itch.io

Very well written and paced! I love the quiet world-building and subtly unraveled body horror inflicted upon the protagonist. The Disco Elysium vibes — and direct reference... — are much appreciated.

The implementation is impeccable but I still have my gripes with it... while Mr. Kitajima may be a well written self-destructive gruff alcoholic in uniform (or body-mods, in this instance), unfortunately he's still one. 

It's one of the most overused character archetypes, and I hoped there would some little twist to him to make him push past it into uniqueness, but there was not.

I look forward to checking your other work!

I found the story a bit confusing at times. Partly it's because I don't know anything about rowing, so the relative position of the girls was hard to conceptualize, but that's my problem; mostly because it was at times hard to track who was talking. I think it could have used a few traditional dialogue tags.

Because of this occasional confusion, I also did not like the choice of preventing the reader from accessing the same POV twice. Seems excessively constricting for no real reason.

That aside, I thought the writing managed to mostly hit the sweet spot between being quick and having enough detail, which I feel is important in interactive fiction.  It was interesting jumping around different points of view (the Cox being upside down gave it away, though!). The cover art is also really nice.

I released a new version of the game, you can find it here on my itch.io account or back on Knockout!

Hello! Long time no see. In case you're interested I've begun working on a new version of the game. You can find the new prototype here: https://knockout.chat/thread/39529

I have bought A Matter of Murder! It looks very interesting and aesthetically pleasant, although I can't hide that it burns a bit to see somebody execute an idea you've also had better than you. Especially because the first idea I had, whenever I considered maybe expanding the game, was turning it into a point and click (I only made it a top down game because that was the style of assets provided for the jam).

Given their importance in the genre, motives are always at the back of my mind, but honestly I never figured out how to "model" them, and they were the first thing that was dropped when I moved from brainstorming to actual programming. I feel like it may be the kind of thing that is better implied rather than modeled explicitly by mechanics, but maybe I'm just being blind. I'll see how AMOM does it.

I was thinking about maybe putting my hands back in the game just this week (that's why I popped back into itch.io, which is not a website I visit often) so this conversation comes at a great time. At the very least you helped me find out about AMOM which seems to be a game I'm going to have some fun with. Thanks!

Hi! Sorry for the late reply, but I did not get your notification. It's a very interesting post so I want to give you an answer anyway.

You are right that the way the game is coded makes it so sometimes it's a 50/50 shot guessing who the killer was. While I noticed that I had no time to find a way around it. I meant to have slightly more complex witness mechanics but unfortunately no time to implement them.

However, as far as I can remember, it should always be 100% possible identifying the murder weapon. This is because map positioning is actually taken into consideration, despite what you may have thought, although not with the level of complexity you expected. Witnesses aren't able to comment on movement, they only know whether somebody was with them or not. The killer however DOES take into consideration the position of other pieces while carrying out the murder and not before.

Simply put,  this means that since Acid was in the Master Bedroom, once Lilac was in the bathroom, she could only use whatever she found in the bathroom to kill whoever the victim was. So she had to take the painkiller from the medicine cabinet and then hide it in the washing machine after the murder.

This is because each room has at least 3 elements: a weapon spawn and a weapon hiding spot. Originally I planned for some weapons to be able to be put back (for example, the painkiller bottle could be put back on the sink, while of course a knife would have to be hidden somewhere else) but this didn't make it in. This means that, if you find an item outside of its spawn, you can always be sure it's the murder weapon.

Anyway, once Lilac took the painkillers and murdered the victim, the algorithm looked for a hiding spot. Since the next room over was blocked, the only hiding spot available was the washing machine in the very same room, so she put the painkiller there. Had Acid been in another room, and the master bedroom been free, she could have decided to exit the bathroom with the bottle in hand and hide it in the closet.

I am really fond of this little game because I had lots of fun making it, but it is undeniable that it was severely limited by being an experimental jam project, my first Godot project, and the fact I am not that good of a game designer to begin with. I'm happy you still enjoyed it, tho, and I thank you for your comment.

Alright, understood. I'll keep your feedback in mind!

About the warning: this is absolutely true. I initially wanted to make the timer flash red when the time was low, but this didn't manage to make the cut. It's an important piece of polish, I agree with you.

About the body: you're not the first person to report on this and in hindsight I made a mistake. The color of the body is a more desaturated version of the sprite when "alive", so it tends to get lost. I also noticed this through playtesting, but didn't realize how big of a deal it was because I knew where to look for the body in the first place.

The ESC to restart issue has been reported. I think it happens on windows too, and I'm using a mac myself and I recall it worked fine when I  playtested, so it's probably a subtler kind of bug. I'll look into it!

The "winning" screen turning into a "losing" screen after alt tabbing is very unusual and you are the first to report it. It's very odd and I'll look into it.

Noted! There are some other spots where it's a little hard to examine what you want, so I'll have to improve the system.

The lack of music is an important point. It's just that I am kinda crappy when it comes to sounds and music so I tell myself I'll add them later, which usually results me in being too tired to eventually care about them. I had to push myself to include the few sounds I did :p I realize this is not ideal so next time I'll work on sounds while I program just like I work on art and animation at the same time.

The randomly generated mansion is a great idea I considered, but just like more suspects and more weapons, it's something that had to fall on the cutting floor for time constraints.

Thank you for your long post and valuable feedback!

Hello!

Would you say that this particular timing was enjoyable?

As for the writing, the large majority of it was spit out pretty quickly. As far as comments about the mansion go, I assume you mean the "whoah, shiny" attitude the detective has? There are multiple points where I do that and yeah, I realize that may get repetitive

I had multiple people report this issue and I'll look into it. It's the only bug that's been reported so even if I don't end up expanding the game I want to get it fixed after the jam.

Thank you!

I’ve been considering a more elaborate version, if only because I’d like to improve the underlying code and add a few rooms and weapons I had to cut for time constraint. Thanks for playing!

Really cute game! The leaf mechanic is very easy to understand and satisfying to use, movement is polished, and the sounds and music are pleasant.

I think the flames should last a little bit less, since sometimes you get stuck waiting for them to disappear, and the upward push could use a little less endlag. 

I managed to get it to run by following the instructions in this solution https://superuser.com/questions/898124/the-application-someapp-app-can-t-be-opened

You're welcome!

Hey man, I the app doesn't run on mac. Are you using Godot? Exporting as .zip didn't work for me either, but exporting as .dmg did fine.

Find the body and examine it. This will give you a hint. Then look around for possible weapons... if you find one that matches the hint and is in a suspicious place, then that's probably the murder weapon.

As for the escape key issue, what platform are you on? I assume the escape key works fine during the game and you're able to open the inventory?

I added the time limit to add some sense of pace and to underline the replayable nature of the game. I think it conveys that the game is really short and it's meant to be replayed multiple times, so while it pauses to let you think a bit, it also tells you that there is no reason to get it right the first time around. That's my logic, at least.

Thanks for the comment!

Mh... I thought I managed to position them to be pretty unobtrusive, but I must have been wrong. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I also noticed the dead body tends to blend a bit with the environment. Thank you for your feedback and I'm happy you had fun :)

Thank you!

I completely agree with you. All these are considerations I made through development. For example, I considered giving suspects different roles (an accomplice who protects the killer, a person with a grudge who will always lie to frame somebody who is not the killer, a forgetful suspect who doesn't provide any useful information etc) plus more types of weapons and clues, but unfortunately this is all I managed to do with the time allotted. Time management is a skill in itself with these jams, and I'm not too good at it (yet! :p)

Thank you for you kind words!