zungryware 2024-04-16 04:58
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Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → And Don't Open Your Mouth Again
By zungryware
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 621 | 3.52 | 21 | |
| Fun | 891 | 3.13 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 366 | 3.60 | 22 | |
| Theme | 531 | 3.73 | 21 | |
| Humor | 543 | 3.07 | 21 |
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This is so fucking cool +2
So far I have only interviewed about half the jurors and I feel pretty overwhelmed and anxious with the amount of information I am trying to remember, or will have to revisit. It might be the exhaustion of the jam that's influencing things.
I ended up just selecting four random jurors to see what happened. They all voted guilty. Then I decided to interview everyone on one topic, and picked four jurors who seemed biased in favor of the defendant on the topic. Three of them voted not guilty. But at this point I realized I still wasn't playing the game in the way I am supposed to, I was just throwing some names at the wall to see what sticks.
Scrolling back through the wall of text, the sheer amount of stuff just got to me and I am going to have to stop for now. I commend you for setting up this kind of logic puzzle and it's a really cool concept, but a little too hardcore for my illogical little brain.
The terminal interface is a cool vibe, and using different colors and sounds for each potential juror is a great move.
(One type I spotted during their deliberation: [Eddie]: That's what I'm sayin'. I **fasion** myself a good judge of character. If that man were fixin' to kill his lover, it wouldn't be so he could get his hands on some extra pocket change.)
Interesting concept!
@flaterectomy
My game is too hardcore. I'm going to use that. I didn't "make an overly dense experience that overwhelms people with too much frontloaded information", I made a game for hardcore people. So anyone who rates my game poorly is just not hardcore enough.
Trying out different combinations is an intended part of the experience, just as long as you're not randomly swapping people out until you get a hit. My hope is that after each deliberation you can make judgements about which jurors should be swapped out. And you can use the interviews to pick new jurors to swap in. Things like, "They had a good conversation going about the ulterior motives of the coworker but then Eddie chimed in and derailed it. I should try taking him off the jury. Susan seems to have doubt on that topic. Let's swap her in." That's the hope, anyway. I worked down to the wire on this and never got the chance to do a full playtest.
For reference, there are 210 possible combinations and 5 of them will result in acquittal. So guessing randomly you have a 1 in 42 chance of getting it right.
Thank you for playing. And if you could see your way to giving the game another try, I would really love to hear any additional feedback.
quick minor frustrations: sfx were a little harsh for my ears so i had to mute them, scroll bar wouldn't stay at the bottom.
the good: very well written, the procedural conversation is very interesting and well done. the "logic puzzle-ness" of it seems to largely make sense. UX is about as good as i could want from a purely text based game, but i think it'd be a lot more playable with a more explorable user interface.
unfortunately, i couldn't finish it. i have to assume there's a couple endings: get 4 people to agree to jury nullify, get 4 people to agree the cop thing is suspicious, etc. but 30 minutes in and i think i'll have to stick with 3 not guilty votes as a personal record. i don't think that's necessarily a flaw.
congrats on the unique and very complete game!
A solid game for people who enjoy text based adventures. Had fun reading through the dialogue, good job ^^
I opened my mouth again:D
Interesting concept. I did enjoy the experience, and found it to be a refreshing change in the types of games I've been seeing across the jam. I always appreciate people trying unique or niche concepts!
I don't however appreciate the dev's attitude "anyone who rates my game poorly is just not hardcore enough"...People are allowed to just like different things. But it's a great attitude if you want to prioritize protecting your ego over hearing constructive criticism.
Once again, I enjoyed it!
@aj-atkinson Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed my experiment. That entire bit about people not being hardcore enough was all sarcasm. I am fully aware that my game is flawed in many ways and will turn people off with the amount of frontloaded information it expects you to keep track of. And in fact I am hoping for as much criticism as possible so that I will know what needs improvement if I decide to work on this more post-jam.
Specifically, I was hoping to hear whether I was successfully able to give the player enough hints from the dialogue and interviews to let them feel like they are making an informed decision about their next jury combination. I want it to feel like the player is solving a puzzle, not just randomly swapping out names until they get an acquittal.
