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(2 edits) (+1)

SPOILER-WARNING!


When you jump against something, you keep floating until you let go off your forward movement, which feels very wrong and buggy. You also don't slide along Corners or anything, but get stuck if you just slightly miss the Door.

It would be really nice if I could click on the Parts in the Part () left by Description () to get the Info I found out about that Piece again, or if I hover over the Names, get their descrptions and Nodes I made for them.

Took me a while to realize you wanted me to match table lamp to old table lamp, not to whoever owned the Lamp. Should've read the little Magnifying Glass more carefully. On that Node, Rightclick to zoom/look at Items in more Detail is fine, if they had any Detail to actually look at that isn't explained via Text, and had it look more like I was looking through a magnifying Glass. It would also be really nice to be able to pick up and rotate Items. And crouching while not necessary would be nice. And no Invisible Walls.

Unless I missed something, at some Point the lock-in for correct Answers stopped working, with Jennifer smith delivering foodcans, Max Suttons Radio, etc. 

Regardless of that, your Hints might be a bit too "arcane" in some Places. Don't know if that is due to a demo Area thats unfinished, or if its supposed to be that Way in the Game itself.

Also the Menuing itself could be laid out a lot better I think, having to click through a bunch of Submenues to get to filling out the Form, then going back to look at the Subjects again gets really annoying after a while.

And an actual Notepad to write ingame Notes would be nice, not just attaching it to Subjects. So I could quickly write down all the Names of all the People with Cats for the Junkbox i.e.

Based on the other Descriptions, I'm assuming "Blondie" is refering to a female, but the only Person with any connection to Paint is Charles Hyde, so from the Photograph in the Toolbox I'm assuming he has a connection with some Mary, which only fits to Mariee Yaisthe, so either of those should've braught the Car Radio, I'm going with Mariee here. Again, nothing locks in anymore, so I don't know if this is actually anywhere remotely correct, or if its Charles, or someone else. I'm not getting any confirmation, but more importantly, I'm not getting enough Clues to have a decisive answer, its all based on some Speculations in the End. Same with the Barrels, it says (2), so I'm assuming 2 Barrels of that Type were delivered. But every type of Barrel exists at least 3 times in the Scene. At least I definetly know the deliverers Name, and that he works at Fishing something with the Cat-logo, so I'm assuming its the Cat-logo Barrels. Again no log-in on either the Barrels or the Name tho.

Some others like the Air conditioner fill themselves in nicely if my Car Radio Guess is correctly, that feels nice. If I had enough Clues to decipher the Blondie clearly. 

No Clues on ???, so I'm assuming its the Homeless Guy, since nobody would know about him. Once I filled out everything, it tells me something doesn't feel right, so I'm assuming I got something wrong, but again, not enough clues on most Things to definetly answer them. Unless of course I missed something important somewhere.

Pic related has the filled out Form, obviously the few Things it locked in are correct. Otherwise, Jonathan Warne was dead, so its the only connection to old I found.  M.Sutton is on the Walkie-Talkie, Bill Gumms as the Homeless person, Mariee Yaisthe (or Mayra Gyshe, could also work, probably better fitting with May, I misread as Mary before.) through the May-Charlie Picture in the Toolbox and the Paint-stain connection, Carol Myers through being the only Female with a connection to the Myers Household and the Pen being in a Box with Cathairs, which matches her Husband, Jennifer Smith as waitress at the Blueberry Place, R.D. for Initials, and Dale Corridge as being obvious. Barrels thanks to matching Dale's Picture. If any of these are wrong, or I missed any important Clue, please let me know, and/or why/how they should actually be connected, so I know if I messed up, or if its actually a bug with the System not necessarily working right now, or the Clues not being fillable.

Ranking the Riddles in Interestingness so to speak, after solving them all finally. (also removing the Image itself to not give the Solution to others quite as easily)

old beardly is stupid, you have too many Candidates that just fully fit this to know which one its supposed to be. Bald Guy is good, it leads you wrongly first, until you think about comparing all your Hints. Mr. Warne works again, same reasoning as above. ??? is dumb, you have no Idea which its supposed to be, any of the Picture ones, if so which one? could also be someone else entirely. Blondie works if you're not too ESL/know enough about the local Culture or however you want to call it. Next two are fine, I liked the first one of those a bit more, the second one is just very quick to figure out, could be convoluted a bit more maybe. R.D. is too simple if you only have one R.D., and needs more Hints if you have more then one. Blondie again, leads to above, which is a nice double-use. Dale is also very nice, having to work in reverse to the others. Filling out the other Side is apart from Dale, a completey waste of Time, as you're just matching the same name against the same Name. 

Treating this as not a Demo Level to showcase the Mechanic itself here obviously, hopefully to help you improve on the actual Riddles in the actual Game.  

As for the Mechanic itself, it works fine, if you expand the Notebook to be useable properly. Some Sidepanel to write quick notes to, not so many submenues to navigate through in order to reach something, not Popups upon Popups, but flipping the actual Notebook Pages etc. And you kind of need more Mechanics then just filling in the Blanks I guess, it is a really nice Investigation representation, but its missing something around it. Which might be in actual Levels.

1. About the movement and character controller

It's not ideal but the character controller is a basic one I coded to be good enough to just get the job done. I would love to optimize it but the game is not focused on movement so it's not a priority while fleshing out the core systems.

2. About the Case Notebook navigation

The navigation has a long way to go still and it has a lot of features that I'm still designing. The notebook is planned to be a lot more interconnected and easy to use when looking for specific things but that will be added one improvement at a time.

3. The hints

The clues and leads you have regarding all the people logged in the notebook are cryptic mostly because you don't encounter them organically yourself, which means each one makes no impression at all. This is only really a problem in this version, since in the actual game about 90% of all case pieces (including people) will be things that you have encountered and found yourself physically, so you will know them better and know what they look like.

4. The input slot solutions

The "puzzles" to solve each pair of slots are a mixed bag because I had to balance having some freebie easy ones to start off and then having some more complex ones to make players stop and think longer. It might be that I tried to compress several hours of difficulty progression into one single puzzle set. The left column of the scene section is not supposed to be challenging, which can seem like a chore, but it's there to indicate that each of the items needs to be found to progress and gives some idea of how the game works on a larger scale. There were supposed to be multiple options for some of them like with the barrels but at this stage the demo will have to go without them.

>3. The hints

I kind of figured as much. It would have Things make a lot more Sense if you've actually interacted with it before, seen it before, etc.

Generally it seems most of the Issues with the Puzzles, the Solutions, etc. stem from the rest of the Game missing. I'll try this out again when there's a proper start to a Case for this. Are you planning on only having a single case, or multiple smaller ones, or start with one and then deliver multiple additional ones later on?

The game is planned to be just one extended investigation that contains multiple mysteries that might or might not be connected. In the notebook they are logged as scenes. It takes you across a few locations in the town and it's non-linear in that for the most part you have to decide yourself which location might advance your investigation next. You collect leads, solve scenes, and this leads you to other locations and other clues.