A Few Easy Questions

andrewkennedy 2025-04-07 16:30

I liked the double-take on the theme: not just the "bottom of the ocean" setting, but the gameplay was about digging deeper for a story.

It would have been nice to show a little (+X) or (-X) next to the score after each question to see the impact each had without having to remember what your score was on the previous screen.

At the end of the day, he ended up walking out after I pressed him too hard about the Elixir of Life at the bottom of the trench. Worth it.

``` Story Points Earned: 0 Fun: 20 Aggravation: 155 Unease: 190 ```

Well done, that was a cool experience!

grid96 2025-04-11 20:57

I really liked the writing and presentation. So the depth was about both, the trench and depth of the dialog?

empyreans 2025-04-16 23:19

Went on irritating the guy and he didn't turn out to be such a nice dude after all so I think I probably did the right thing. He seemed to be looking for some PR cheerleading to further boost his ego and the world could do less with such people.

I couldn't restart the game from the beginning as it saves progress in the browser and I didn't want to clear site data on the entire site for this. There should've been a retry button.

Interactive fiction is always great and I wish I could do a few more tries to dig up more information.

Great job!

~Xp

spookyman999 2025-04-17 03:58

pretty cool game with a pretty cool vibe! liked it

allie-vera 2025-04-17 04:17

Love this take on the theme, playing on multiple meanings of depth! I didn't dig deep enough to figure out what he was looking for on my first run, so I look forward to learning more in the next!

kiv 2025-04-17 06:47

The writing is really viby and cool, I enjoyed the story, thank you

spexxilove 2025-04-17 15:46

cool story. I feel like I was very close to figuring out what the guy was really up to down there but I couldn't get it out of him. It was a bit difficult for me to figure out what exactly I need to do to get there. I felt like I need him to say something specific before confronting him about the reason of why he went down there in the first place. My best guess was the immortal jellyfish thing but I'm not sure. It could also be something with the numbers has to be right but other then him running off when he gets too angry I don't really know what the numbers do.

but I tried a bunch of times which I think is a good sign ^^

henk 2025-04-17 20:28

The presentation really made this one; I feel like my heart rate cranked up a notch when the question count overflowed. I managed to get a final score of 100 on the first try (along with what I think was the "true" ending), although based on the other comments here it's possible I just got really lucky.

On the itch.io page in the "main" question menu some of the UI was cut off on the bottom of the screen for me. I also had to zoom out a bunch in browser to even fit the entire game window so my guess is the game was tested on some resolution higher than mine.

moonlightbomber 2025-04-18 00:20

Being a text-only game, I had to judge the magnate being interviewed and not press him too much at the beginning. But at the end, I exposed his attitude, which isn't all that different from the IRL well-known billionaires.

Good game.

ditam 2025-04-18 20:54

The lack of a retry button was irksome, because the good writing made me come back for more and more attempts. I _think_ I got what I could in the end (he did go off record about what he found), but I only got 45 story points for it, whatever that means. So who knows! (Maybe a complete victory would involve him going on record with the whole thing? Now that I've "groundhog dayed" the answer out of him, I'm less motivated to try for this ending.)

Either way, it was an enjoyable detective game of sorts. I kinda wish the answers to the basic (dead-end) questions changed based on the rest of the conversation - it seemed like there's really only 1 question that you can make progress with. On the other hand, this at least allowed me to dig deeper into that topic, and see where that takes me... Good literal and figurative take on the theme too, well done!

oter 2025-04-20 16:42

Happy to see another IF writer, and your comment at the end about Harlowe being finicky made me laugh--it truly is, though at least it is easy to get rolling with.

I liked how short your game is, made me want to go back and play again to test it out and see other options and whether he would respond differently with different choice paths. I ended up using an incognito tab to play three times, and I want to keep playing to see the true ending! In my playthroughs, I tested him but didn't press too hard, and I thought it was odd that in my final run, I went with all the softball questions, keeping him as happy as I could but ended up with a higher score than the previous run. Maybe I had just picked bad questions but I expected softballs to give the lowest score, and instead I ended up with a 70 (the time before was 55 I think, and I don't remember the score from my first run).

Still, as others have said, I really like the concept and the overall game, and I'm eager to go back and see if I can push him harder for the juicier ending.

Also, here's a couple ways to reset if you're interested. (I hope you don't mind me sharing, feel free to ignore!)

Tip for restarting in Harlowe (though there may be a faster way) -- I created a reset story passage that said "Resetting..." then listed all the story variables and reset them one by one then "Done" at the end or something as a clickable link back to the start of the story (and you can compress all that whitespace, too). For local passage variables you should be able to just redeclare them at the start of a passage, but sometimes I know Twine/JS can have a fit if the variable has already been declared.

I'm not sure if it'll work as well in Harlowe, but the other solution I came up with after switching to Snowman was to create a variable array object in my story Javascript file. Each time I created a variable I made it a part of that array (like, story.vars.unease = 0 ), then at the end all I had to do was cycle through the array (or arrays, you can create multiple for different chapters of a story) and delete all the variables. A little harder to set up but much easier to manage once it's going.

emmatw 2025-04-21 19:43

Great take on the theme! It turned into an interesting and well written story, with some replayability. Really good entry!

jumbocactuarx27 2025-04-22 01:34

First of all: love to see a twine game in a game jam. Second: Good work on the writing and keeping the scope small while allowing the player enough freedom to explore the narrative space. I liked how you presented the theme in more than one way. A+

kujoen 2025-04-22 10:11

Really fun to play and hooked me longer than I thought. I tried so hard to get him to go deeper on immortality but I just did not find the right combination D: Maybe I'll come back and pry him some more :D