Once you believe you have a scenario that is worth testing or playing by other people, that you gave it a few rounds of debugging and that you want to take it to the next level, we have created a GeekList on BGG where we invite you to share your creation with other players: BGG post

Mac OS / Linux

Unfortunately, this tool only works with Windows. Because it would require an enourmous amount of work, we won't make a Mac OS or Linux version, sorry.

We invite you to check this tutorial from Apple on how to install Windows on Mac with Boot Camp, or this other tutorial to learn how to use Boot Camp, VMware, Parallels and VirtualBox. Remember that you will need a Windows licence to run it.

As for Linux, here are 4 ways to run Windows on it.