itch.io

Thank you so much for donating! 💜 I’m glad you liked the format, I’d like to do more with it someday too! (Though for now we’re focused on our latest narrative deduction game, The Archives of Trevosa.)

Good thoughts on the dates! Each document does have a date internally, and I was wondering if we should just show that to the player (given that documents are already ordered.) It might add an interesting layer of puzzling to ask the player to work out some specific puzzles using that date information… We’ll have to try it and see how it works out.

This post is covering all the changes we’ve made since the jam, not just recent ones, so sounds like you might have already seen it - if you were able to enter the True Heir title, then there’s nothing new beyond that.

And for sure, we’re hoping to add a few more cases of words without clear 1-1 translations in the expanded version!

Fun concept and art style!

If you don’t mind feedback, I had some UI complaints: the textbox text constantly changing size/wrapping was very distracting, and when I was dragging a chess piece, I expected to drop it so its base would land on the target square, but I guess my finger had to land on the target square instead. On mobile, I didn’t love having to zoom in and out of the different times - it would be nice to always have one board centered, but with a timeline that lets me switch or scrub between which time period shows.

Keep it up, this is fun flavor and an interesting game!

So glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for the thoughts, and I can say that those things are indeed on our list for a future update.

Thank you! I’ve super busy with other games, so I’m a little behind on adding in the translations I have so far… But I’d really like to and was intended to do that by the end of the month. So I’d love to discuss adding Spanish, would be happy to talk on discord.

If you’re trying to find all the documents, enable the undiscovered documents count under the Archive Filter section for a nudge on which documents have terms you should search for next.

For solving the tree, there’s no walkthrough to my knowledge, but you can ask here (use Rot13 or other spoiler method) or in Jamwitch’s discord if you’re stuck on something!

If you do, please share!

That’s up to you to discover from clues in the documents! 🙂

Correct answers are only locked in in groups of 3, so you’ll still need two more people correct before they all lock in and it goes to 3/30.

Hi folks! I’ve finally made a Jamwitch discord specifically for folks to discuss our games. Please join if you’d like - you can share your results (try it, it’s low pressure but creates a nice sense of community) and chat about either Yliad or The Importance of Being Earnest.

Here’s the Discord invite.

Thank you! And noted about the font size. For now, zooming in should work - I just fixed the tree so it can scroll horizontally if needed.

I don’t know if we’d go for that idea, since we’d like the characters to keep their identities as characters and for players to be able to discuss the story, which would be hard if the characters were shifting around - but fun idea!

Thanks!

For corporate politics, or at least office politics, try the very entertaining and engrossing narrative deduction game A Case of Fraud. 🙂

I love to hear that, thanks! Yeah, sorting was the plan from the beginning, if we hadn’t had a bug with it. In the model of Her Story, it means that the search limit more readily shows you early documents, so it’s more of a challenge to track down the later documents - that gives the game some structure while still being overall non-linear in what you happen upon when. But I appreciate that there’s a fun aspect to having to reconstruct the order yourself too!

Fun idea about the pronunciation guide! In the context of the game we have the documents and tree only, no Trevosan to talk to, so I guess it’s up to the individual player. 🙂

(Rot13) V guvax lbhe dhrfgvba vf n ovg bs n fcbvyre fvapr vg’f abg vzzrqvngryl boivbhf gurl’er gval ng nyy, znlor lbh jbhyqa’g zvaq hfvat Ebg13 gb uvqr vg?

Ohg lrnu, jr unir gurve cbegenvgf, fb jr pna frr gurl’er gval crbcyr! Jr jrer vafcverq ol “Gur Obeebjref” puvyqera’f frevrf, nzbat bgure gnyrf bs gval crbcyr.

It sounds like you may have the right titles per name, but the names in the wrong place. Gel frnepuvat sbe Ylfan gb svaq fbzr pyhrf nobhg jurer Ybanen vf va gur gerr.

Notetaking per word is on my list for a future iteration, but I hadn’t considered notetaking per person! Cool idea, thanks!

Our direct inspirations are The Roottrees Are Dead and Her Story. The Return of the Obra Dinn is also foundational. If you want another small, fun family tree deduction game, try A Case of Fraud. You should also try Type Help and The Red Pearls of Borneo for a different and super fun narrative deduction mechanic. And we (Jamwitch) have two other small narrative deduction games, The Case of the Dungeon Descent and My Friends the Monster Trainers.

That’s what I’ve got off the top of my head! Enjoy!

I got you, I knew that would be a possibility with the update so I made sure the leftovers can still lock in!

It’s a bit of a steep start to get going for sure! If you haven’t, try searching the additional titles you see in the tree (cynai-til, etc) to see what you can learn about those people.

