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Part of our original concept was that allies' cards could be combined before playing, but this turned out to be wildly out of the scope for 48 hours. Glad you had fun, though!

Absolutely agreed on that last point; we struggled a lot with the targeting system. Luckily we already have a new build where you can drag cards to your allies that we'll post after the jam.

Really awesome concept, very charming use of existing assets! Definitely encountered some physics bugginess but I'm really impressed.

This game is really cool, but I struggled for quite a while figuring out what I could interact with. Also, maybe it was just my screen's resolution, but the arms were in...kind of a weird spot on my screen?

Love how the music changes with the...floor? Obviously very unfinished but nice job for 48 hours!

Neat mechanic, love the art! I found though that the buzzing sounds were unpleasant at best, painful at worst.

Really charming and super polished, I loved figuring out how to solve puzzles with the possession mechanic!

fantastic job, super charming!

super cool, really like this one! unfortunately the death noise is now stuck in my head.

hehe funny lizard stick to wall c:

great job!

Thank you!

I am extremely confused about how to even beat the first level; I've attempted to put the two puzzle pieces on top of the yin/yang symbol, that didnt work; I've tried holding them next to each other, putting them on the ground next to each other; not sure what else to do. The art and music are very charming, however!

Bumping for update!

To be clear, Nagito and Sans are just in there as placeholders haha, they won't be in this game!

Realizing I should *probably* bump this, since I'm putting all of my devlog in one post.

Super cute so far, I'm excited for this one!

Thank you! And I'm making it in Twine, so it'll be primarily text-based. I was inspired heavily by the Detective Grimoire series (Tangled Tower is phenomenal), without the visual elements. And I think that motive is a little too dark!

Yep! Any ideas are appreciated.

The Mall Goths Solve a Murder (in the Mall) is a short mystery game I'm making in Twine. You play as a group of high schoolers who find the corpse of the mall security guard in the locked kitchen of a Jamba Juice. Interrogate various mall employees, dig through trash cans, and break into a Hot Topic to solve the mystery!

1/9

Hey all! Excited to get started; I've done a bit of preproduction work and outlining over the past 24 hours or so. I'm going to be spending today refreshing myself on Twine; I messed around with it a few years back but I'm excited to crack it open again!

There are a few things I'm still trying to figure out about the game: 

• While I've figured out whodunnit and howdunnit, I'm still not sure on whydunnit. Why would someone kill this mall security guard? I know the security guard is quite a jerk, both to the kids and to other mall employees, and he's not above blackmailing people. The biggest catch is that I want to keep it relatively lighthearted.
• I'm debating whether to use existing companies/bands or to come up with parody names. The game is set in 2003-ish, so I want it to be a time capsule when it comes to media references.
• Art: yay or nay? I've heard that it's a pain to add visuals to Twine, but I think it would be a nice addition. I think a map of the mall would be the most important thing, but if I have time I'd love to do some character portraits.

1/10

Yesterday I wrote and added the first 13 pages and did concept art for the main cast. I also messed around with both the Harlowe and Snowman story formats, and I'm unfortunately still indecisive! A lot of the stuff I want to do is easier in Harlowe (I don't know javascript) but having control over the CSS is basically a requirement for me. I think I'll try Sugarcube today to make up my mind, and finish up the introductory sequence.

The format of the game is something like this:

Introduction - linear until a certain point. Introduces the player characters, the setting, and tutorializes cycling links.

Investigation - you can select where to go in the mall, and investigate things in any order. A few places are still locked, though, so you'll need to find the proper items in order to enter them. There are five suspects: the Jamba Juice Cashier, the Arcade Owner, the Sports Equipment Store Manager, the Jewelry Store Employee, and the Children's Boutique Owner. As you gather clues and talk to each of them, new dialog options open up, including cycling links in your dialog so that you can ask them the right questions. If you ask the wrong thing you can always try again.

