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The Case of the Thinky Game Jam

Hosted by Thinky Games · #thinkyjam2023

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A jam submission

Little Shops of MurderView game page

There was a murder in a small town. The police ask you and your team for help.

Submitted by Humane Tiger (@HumaneTiger1), AppealingNameGoesHere, LadyStrangedev, rebelsafoot — 2 days, 1 hour before the deadline

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Little Shops of Murder's itch.io page

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Comments

ambieronaSubmitted95 days ago

Thanks for the game! I got confused because I didn't realize you could scroll the phone, and I also sometimes didn't know where clues went so I just guessed. But nice little mystery once I got the clues! I never was able to open up the Audio Shop or Blue Dream.

Submitted

Trihan127 days ago

There's a bit of a bug, or what appears to be one, where if you click "End day" immediately before opening the letter, you can't get back to it or extract the clues.

Humane TigerDeveloper127 days ago

Thanks. That's true - this kind of misconception would be almost neglectable if there would have been enough time to add an in-game tutorial guiding players through the first days. I am showing an example of how this could look like here: https://itch.io/post/9070639

Trihan127 days ago

Yeah, I saw that. Looks neat and would definitely help! You made a fun little game though. I like the assignment of assistants to investigating stuff. Is there a particular order you need to do that in or is it a set amount of new stuff you find after investigating X times, regardless of who you send?

G.C. Katz139 days ago(+1)

Really, really great core mechanics here--it was super satisfying linking clues to people and unlocking new information, and I enjoyed the story. I also noticed some nice quality-of-life features, like marking new clues with a star. All in all, good stuff. And super impressive without a game engine! I'd definitely enjoy more mysteries in this format.

Moving forward, I do think a little built-in tutorialization/hinting would be nice--what you were supposed to do wasn't intuitive at first glance.

Humane TigerDeveloper139 days ago

Thank you for sharing your thoughts :-) Was planning a tutorial, where one of your assistants is guiding you through the first day - and then, more occassionally, showing up later, always when there are new things to learn.

G.C. Katz139 days ago(+1)

Yeah, that'll be perfect when you get a chance to implement it. But I know you were (quite understandably) short on time.

marcgenesisSubmitted140 days ago

I liked it a lot! Congrats on the submission.

Submitted

Dear Murder Diary

hesperus4Submitted140 days ago(+1)

Really enjoyed this! I liked the mechanics of having the assistants and choosing what they did each day, that was awesome. All my nitpicks are very much explained by it being a game jam with limited time but I'll list them in case the feedback is useful e.g. you want to expand on it.

The H key didn't work for me to show interactable things, so I did a lot of pixel hunting
I found some of the clues quite arbitrary in terms of what they should be matched with, often I would expect it should match with the person rather than the place, rather than vice versa. Many of them I had to brute force to some extent, and some I never figured out why they matched (e.g. the clue about the diner owner going for a walk in the evening). The key seemed like it should match with the B.D. shop, I was perplexed about that. The combo to the safe made no sense to me, surely that number was just a timestamp?
I would love to be able to drag the clues on the desk around and for them to stay where I put them
I had to read other comments before I realised you could scroll on the phone - I had tried dragging the screen but it didn't occur to me to use scroll wheel! Even putting that in the controls wouldn't have been helpful to me, as I didn't read the controls because the other things were intuitive

Submitted

Archipelago Explorer

Humane TigerDeveloper140 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks for your kind words and for taking time to list your suggestions. There was a whole "shadow process" during the games creation, where our team was trying to understand and figure out how to translate our nicely and coherent written story into a defined game loop. This was a true challenge for many reasons - the parts where we didn't do so well ended up being the arbitrary clues you found. The challenges got even more tense towards the end of the story - so I had to cut some bloody corners to e. g. let the player find "at least some kind of code" :-D To me this overall process (getting from "no idea how to do that" to "okay, it works pretty well") was really interesting and satisfying. And now all these encouraging and confirming comments like yours coming up here, makes me so happy.

hesperus4Submitted139 days ago(+1)

You've got some unique mechanics in this game, and I think it's so cool that you took a risk and developed something new - that's the best outcome of a game jam game imo! I'd definitely buy a developed version game on Steam!

Jinan DangorSubmitted141 days ago(+1)

Really cool game! I think the biggest improvement I'd love to see is something reminding me where I found each clue, since you end up with copious evidence but can't remember where you found it and hence who it implicates. I also found myself spamming clue+target pairs a lot since a lot of them seemed to have logic I didn't understand (Why can't I use the key to go to the place its initials suggest? Why does this clue mentioning two people have to be used on a specific one of them? Why does this clue that mentions a person have to be used on their storefront, not themselves? Also, why is this the combination to the safe?). Other than that (and failing to realise I could scroll the phone and restarting the game XD) it was a really fun experience!

Submitted

The Lonely Logs of Lincoln Lane

Humane TigerDeveloper141 days ago (1 edit)

Glad to hear you liked the game despite all its weaknesses. Your questions are all valid. And a much more skilled version of myself would have done better. 2 weeks sound a lot, and I tried really hard every day to make progress. But it is so hard. There are several points worth mentioning:

Software development takes a lot of time, next to a fulltime job it is also a question of enough energy
Our team members were mostly 1st timers
The topic was new to all of us
Time difference between US and Europe is significant
Aligning such different disciplines as story writing and development is hard
Fully understanding what everyone has in mind is hard
Bringing all these loose pieces together in a perfectly coherent game experience is hard

The solution to all of these challenges were many compromises - mostly coming down on my dev side. Tried my best to keep them as small as possible, and to create a somehow holistic and thinky experience. With much more time and much more communication I could have done better - for the time given I am proud of the result we achived.

Jinan DangorSubmitted140 days ago(+1)

Hey, you made something really cool! You don’t have to explain to me why game dev is hard!

You should be proud of what you made, I’m just providing my impression of the game. Best of luck with your future projects!

mikethetikeSubmitted141 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Nice game but I got stuck and had to resort to pixel hunting. I think if the photos were a bit more defined it would help, but I got really stuck with 3 clues and about 3 places left and 3 people and couldn't find anything more.

Submitted

Humane TigerDeveloper141 days ago

When you press H all clues light up. It takes off the need for pixel hunting, but still allows detective work like conclusions based on the extracted clues.

thasgol141 days ago(+1)

Great job! I really enjoyed the game. I had a bit of difficulty playing on Safari because every time I dragged a card, all the text around it was selected. Additionally, I found some clues not very clear, and I ended up dragging them everywhere until I figured out where they should be associated.

Posh CatSubmitted142 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

I liked it!

HarrySubmitted142 days ago(+1)

It was so fun. Amazing art, great story and the investigation is really engaging. The desk got a bit confuse by the end having so many things, I lost some evidences there. Would be nice to be able to organize the items. Some information was not clear and I had to try brute force. Maybe some information might have more clues, but it might have just been me.

Submitted

Jo-Zeas Gravity Adventure

capythulhuSubmitted142 days ago(+1)

I'd buy this on steam.

Submitted

Supernatural Shenanigans