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A jam submission

Old-fashioned way to dieView game page

A hand-drawn detective game
Submitted by ana.merzlaya (@AnaMerzlaya) — 2 days, 7 hours before the deadline
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Old-fashioned way to die's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
UI Design#73.9134.375
Overall#122.9353.281
Story & Plot#162.9073.250
Gameplay/Usage of the medium#172.5712.875
Usage of Theme#192.3482.625

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
Ana Merzlaya

Program
Unity/C#

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

The game needs to be run in full-screen mode for me in order for it to display the UI properly (I had the same issue as Franzinyte where starting the game causes it to be zoomed into the top-left corner, but I found the full screen button by chance), so getting it started was a bit difficult. The visuals look fantastic, and I love the watercolor effect. One thing I didn't like as much was how the interface would swap between right and left with the character's image and the text/buttons. I would prefer that interface to stay consistent

Hitting space seems to "restart" the typing animation for that screen, which I'm not sure was intentional? I also had some trouble figuring out how to move to the next dialogue section until I tried clicking the "continue..." text. I think the continue "button" might actually be taking up the entire text box, since I noticed that the border and background on the text disappears once the end of that line of dialogue is reached. The dialogue runs a little slowly, so I would have liked an option to speed it up or remove the typing effect.

There were several grammar and spelling errors, and some of the vocabulary choices felt odd (some felt too out-of-place for the time period you were going for). However, each character's voice was consistent and distinct enough that I could tell them apart by text alone, and that was really good! The story was a little difficult to get into at first though, and I would have liked more context or even a debrief the way that I'd expect an investigator to get before arriving on-scene.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and for your detailed feedback!

That was not intentional about the space button, i actually was planning the player to use only mouse (+Esc). I'll check it after the voting period.

Submitted

I would've liked to check this out, but I can't play the game unfortunately. I'm not sure why, but both the browser and downloaded version only display the top left even on full screen and I can't interact with it in any way.

Developer

Maybe your monitor is very high resolution? But it should work for HD and 4HD. You can't even go out of menu?

Submitted

Whoops, sorry for the late reply! I don't really know much about resolutions and stuff, but yup, I can't go past the first screen.

Sorry if this wasn't much help.

Developer

You don't see the Play button? Maybe you could send me the screenshot? 

Submitted

This is what appears for me, both full screen and windowed mode for the downloaded version.

I guess I can click the play button in the browser if I play around with the zoom settings, but the other sides are still cut off.

Developer(+1)

oh. seems the page size has way to high resolution for you, sorry. I will try to upload new version after jam is over.

Submitted(+1)

It's a great looking game, the style and design is beautiful.  Kind of hard to get through repeat playthroughs, as you have to click through every single dialogue box every time.

Developer(+1)

thanks for playing! actually you don't have to ask all these questions, you can skip them, but by this the ending might change.

Submitted(+1)

This was an interesting submission. Overall, it looks beautiful and was probably difficult to code. The interactiveness was really interesting and it was easy enough to get the gist of how to play the game. I really liked the illustrations, it gave a nice 20s touch and vibe to the story (kinda made me think of an Agatha Christie type of story.

What fall short to me was the way the story was conveyed. The faded-in text in the intro was a bit too short it made me feel like I had to rush to read it all, while the text in the conversations was incredibly slow (which made me lose interest a bit, since there was no way to hurry the text along, or skip the animation). I am not sure either about the tone of the conversations. Some sentences felt very academic (i.e. the use of moreover), while others could seem to be voiced by a child. It made me a bit confused about where some of the character came from (posh or not, intelligent or stupid, etc).

The game is beautiful, but needs an extra coat of polish to be great!

Thank you letting us play your creation :)

Developer(+1)

Thanks so much for playing and for your feedback! I love detective series myself and probably Poirot or Miss Marple inspired me a bit:)  

The text should appear with the speed one character per one time frame, which seem quite fast for me. (However I've read that on some computers framerate might look different, sorry if that was the case for you, next time I will try to keep it in mind).

Indeed, I was trying to give characters different tempers, not only by how they look, but also how and what they say. I'm happy that you noticed that they all speak a bit different:)