Story inspiration and writing roadblocks

Let's acknowledge the obvious: the inspiration for the story and characters of this project is the Carmen Sandiego franchise. If you were a budding babydyke in the 90s, chasing this charming leggy brunette around the world was probably a little thrilling and confusing, but looking back, seems like an obvious clue (just like that older girl or awesome teacher that you ~admired so much).

I wound up going down the research rabbit-hole the past couple of days and have confirmed that there is minimally agreed upon canon so far as Carmen's background goes, and perhaps less-so regarding the other characters in her story. Notably, she is a Hispanic woman, former child prodigy and top agent at ACME, now a gentleman thief who relishes a good matching of wits. Everything else is pretty flexible, including her former partner at ACME. Excellent!

This project gives ACME the college AU treatment. Carmen is an art history major with friends all over town and campus. Her "best friend" Lily is a criminal justice major. When Carmen's absence becomes worrisome, Lily must scour her usual stomping grounds and question acquaintances for clues as to Carmen's whereabouts and motivation.

Knowing that much helps populate the setting with locations and characters. Where can we go on a college campus/in a college town at night? What sort of objects contain clues as to Carmen's whereabouts? Where can we finally find Carmen? Who will we interact with along the way? A lot of places will be off-limits (excellent - that helps with scope and streamlining). Some places will have "gatekeepers." Some places just don't make sense after midnight. The population can be excusably minimal.

The thing is, I'm building with Duplos right now and somehow need to translate it into Legos - same scale, smaller building blocks. While I'm typing this up, I've got the Dream Daddy Noclip Documentary playing in another window (this segment in particular), and the narrative designer is talking about "realizing what we need to have variables for and when they would need to be tracked throughout the game." That's something I really need to zero in on here. Regardless of progression, Lily always finds Carmen at the end and learns that Carmen has more-than-friends feelings toward her. The variable aspect should, in my mind, be three different emotional conclusions, unlocked by degree of story exploration along the way. Ideally, discovering the majority of the story before talking to Carmen would allow the player to choose between three different approaches to the final conversation (discovering a middling number of clues gives two of those approaches to the final conversation, and discovering less than that only allows one approach).

So I feel like that's the puzzle I'm working on right now, trying to move forward with writing the story but also making sure it makes sense with the... uh, delivery system? points/unlock system? progression system? The whatever.

I have no idea what I'm doing.