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(+1)

Made some notes during second approach, I see what you're going for and I'm certainly buying the game when it's out. Hopefully some of the brainstream will be useful.
First puzzle

4 options - Dockside Road | Deermouth Trails | Junkyard | Main St

1. Top sign says Downtown - Downtown includes Main Street  and Dockside Road, must be either

2. I found torn sign, it's got two bolt pattern, there are 2 suitable places for that on the sign post, unless it's a trick and it's n-th iteration of the sign

3. Map - If those things on the East are mountains, why is the town the same color | There are two possible locations that could technically be this crossraods

4. Solution is only possible if you find footsteps and the river, it does give you satisfaction if you find it, but people who wasted time on thinking within constraints of 4 given locations will be irritated

My takeaway from this puzzle - First search the available space thoroughly, THEN get to solving, otherwise you're wasting your time.

Second puzzle - Junkyard ledger

Blondie caught me off guard, aside of that it works well, once you get used to UI

Sprint might be good idea.

Why is currency tied to 2.1 loafs of bread, does it have something to do with replacement fertility rate, some lore plz.

The style, graphics, clear UI, great writing. This game is easily going to be a hit if you continue with the passion.

(3 edits)

I'm happy to hear you enjoyed it. I'm willing to admit that the signpost puzzle is nonsense at the moment -- it was very hastily put together because my focus is elsewhere right now. It doesn't work because it's supposed to be the first challenge in the game, and that generally has to be a freebie for the players -- serving to teach them the mechanics, not so much to test their skills.

The "map" is a travel screen, not a clue. And even though it's possible to get some clues from it, I realized from watching players that it's ultimately too distracting from the actual puzzle so I will  lock it in future versions.

The Blondie confusion is very common which I find funny. To me Blondie is always going to be Clint Eastwood. That version of the ledger puzzle ultimately isn't going to appear in the final demo anyways so I'm not worried about it.

Adding a sprint might break the game. I think it's going to become necessary as the game moves over into the bigger locations but it's a big problem that it encourages players not to pay attention around them, since the full game is going to be much much denser with details.

The footnotes system is there to solve a very real problem for the game -- since it's both a detective game AND doesn't take place in our world this combination carried the enormous risk or breaking the game. Context is everything, and since I can't expect players to know common knowledge from our world, much less from a fictional world, the footnotes were introduced to provide context.  As the game grows in complexity it's going to become very intertwined in figuring out some solutions. It's nice to know the value of the currency since it's very easy to assume wrongly how much it is worth. An American would assume that a bread costs 2 units of a currency. Someone else might assume it costs 10 units of a currency. It's stuff like that.

If you want to keep up with the game you can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/gplaysupremacy . I don't post a lot of updates at this point but I'm now at the stage where I'm gradually finishing with the game systems and slowly moving into assets, content, and marketing. I expect (hopefully) that the game is gonna start taking bigger strides soon.