Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD11 → The Butler Did It
By surrealix
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innovation | 9 | 3.88 | 17 | |
| Overall | 30 | 3.06 | 17 | |
| Theme | 31 | 3.76 | 17 | |
| Fun | 49 | 2.41 | 17 | |
| Graphics | 11 | 3.71 | 17 | |
| Polish | 42 | 2.69 | 16 | |
| Technical | 8 | 3.47 | 17 | |
| Journal | 12 | 3.63 | 16 | |
| Timelapse | 13 | 3.20 | 10 | |
| Food | 25 | 2.22 | 9 | |
| Humor | 4 |
Considerable achievement to get a game like this going in 48 hours (despite the bugginess). Graphics do the job (minimal, fit with the theme). It's tricky to determine the killer. Maybe a 'clock' running while each alibi is replayed would help in correlating each sequence of events. And maybe colour each character differently. More of a thinking game than a "riotous fun" type game, but sometimes thats just what I want.
Serious problems... crashing constantly, and when it did work, the font was virtually unreadable (scaled, without antialiasing, it seems), and then it crashed when I clicked the rolling pin. And Vista gave me a warning I've never seen about data protection, so I'm gonna protect my data and stop now. It looked really interesting, and I wanted to see how it went, but I just can't even judge this.
At startup:
"TBDI.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience."
Too bad, the shots looked interesting.
I like murder mysteries. I really wanted to like this game too, but unfortunately I think it's a bit *too* minimal to be much fun. It's kinda fun-ish to try to figure out who did it by watching the movements of the suspects (name font was too small btw, a larger one certainly wouldn't hurt), but then again that's all you really can do.
Also, when you click the handcuffs icon the crime is apparently solved for you, so it didn't actually feel that much like a game to me (except you know if you guessed right or not, of course). That could have been because I had the wrong person selected when I clicked the handcuffs though.. I did figure out who the murderer was, but I thought I'd get a selection box or something when I clicked the cuffs. I tried running the game again to see what happens if you actually click the right person before clicking the handcuffs, but I couldn't get it to run again even though I probably tried more than ten times, it just kept crashing (using the windows version).
So anyway, it fits very well with the theme, both in graphics style and gameplay, but I think the minimalism in the latter hurts the game =/
I really like the murder generation system you created, though. That worked great =)
Great visuals and interesting. I would have liked to see a "speed up time" key so people would move faster. Crashy but still an achievement to get such a neat system working.
I watched one story and guessed -- and won. Yay!
The crashes were annoying but I was eventually able to play a game. It seemed to take way too much time to watch through everybody's version of the events. Would had probably been nice to just click through a sequence that showed which room the person was in and who was there with them. The graphics were nice.
Neat idea, nice graphics, sadly, a lack of polish keeps the game from being all that fun. Once I got it to run, it was interesting, but a bit boring, to watch everyone's movements. No real way to know if you win or not, either.
I grabbed your working windows port, but it didn't really work very well. Crashed a couple times, then when it did load I couldn't tell what in the world was happening. The font was unreadable and without any interface clues I really had no idea what the icons were except the handcuffs. It sounds like a really fun game though -- maybe you can post a vid of it working :)
I like the look and the idea; I love murder mysteries. Though I think the interface would need a little work to make it a bit more fun. i.e. showing the items in the rooms, having names above the icons of the characters, etc...
Very nice implemetation, other than the random crashes on startup. Making a murder mystery generator like this in 48 hours is quite an accomplishment. Nice graphichal style.
I got it to run, but when I interviewed someone, I could not get back. There was no back button, no key worked either, except Esc which exited the game. O at start, the rooms are in sideview, I though there was some graphic glitch at first, before I realized I could rotate it.
Really like the look. Could probably be more fun if it wasn't such a lot of waiting. Lots of random crashes -- uninitialized memory troubles? And yeah, camera could start with better view.
The cook did mine! And he admitted it too...
Very cool concept and most of the execution is great as well. The gameplay is a bit slow-paced, maybe having a draggable timeline for each story would have helped (so you can go back and forth quickly without having to start all over again with the sequence of events). I guess that would remove some of the cozy traditional pondering and book-keeping that you get/need with "realtime" execution though.
Oh, and the text rendered crappily for me. I ran the Windows build. Think I got the same issue with some other game as well - the text is sort of stretched down with nearest point sampling so you lose some pixel lines and it gets generally hard to read. It's probably due to whatever you used for building that executable I guess.
Poker!
I'm impressed with the idea and the different storylines being generated each time, but once you get past that it seems to be essentially a logic puzzle. I spent some time fighting with the camera before settling on a point-of-view where I could see everything clearly. The style of the graphics reminded me of an old game called Movie.