Deduction - the cops show up and ask you what happened. This can only occur after you've gathered all of the clues that would point to the culprit; I'm still working out exactly what variables need to be true for the ending to trigger. The deduction sequence is done using cycling links. For example, when you are asked who did it, you'll be given a sentence like "[Suspect] killed the Security Guard using [murder weapon]!" where each thing in brackets is a cycling link. I'm still working out what the failstate of this would be, whether you get infinite tries, advance to a bad ending, or if your deduction doesn't actually matter and the cops figure it out regardless.

Also, it snowed this morning! Which is wild because I'm in Texas; I don't think I've seen snow since 2018.

1/11

I've settled on using Snowman and spent most of my time yesterday figuring out Javascript stuff, so now I have cycling links working! I've tutorialized these by having one of the player characters order a smoothie near the start of the game. Since Jamba Juice is a real restaurant I wanted to use actual flavors they had in 2003...but wasn't able to find a menu quite that old. After a lot of googling, I managed to find a very low-res image of a menu from 2008, so hopefully I got it right. I may wind up sending the game to a few older friends to help spot anachronisms; I was only 5 years old in 2003, so there's plenty of stuff I don't know.

I've also added the first branching choice, which will be relevant later in the game. I had to revise it slightly from my original concept, because when given the choice between "ask someone else to open the door for you" and "kick down the door with your sick-ass platform heels" I think most people would pick the second. There's a time and place for humor, and I'm realizing that player choice isn't it, unless you're trying to guide someone to a certain answer. Heck, Dragon Age 2 is a fantastic example of this; you've got to wonder what percentage of players picked the Purple (funny/snarky) options in dialog most of the time. I know I did.

Today I'll be learning how to set up variables in Snowman and (hopefully) finish writing the introductory sequence. Also, does anyone know if there's a way to check the wordcount within twine itself? I'm trying to cap this game at 12k words, so it's reasonable to play in under an hour.

1/12

I have switched back to Harlowe, to the surprise of no one. Turns out I can do (nearly) all of the CSS stuff I wanted to do in it, so I don't need Snowman. So I spent time yesterday making sure Harlowe would work for me; I planned on doing visuals absolutely last, but I wanted to make sure I could do what I wanted in Harlowe. Turns out I can! Here's my visdev work, with dumb placeholder sprites as a joke:

EDIT: TO BE VERY CLEAR, SANS AND KOMAEDA ARE NOT IN THIS GAME. THESE ARE PLACEHOLDER IMAGES, TO MAKE SURE I CAN PUT IMAGES IN PROPERLY IN THE WAY I WANT TO.

There are a few things I may change about it, but imo this is a great starting point. I'm going to have to figure out if using Justify for the narration text looks good or not; I sometimes find that difficult to read.

Beyond that, I didn't finish the introductory sequence. Hopefully, I WILL finish that today, as well as the initial corpse investigation. I also spent time yesterday learning about variables, yaay. Lots of booleans in this one, to check what pages you've been to.

1/14

I am continuing my devlog in this post because I like it being all in one place. Maybe that's a mistake but whatever.

On Tuesday I finished the intro section, then trimmed half of it down because it's getting too long already. I then started on the corpse investigation sequence and started setting up a lot of variables; one thing I dislike in a lot of mystery games is that you can only get each piece of evidence from one location, so I'm making sure that you can get the necessary evidence in at least two locations. I also set up the main mall-navigation landing page, which you'll be returning to a lot.

I took a break yesterday to do some much-needed errands and rest up! There was some plot stuff I was trying to work through so I let that marinate for a bit and thought about how I wanted to handle it. Feeling refreshed and excited to get back to work today. I'll be finishing the corpse/crime scene investigation, and either moving onto the first conversation, adding another investigation sequence, and/or building case-review section (which will be most important for the end of the game).

1/15

More corpse-investigation, yay! One of these days I'll get to writing the actual conversations I'm most excited for. Something I've been setting up is a bunch of variables to determine what you've messed with at the crime scene; you're a bunch of kids who don't really know what they're doing, and while flipping over the corpse may be necessary to solve the mystery, you are basically tampering with evidence. I think if your $crimescenedamage score is above a certain number, you risk getting arrested. Whoops!

A week in and I still feel like I'm just getting started...I think I need to sit down and scope some stuff out today.