Pretty cool experiment! For some reason we immediately thought about the terminal when we were planning what to do :)
Neat concept! The fact that it's so easy to try different juries made it a lot of fun to play around with and see how different people interact together. I managed to get 4 of the winning juries on my own but had to look up a hint for the last (the attorney general one, there's a bug(?) where logan and lynne brought her up as a non-sequitur without alice there, which confused me a bit). The decisions don't always seem to correspond perfectly with the discussion and there were a few parts where it seemed a bit unpredictable whether certain conversations would happen or not. Other than that the system was fairly logical and I was able to think through how to assemble a jury with a bit of trial and error. Great job!
@kaliuresis Thanks for playing and great job at getting four of the correct juries!
The attourney general path is definitely the weakest path in the game. I probably should have scrapped it when I got to the one-hour-left mark but I had done so much work for it that I shoehorned it into the game anyway. That non-sequitur you mentioned is a bug, however, and I just pushed a fix for it.
Am I missing something here?
``` [You]: interview geoff
[System]: Type "interview geoff [topic]" to select your topic: The Defendant The Victim The Law The Father's Inheritance The Coworker
[You]: interview geoff The Father's Inheritance
[System]: Unknown topic. Type "interview geoff" to see the list of topics. ```
@ace17 Looks like my command parser doesn't like it when you include an apostraphe. I'll fix it when I get home. For now, just leave it off. Either of these will work:
interview geoff The Fathers Inheritance
int geo inherit
I played this game with a friend on discord for about two hours and it was really fun!
The interface takes a few minutes to get used to, but once we're into it, it's very usable. Maybe `[tab]` to autocomplete names would improve it but that's the only thing I would change.
We really enjoyed the first part, where we had to interview all the jurors and read information about the case. It feels a bit like the investigation phases of _Ace Attorney_, more or less?
Even if they are a bit cliché, every juror having their own personality, color and sound effect is great. We grow attached to them, either by liking or disliking them (love you Henry; fuck you Alice; what the fuck are you doing here Mason).
The second part, after selecting four jurors, felt amazing at first: they were talking to each other, arguing about the facts, the motive and everything! However, after two or three guilty verdicts, this is where the game came short for us.
We quickly realized that re-reading the interviews from part 1 was useless, we HAD to try various combinations if we wanted to win. The jurors were saying things during part 2 that they weren't saying during part 1. Or the opposite, not saying things during part 2 that they knew in part 1. Or even worse, sometimes they say the opposite.
Some examples from Henry, the worst offender: - He claims that the real killer could have used gloves to use someone else's gun during part 1, then during part 2 claims that nobody else's prints were found on the gun. - He claims that the motive doesn't make any sense since they weren't married during part 1, then during part 2 answers that stealing the inheritance is a valid motive.
It wasn't very clear that we needed two kinds of jurors: jurors asking the good questions and jurors answering those questions. So even if Susan wants to burn people alive and has nothing interesting to say at all, we need to take her just because she can ask a question to Clive about the gun. We expected the jurors with the answers to introduce the inconsistencies themselves. Why doesn't Clive talk about the gun unless asked to?
You said in a comment above that "trying out different combinations is an intended part of the experience". However, we don't agree with that. It felt like our entire work from part 1 was nearly useless since we had to see how each juror was going to react anyway, and swap them based on that.
It felt like this game could be split into two different games that would work better when separated: - One where we have to spend a lot of time understanding a mystery, taking notes then selecting the best jurors, while avoiding obvious and less obvious traps (like Mason), and where everything we need is available right from part 1. - Then another game where part 1 doesn't exist. We know nothing about the jurors and we have to try multiple times to see how jurors react to each other, understand what are the best combinations then find the perfect one.
Well, we still managed to win using Clive, Susan, Lynne and Henry and we had fun overall, so great job and great approach to the theme!
Cool game!
@paul-maxime Thank you so much for the in-depth and thorough response! I agree with pretty much all of your criticisms, though I'll try to explain why certain design choices were made or why certain issues arose the way they did.
