Recurring Detective by RedGuyFromHell
We tried our best and in the end i believe we managed to get a somewhat finished product. The story is far from over and we barely got any time left for debugging. That being said I hope you enjoy our attempt at a game and we can't wait to see what you guys also managed to create. Thanks for a great jam and we wish you all the best! :)
| Youtube | https://redguyfromhell.itch.io/recurring-detective |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/recurring-detective |
Ratings
| Overall | 1341th | 3.081⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1182th | 3⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1240th | 2.9⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1547th | 2.603⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 694th | 3.306⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 474th | 3.135⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 300th | 3.871⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 38🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
Story ends on a cliffhanger, which is a shame - I hate cliffhangers :wink: It also feels somewhat disjointed, for example: If I go to examine the poisoned guy first, I should not know about the glass with powder (as I didn't examine it yet), but my character acts like I know about it and already examined it. Seems like the story has an established sequence of events and doesn't react to you doing things in a different order at all. I'm also a bit dubious about the powder. How can you place poison in ice cubes, and yet have some powder left around the glass? If the poison is powdered, wouldn't it dissolve when placed in water and then made into ice cubes? Or is there some other way of poisoning ice cubes that I'm missing :thinking:?
Found a bug, I think - maybe it's intentional. When the game makes you leave the bar and resets the loop, the transition happens so fast that all you see of text is "As you leave the b". There is also some text strangeness that could use corrections (e.g. "Describe me the criminal", "Where are trying to get at?").
Overall, it's not a bad jam game but could use some story polishing. Good work!
@melon-spirit We didn t have enough time so the title screen was something we did as fast as we could so we compromised between the looks and time spend on it. About the fog, we first wanted to make some pixelated fog generator or something dynamic but after a few tries we just accepted the fact that we had not enough time so we went with just static sprites of smoke overlapped.
@theseusinabottle Nobody likes cliffhangers. We had the whole story planned out on our whiteboard but sadly the time was too short for our team to be able to make the whole game. We are happy that we managed to get a working build up and running with the first scene completed.
@nailuj29-gaming Thanks for the feedback dude. You rock!
@blobo We appreciate every input we get. We really wanted to make a dark rainy mood detective style game and we glad that we got that across. We got inspired by games like " The last door " and " Darkside Detective "
@rizekcajk Yeah, we had kinda a lot of bugs and quirks that we had not enough time to repair so we just said live it as it is and see what the public says. Thanks for trying our game.
Positive:
* Nice mood
* Good pixel art
* Good music
* Interesting story
* Dialog system
Negatives:
* Some rough edges with the dialog mentioning things I hadn't done
* Obviously not much to it yet
It's a bit rough around the edge, the dialog system is good for a jam, but need a bit of improvement
- Blacking-out already said stuff, not disable just visual cue
- Disabling player locomotion animation when in dialogue
- I was able to trigger the dialogue multiple times if pressed E, and the dialogue restarts, so maybe allow player to choose using the movement keys and select with E when in dialogue would be nice, since the mouse interaction felt useless.
That being said I love the mood you set and a nice little setup for a story, I'm really excited to see where you guys take this because I saw a to be continued in the end!
I wish the whole team best of luck and don't feel down, you guys made a good base demo with a lot of potential for interesting storytelling with perhaps multiple outcomes.
However the gameplay is not finished, is it, i talked to the bartender after the Drinking Guy, and clicked walk away after i got his drink. It then revealed that he tried to poison me with the icecubes.
Seems like the dependencies of the events are not bugfree.
But i like the way this is going! Keep it up
@shubart No, thank you for playing the game and giving us a chance! You rock dude!
@indieronin Sorry, we are quite new to this and do not quite know how, i think it something to do with unity build?
@kaafirookie Thanks a lot for the input and indeed, we know some things can be improved, some things fixed and other such tasks but we did not manage to do it in the remaining time. Thanks for trying our game and hope you check our game when we will release a full version not just a demo like this. And about the story, i will say a sneak peak, when you enter the bar, the detective should have said "Hey, batman?", then batman would appear and the detective be like "Ah sorry, typo, i meant barman" and the batman would transform in a barman. Thanks dude and be sure to follow us!
@fachscahfttf Yes, the game is quite far from calling it finished. We did what we could to prove the ideas we had and the main mechanic of the game. Happy to see that you liked it anyway and try to follow us if you want more. We will upload a full version when all it s done. Thanks.
@gonzalol Yup, we hope we can finish it too! Be sure to check it out when you see it! Thanks for the feedback dude! Cheers!
Pros
* Really nice art
* Dialogue system is quite advanced for a jam result
* Story based game: I love story based games and it had a good start
* Nice music and really good mood
* I loved the animation in the street, it make the city alive
Cons:
* Pressing 'e' during a dialogue restarted the dialogue, in my opinion, having 'e' make you go at the end of the current line and then start next line would be the best option
* Dialogues that were talking about things I had not done yet ("he is lying" while I didn't talk to the "he")
* The last text that I had difficulties reading before going back at the start (and the phrase seems to not finish)
* If you accord importance to the theme, I don't think it really fits into it: it feels more like"start a new game" than "stuck in a loop". Having a small intro or final phrase explaining why you come back at the start would do the trick tho and it goes into having a more in depth story (which is hard in jams)
Overall, it's not a bad game but clearly needs a lot of polishing and more development and has a lot of potential. For a first jam, it is quite a good result and you just learned the most important rule of jams: don't aim too high ;) Congrats on your results anyway and I hope you will continue to develop this game, I am pretty sure it will be fun to play once finished :D
Excellent art. The story is ok, I managed to not get myself killed, I'm happy enough with that. No point in listing shortcomings as you clearly didn't had time to make the game you wanted. Make it less ambitious next time. I made that mistake this LD, didn't even manage to publish it in time, the game's link is on my profile text.