SPEKS - A Murder Mystery

seafishelle 2021-04-26 02:58

First impression: OOF that text speed is SLOOOOW. It doesn't help that it also prints out all your BBCode tags one character at a time, which kills some of the immersion right out of the gate. That Godot scrollbar (while I get that you can't do much about it) also looks pretty out of place.

That said, I like this a lot! Digging through the story, finding out all the data for yourself, making your own accusations, like a Star Trek themed Ace Attorney game. I'm into it. :smile:

Gave it a 5 in Theme for the creative interpretation.

kristinamay 2021-04-26 03:03

This game is so cool! I really wish I could get the intro text to move faster, but I had a lot of fun playing it.

jibberwocky 2021-04-26 03:17

Really cool concept and take on the theme. I really like how some of the elements that initially make you more suspicious of certain characters actually make them more credible as you keep playing, the web of interactions between them is super well thought through. Despite the opening text being slow swapping between people and questions felt very snappy and meant I didn't need to remember too much between questions.

swordfish 2021-04-26 03:18

@seafishelle Thanks for your feedback. I was really sort of debating how fast to scroll the text at the start. Had in mind retro future stuff like the terminals in Alien. If I had more time would have added the ability to skip through it. It makes sense that the code tags were sort of immersion breaking to you. Again it was an area I was debating and I felt that it added to the old terminal aesthetic. But, I guess that is really a personal preference thing. And your totally right about the bar, but oh well.

@kristinamay Thanks for the comment. I am getting the feeling that the consensus is that the text crawl is too slow, lol.

spydercrawler 2021-04-26 03:18

This was awesome! Digging through the testimonies to find the murderer was quite fun. I appreciate the fact that you added a few red herrings to spice things up.

pixelhurricane 2021-04-26 03:19

Amazing concept, opening cutscene dragged on for a little too long but I really enjoyed the gameplay I thought the interrogation system was interesting and unique and I might come back to this game to discover the actual murderer when I have more time!

swordfish 2021-04-26 03:40

@spydercrawler Thanks for the feedback. Didn't want to make it too easy :)

@pixelhurricane Seems to be most people think the intro is to long. I would agree. I am not sure if that counts as a bug to change though. Oh well. Thanks for playing and I hope you do find the killer.

swordfish 2021-04-26 03:58

@jibberwocky Thanks for the feedback. Really glad you liked it. I put a lot of time into trying to get the story and characters to mesh well.

rhoff95 2021-04-26 04:32

Text and beeping was way to slow/frequent. I would prefer to be able to get to the core of jam entries as fast as possible, so I would like to read at my own speed. Cool visuals.

swordfish 2021-04-26 04:39

@rhoff95 Thanks, I totally agree at this point that the slow crawl was not the right choice. I also get the want to get through it quick, so, upon reflection other choices should have been made.

pd-dev 2021-04-26 13:14

This game really needs a text-speed setting! But appart from that, it is really interesting and well done. Also like the interface style. I actually have a lot of respect for people who create games that kind of intelligently talk to the player.

cavedens 2021-04-26 14:20

While the text at the beginning is really cool, as many have said, I would speed it up so people dont get annoyed and lose interest. However, the game overall was great after that. Very interesting concept

swordfish 2021-04-26 16:15

@pd-dev @cavedens Yeah, I probably should have halved or even quartered that time, I would have liked to have added a way to skip it too. But honestly since that's the only criticism I've seen so far I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

train27 2021-04-28 10:43

:heavy_check_mark: Great game! Short but not too much.

I finished the game and found the true culprit. The interface is nice although it would've been great (*maybe an idea for a follow-up*) to have the character' sprites react live to what you ask them.

I'm assuming the similar naming of the characters was intentional? It was really cumbersome :laughing: I kept mixing them all the time

*PS: I've noticed our games share a similar concept, even if mine is a bit more crude :P *

:x: Definitely agree on the intro speed, I had mute it :slight_frown:.

I'm not entirely sure how the reactivity bar affects the game. You can ask the same question a lot of times and the reactivity would go up, but it doesn't change the answers given.

swordfish 2021-04-28 17:06

@train27 Thanks for playing! I really wanted to make four or five reactions for each character, I think that would have added a lot, but I just didn't have time in the end :(

Yeah, the character names... I thought it would be funny if they all had names starting with the same letter but it was hard for me even to keep track of them all, maybe not the best choice lol.