Tab completion would have been nice, but I opted instead for substring matching. It's explained in the controls document, though I don't blame you for missing it, that you don't have to type out the entirety of a command. For example, if you want to interview Clive about the defendant, you can type "int cli def". I probably should have pared down the documents to just the essential information but I ran out of time to do that.
The jurors' personalities are cliche, for sure. I wanted to make them easily distinguishable to make it easier to build the necessary associations between character and effect on the game. (This is also why I added the different text colors and voice sounds on day 1.) It was fun, though, to write some of these exaggerated characters. My favorite to write was Eddie, whom I based on Randle McMurphy.
I'm glad the conversation was engaging! To me, this project was mainly about the procedural conversations and whether I could get jurors to make actual arguments with each other without awkward non-sequiturs or semantic issues. The actual gameplay and puzzle design then had to be figured out after the fact.
I definitely wish I had spent more time refining the gameplay of the first couple of solutions before creating more. I had the idea that I must include enough solutions for each juror to be part of at least one of them. But I came so down to the wire that I just had to throw it together and hope it made sense. There are definitely some inconsistencies in juror behavior and some unintentional red-herrings.
During the writing process, I realized there were some dialogue paths and responses that need to exist no matter what combination of jurors you have selected. But in order for that to be guaranteed, I would need to write those responses for a minimum of eight out of the ten jurors. And that just wasn't feasible. So I got the idea to write a 'default' juror which would contain responses that could only be used if none of the available jurors have a valid response for a particular claim. The principle I tried to follow was that any default response should make sense no matter which juror says it. Or that any juror that shouldn't be able to say that default response should have a custom version of the response in their configuration file that does make sense for them. Unfortunately, it seems like I let a bunch of these slip through.
The reason you usually need two jurors to trigger many lines of reasoning is to promote the whole combinatoric gameplay. The example with Clive and Susan talking about the collector's model shotgun is kind of a silly example. Yes, Clive probably should bring up that topic on his own, but I wanted that particular combination to require Susan to be on the jury. I tried to telegraph it by having Clive mention that guns are a hobby of his and having Susan mention that she likes asking people about their hobbies, but that one is a bit of a stretch. A better example of this principle in action was the interaction between Kylie and Eddie regarding jury nullification. Eddie says most of the time that he would rather not charge the defendant with assault, but doesn't know that that's an option. But if Kylie is on the jury, she can tell him about it get them to throw out the assault charge.
My intention for adding the interviews was to give you some sort of jumping-off point so you wouldn't go in blind or have to re-read tons of conversation dialogue in order to get the information you needed. In essence, the interview is meant to give you the information you need to solve the puzzle while the deliberation is meant to show you *why* you got a correct or incorrect answer. In practice, it seems like I missed the mark on that. The interviews seem like a bit of an information dump in practice, so you could be right about ditching them altogether.
Solid writing and cool interface on this one!
That said, I am not sure if the control really serves the game and some people who would otherwise enjoy the writing and exploring the case might bounce off from the game because of the relative clunkiness of typing commands. I think the vibe could still be preserved with the same look and feel if you had a bit more menus where you could pick entries from a list while staying with character-based rendering, like how the "new wave" of terminal apps do it, for example [lazygit](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit) instead of vanilla git.
You could
* always have to focus on the input field even if the user scrolls the view, if you focus the text your up-down-enter will work but backspace and characters do not. * drop the "The" from the name of topics, it makes you feel like you need to type that even if you don't * if not going the menu route, let the player choose interactively with numbers or initials like many CLI programs do for multiple choice prompts and lists * the input field locking when doing "Next" for text blocks felt a bit antithetical to terminals, although I get why it's good to have the text appear in chunks and not sure what would be a better way to progress * the colors of jurors could be shown on the list provided by the output of the empty `interview` command * make it even more minimal by having the command prompt be on the same area as the output like regular terminals (instead of the separate input field and "Send" button) * add some sound to user typing and sending the command to make it more immersive
@unless-games Thank you for the feedback, especially on the usability front. I will definitely keep all this in mind if/when I work on a post-jam version.