Wow, very ambitious writing project for a jam! Maybe a little too ambitious considering people want to get through a lot of games and this one would take a while to fully get through. You've made some interesting choices to make this appear closer to life, like not giving a real answer and not highlighting keywords. I do respect that, but I also feel like they took away some of my enjoyment of the game. I'm also not a huge fan of having to click through conversations multiple times to explore the whole tree; maybe clicking keywords should 'collect' them for later interrogation? Some of the UX was also a little questionable in my opinion, do you really need a "go to Title" button on every dialog? The writing I've seen was pretty good, but I've got to admit that we probably only saw like half of the game; it was pretty obvious that Dylan stole the money but we did miss out on a lot of the other stuff you've mentioned in your full explanation. Definitely nice to see a different art style than pixel art, pretty cool artwork. All in all, a pretty cool and ambitious twist on the mystery genre! I have to admit I'd probably enjoy a more traditional game-like approach more, but I'm glad you decided to try something new here.
(also, this game is kind of violating separation of power, but meh, it's a game after all :D)
Viewing post in Scales of Justice jam comments
The game totally violates separation of power, but I’m working with this as more of an alternate universe ethics sim rather than a civics sim. The scale is basically an unquestioned god in this universe, and the detective is merely feeding it information.
I appreciate the feedback. I did worry as I was making it about the time it takes to complete.
You’re also not the first person to dislike the hidden words mechanic, but I stand by the choice. I didn’t want this game to fall into the detective game trap where you’re just clicking buttons without thinking.
As for clicking back through whole conversations, you may have missed it, but there is a back button that backs you up from your current page. That makes it a little quicker to navigate and take a different path. I did consider a “journal” that takes notes for you of places to come back to, but I ended up cutting that for time.
All in all, you’re not wrong that the writing was ambitious, possibly to my detriment here. I underestimated how much time and work it was going to take, but once I’d concocted this story it was hard to slim it down any more than I did. I already cut two characters entirely, but I needed Dylan to be responsible and Lena for motive. At the point I realized it was a bit much for the time limit, it would have required starting over to remove any more.
Lastly, on the UX front, that footer was supposed to contain a settings menu with audio sliders and text accessibility settings. It ended up only containing the exit button, which I agree I probably should have just scrapped. That’s getting fixed in the postjam release anyways.