The reactivity bar doesn't do anything, initially I wanted to have some triggers linked to it but when I realized how much dialogue I had to write already they got cut. So in the end it was just a way to see how they react to your questions, if it spikes a lot on an innocuous seeming answer, they're probably lying.

I'll have to check out your game too :)

dhim 2021-04-28 17:25

oh oh I dig this game! Very nice.

I am very interested into the design of this kind of game ? Do you map out the possibility, what's a lie etc ?

swordfish 2021-04-28 22:52

@dhim Thanks, In general I wanted to make sure that it wasn't immediately straightforward who the murderer was so I made sure to add some competing motives, red herrings, and plausible explanations for each of the suspects. Overall I wanted the player to have to dig through multiple layers of lies to find the truth and catch the real culprit.

With that in mind, I created a loose outline of the plot, who got killed, who did it, what else was going on at the time, etc. Very, very loose, I didn't write much down for that part, if it was a longer story I'd probably want to map everything out really clear before I started writing dialogue but I really didn't have the time.

Most of the work was done in a spreadsheet to keep track of everything, I mapped out every combination of options for each character and wrote a response that made sense for each of them to say. I leaned pretty heavily on stereotypes and tropes to speed that up, if I continue with this idea I'll probably rewrite everyone to be a bit more realistic. In Kevin's case for example, it makes sense for him to lie about where he was at the time of the murder so that his affair doesn't get out but this might initially cast suspicion on him as his story falls apart pretty quick when you talk to the others.

To make the gameplay more interesting, I locked out a few of the questions at the start and as you play certain words trigger them to unlock. When you choose a question, that gets fed into a script to choose which dialogue to show and changing characters just switches out where each question goes. The most time consuming part was writing all the dialogue; 75 lines for each character, with 6 characters makes 450 lines of dialogue.

The reactivity meter was initially supposed to trigger more lines of dialogue as it went up, but pretty early on I realized that 450 lines was already pushing it so ultimately I cut the influence of that but kept the values I'd already assigned so the player can use them to gauge if a suspect is lying. For some people it seems to have caused some confusion so I'm not sure if I should have just cut that too, but that might have made it hard to gauge reactions since I didn't get reaction sprites in.

Hopefully that's comprehensive, thanks for asking!

nablaz 2021-04-29 11:26

I really liked the concept, as well as the interpretation of the theme. The mechanics are well implemented and it's interesting to dig deep and try to discover the secret (no spoilers). However, the text speed is really slow (and its associated sound becomes kind of annoying after a while)... Without some kind of skipping/speeding option, it becomes somewhat tedious to get your answers, especially if you messed up the first time you tried and had to restart (like I did). That said, the game is still enjoyable and it's remarkable you managed to do so much by yourself in two days! Good job! Cheers

pabulum 2021-04-30 18:23

Really cool game. As others have said the into was a bit long nd some reaction animations would have added a lot of juice but i'm crazy impressed you got all thing done in 2 days! I struggle writing the menus let alont a whole web of lies. ha

harmadillo 2021-05-02 10:13

Enjoyable game. The story/dialog was good and the interface nice and straight forward. Intro text speed was OK for me on the first play through but would have like the option to skip on subsequent tries.

swordfish 2021-05-02 18:15

@nablaz @pabulum @harmadillo I'm glad you enjoyed it, the intro is definitely the first thing to fix if I make a post-jam version. Last minute additions never quite work out the way I'd like but I think it was important to explain how to play. I'm really glad that everybody seems to have enjoyed the actual gameplay so far and there haven't been any real bugs, that's a big first for me haha.

deltachemist 2021-05-03 08:19

Not really my kind of game, but I like the old computers vibe. I also think that the displaying of text in the screen could be improved. Kudos for designing a game with narrative. :)

swordfish 2021-05-16 00:24

@deltachemist thanks, I wasn't sure if people were going to like it being mostly text based, I considered making it top-down and looking sort of like FTL, but there's no way I could have got all the dialogue in if I went that direction.