Yeah my thoughts exactly! I’m definitely thinking a tooltip will work since it’s ready access to the info if you need it, but you can also test your own memory of it.

Naq lrnu, jr nyfb jnag cynlref gb unir gb gel abiry sbezf bs jbeqf ol svthevat bhg gur zbecubybtl! Sbe abj, V znqr fher rirelguvat vf npprffvoyr whfg ol pyvpxvat gb frnepu, fvapr vg zvtug or n whzc gb punatr sebz pyvpxvat gb glcvat va lbhe bja guvat, ohg va n (fgvyy ulcbgurgvpny, bs pbhefr) rkcnaqrq irefvba bs gur tnzr V jbhyq ybir gb unir fbzr zber punyyratvat yrncf yvxr gung. V’z guvaxvat nal jbeq lbh pyvpx be frnepu sbe vf nqqrq gb n tybffnel jurer lbh pna nqq lbhe bja genafyngvba/abgrf, cre vaqvivqhny sbez - ol yvfgvat gurz fvqr ol fvqr gur zbecubybtl fubhyq orpbzr pyrne naq zbgvingr lbh gb svyy va tncf ol frnepuvat sbe lrg-hafrra sbezf.

I appreciate hearing about typos so a top level thread would have been perfectly good, but I got you now and these are fixed! Thank you!

Amazing, I love reading this since that’s the experience I hope people will have!

I was definitely thinking about Chants of Senaar - when playing it, I got the tip to play in “hard mode” where you don’t use the in-game notebook, so you have to note and learn the words yourself rather than relying on its automatic gloss. I can’t recommend that approach to playing Senaar enough because it really feels like you’re learning the language.

So in a future iteration of Trevosa, although I want to add better language note-taking functionality, I don’t plan to have it fully replace the words with your translation (at least, not by default).

Update: the update is in, we added a couple more documents to make things clearer and now you need to specify who is the true heir to reach the end.

Thank you Sen, we hope to do so if we expand it further.

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it! And yep, just in time to miss everyone who tried it this weekend, I’ve added a final step of setting who is the true heir. 🙂

If that’s the case then it might be a bug! I’ll double check it. Thanks!

Thank you!

I removed the notes X button after getting feedback that yeah, it was only going to cause more trouble than it would be useful.

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed and I always appreciate all thoughts!

I think that unclicked words should account for ones searched on other documents.

The number is counting how many new documents you can reach by searching the words on this document. (This is confusing since it was unsearched words in the original jam version.) If you read a new document A, then the number goes down on any documents containing search terms that lead to A. I hope that does line up with what you saw numerically, even if the clarity of what it meant isn’t there yet.

Your wish is my command (in that I just updated the game to remove the button thanks to Reiko’s feedback) 😄

Thank you and thanks for the feedback!

You’re right about the notes X button. It’s something I added unthinkingly when I was working on it and trying to test out the notes functionality, but it’s much less useful for a real player. I got rid of the button. Thanks for bringing it up!

Exiting the full-screen game is something that’s more controlled by itch.io than the game itself, unfortunately. The back button works, as does refresh.

Yep, a more complete ending is something we completely ran out of time for during the jam! We will be revisiting that in a future update.

Thanks about the typo, just fixed it.

It definitely makes it easier, and I should take that into account when trying to pick a good sentence and set the puzzle to make sure it’s not too trivial. But I think I’d prefer to err on the side of easier rather than hard/frustrating, which people have reported with unmarked names (and I agree.)

Thank you, this is fixed now!

Thank you, this is fixed now!

Thank you, this is fixed now!

Thanks for reporting! I had a fixed an issue with the documents not being ordered correctly, but that changed the search results. 🤦‍♀️ I put it back for now.

Thank you so much Paolo!

My codename for the idea, which I’ve been mulling for quite a while, was “The Roottrees are Aliens”. 😄 Given infinite time, I wanted to make players untangle even less familiar kinship terms and cultural words than what we have here, but I’m really happy with how this turned out! It’s all thanks to Marcus and Bucktown, who did all the world-crafting and writing.

Hi folks, I went ahead and made some small updates, so I split out the 72-hour-jam version into its own page, for any Ludum Dare raters.

I thought I’d note today’s changes here, and we’ll make an official update post once we have even more to share!

• Names and titles are removed from the list once validated.
• Added a text and bookmark filter to the Archive.
• I updated the “intuition” count per document to be more useful and less grindy (I hope):
  • It used to count how many of the words in that document you hadn’t searched yet. Now it counts how many undiscovered documents can be found by searching those words.
  • You can still hover over it to highlight words you might want to try searching.
  • I disabled this by default so it’s not distracting, but you can enable when you need it under the Filter section in the Archive.

Let me know what you think! Lots more updates coming soon - thanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback.