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That was definitely an experience!

There are some literally familiar faces here, but with new outfits, and it feels simultaneously new and familiar. The outfits, animations, and general character design are peak uncanny valley, and the awful voice acting (including a completely botched line) completes the ensemble. There are lots of hilarious fun little details like how you bend your neck to look at things. The humour is top-notch too, and blends the expected and the totally out of left field well.

Every one of your submissions has been hugely ambitious, and this one is no exception. I can't help but feel you've reached too far this time, though. It's a janky mess, which is on point for SBIG Jam, but possibly because it was pushing it even more or maybe just because of the general design, it has some issues which take away from the fun. The whole thing has the feel of a ship that's about to capsize, which is never a good feeling, and it's compounded by slow, unskippable dialogue that's fun the first time but quickly gets tedious the second or third time around.

Because of this, I always tried to take safe options and feel like I might have missed part of the game. Fortunately, I was able to complete the game, but I don't think I would have tried again if I'd hit a game over or dead end. I did run into some minor bugs, but nothing that ended the run. I might have even hit a glitch that saved the run; I eliminated everyone, but I could still talk to Marvin even after he was supposed to be dead and arrest him.

Another issue I'd file under the "actual issues" category is the camera, at least in the dialogue system. Third-person camera in a cramped house is questionable, but wasn't really a playability issue. The dialogue camera, however, was a really cool feature rendered almost entirely useless because it would always end up behind one of the characters. To be fair this only was a problem for the Marvin dialogues which you really need to see the animations to understand; in the other cases it covered up the animations which is a bit of a shame but didn't affect the gameplay.

I have no idea if I solved the mystery correctly or whether it's meant to be solved- I have my own theory on it- but I did finish the game, I think handle the agents correctly, and got the spiffy ending cutscene.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

Yeah I wanted to have elements of my past work with a touch of new ideas and I think thats pretty much what it ended up being. I genuinely had no idea how people would react to it.

This definitely ballooned into a lot more work than I was expecting for the jam, and took form MUCH later than my entries typically do. And while being possibly the most mechanically thin game I've made its ended up being more hacked together than my last two SBIG entries. I think this was probably due to me working on the dialogue trees at the same time I was making a tool to make the dialogue trees with (I'll go into a bit more detail on athat in postmortem). But the setup with the events happening mid-dialogue is what prevented me from implementing the ability to skip dialogue lines. That'll probably be the first major update post-jam.

It's a good point about choosing the safer dialogue options, because I noticed from feedback so far that most players haven't gotten two of my favourite sequences in the game (which were also the most complex to make). The game actually does handle if the player kills all suspects, with some unique dialogue from Officer Wilson, but that doesn't really get conveyed properly through the game I don't think. For as janky as the game is I think there's only one point in the game where the player can get stuck? There's no actual lose condition as it were. Also yeah another player found the bug with Marvin, and I don't know why it happens, but I think I might just leave it because its funny.

Yeah the house layout definitely doesn't do any favours for the movement camera, which is literally just a reskinned unity StarterAssets third-person controller. It ende up being that way because I just pulled the house off the asset store and removed almost all the doors. The prefab for whatever reason is missing some colliders, and due to how the third-person camera script detecting collision it can seemingly clip through walls often.

The dialogue camera I did actually try to setup pre-defined character positions for, but I just ran into enough issues with it that I had to axe it in the final couple days. I'll probably try to fix it post-jam.

As for the mystery I'm kinda sad I didn't have time to make the gameplay more detective-y, but yeah in my opinion it doesn't matter if the player solves the mystery or not, as long as they aren't bored! Also yeah I don't know if I'll be able to top that ending credits sequence for a while...

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Definitely looking forward to the postmortem!

Shipping without a crucial quality of life feature is rough but it's a position I've been in before.

It wasn't clear that the game would always be completable, but I was also worried about stepping off the critical path and slamming into some game-breaking edge case. As I said, I don't think I could stomach having to restart and claw my way back to where I was.

The ending credits was pretty impressive!