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[tristydee]

One Show Only is a detective game where you interrogate witnesses to a crime by playing a card game against them. It looks something like this:



Cards represent your questions and by using cards against certain characters you can unlock new cards/information. There are five characters to interrogate, each of which has answers to certain questions.

Now that it's done I've updated this first post and you can get the game here:
https://tristandahl.itch.io/oneshowonly

[tristydee]

The card game is used in the game to interrogate witnesses, cards represent questions and the aim is to move your cards higher up on the grid to unlock get more information.

-It takes place on a 3x3 grid.
-Each turn the player can place either a new card, or move an already placed card one row higher.
-The arrows at the top of the cards represent their movement options, so if the left arrow is vertical, that card can move straight up when on the left column. If the center arrow is diagonal, the card can move diagonally upwards when in the center column.
-Each card has a unique combination of movement directions.
-Placing a card on top of an enemy's card removes it from play and vice versa.
Bringing a card to the top row can unlock new cards.




So hopefully that makes sense... As far as progression is concerned the player starts off with cards with a lot of movement options, as they're easier to use. While the enemies at the beginning of the game have cards that can only ever move in one direction per column. Later on enemies get stronger cards, with multiple movement directions per column, making them less predictable.






There are still some design issues however, the card game is both too easy, as well as too short! It takes a few turns to for the enemy to have placed enough cards to be a threat and by then the player has enough time to bring at least one card to the top row without any opposition. And while one could program smarter AI to combat this (currently the enemies move are completely random), it'd be difficult to find the correct difficulty with that approach.

So my plan is to have certain cards, that can only be placed after enough other cards have reached the top row. This would prolong the length of the card game by forcing the player to place cards they wouldn't otherwise place and gives the enemy a chance to place some cards of their own.

Okay, that's that! If anyone has any feedback regarding the card game, as far as graphics or design are concerned, I'd be very interested in hearing it. Thanks for reading!

[tristydee]

The ability to walk around the circus grounds in my game had begun to feel a bit unnecessary. It was boring, not touch friendly, and made it a chore to talk to a person on the other sides of the circus grounds. So I took it out!
​


One can now swipe left or right to go to an npc and click on them to start the card game. And this makes the game much better. yay! The downside of this is that it makes the already short game even shorter. But I'll add more questions to unlock to make up for that.

I also made a (terrible and ugly) website for the game if anyone's interested in taking a look.
http://www.tristandahl.co.za/oneshowonly.html​

[tristydee]

There's a wonderful game development in Berlin every two months called Talk and Play. I showed my game there last week and my to-do list on Trello shot up from 20 something items to nearly sixty.

The take aways were:
+People like the art style.
+People like the music​

-People had trouble understanding the mechanics
-As the game gives you no feedback on cards that reach the top, but do not unlock other cards; There was little sense of accomplishment if you did not happen to use the right card against the right person.

I've made some changes in order to help people understand the mechanics. A simple change was to add a hand sprite behind the cards in the player's hand and to move those cards closer together than the cards on the grid. This makes it clear that the game does not take place on a 3x4 grid, but on a 3x3 grid, the extra row on the bottom is to show you what cards you can place on the grid.
Additionally, arrows on the card light up depending on what column they are placed on. This helps make the connection between the arrows on cards and the directions they can move in.
The gif below should highlight these changes:
​

The other issue (no sense of accomplishment when you bring a -wrong- card to the top, is a little harder to address.
I want to add a counter to the top of the card game that gets +1 for every card you bring to the top. In order to place to harder cards, this number needs to be increased.
Then I want to reduce the amount of cards that don't unlock further cards at the beginning of the game. This way there's less chance of a player having no sense of progression in the first few interrogations.

I jazzed up the website for the game and sent off a little press announcement, which got me two features so far. The main benefit of this (apart from feeling encouraged), is that a handful of strangers signed up to get an email on release.
tristandahl.co.za/oneshowonly.html​

Okay, thanks for making it this far! ​

[tristydee]

I've been working on the graphics recently (excuse the gif compression) and adding some more content. I now have all the dialogue I need for the game and its no longer quite as short.
So there's just some bugfixing and usability stuff left to do!

http://www.tristandahl.co.za/oneshowonly.html

[tristydee]

The two aspects of the game that still need a lot of work at the moment are the interface and the fact that the card game and the dialogue system don't complement each other as far as the gameplay is concerned.

The UI contains a lot of visual noise at the moment, so by removing ui elements until they are required, the player can more easily see what they should interact with. An example of this are the text bubbles on the left hand side. They are now only displayed after you have asked your first question and they begin to fill with dialogue.

To further simplify the UI I have changed the text displayed on the players cards. Whereas they used to display the first three words of that question, I.e "where were you…" they now simply say "Question 1" or 2,3 etc. The important thing is that one can still differentiate them. But the text no longer grabs your attention when the most important part of the cards UI are the arrows showing their movement options.

The game can be played and beaten without reading any of the dialogue on the left hand side of the screen at the moment and I want to circumvent this by giving the player hints as to who has the answer to that question. So by successfully bringing a card to the top row against the ringmaster, he might then say, "I don't know, but you should ask the magician". This information will then also be stored on the card itself. The text on it now says:
" Question 2
-Ask the magician ".

This will reward players who take the time to read the dialogue and make the process of deciding which person to interrogate next less random.

And this is a page from the intro comic at the beginning of the game

[tristydee]

Okay, I'm nearly done with the game, there are just some bugs to fix and optimizations to do and since I had to capture some footage in order to hand my game in for IndieCade I ended up making a little trailer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=BArq3SLaX8A

I plan on releasing the game on itch.io first and then mobile a month or two later. I've always been interested in seeing how games sell on itch.io so I'll share my numbers here then.

Thanks for reading!

[bdsowers]

The visual styling on this is great, and I love that it's an investigation game that has interesting gameplay beyond just navigating a dialog tree. I'd say you lose a bit by allowing rapid transition between characters - I understand the reason for it, but you lose a sense of space, and I think there could be a lot of charm in navigating a living circus.

[tristydee]

Thanks for the reply and I'm glad you like the art!
I think that hopefully the fact that the game will be more concise by allowing you to swipe from character to character and that's worth losing a bit of a sense of place for me.
The fact that swiping to select a character works better on mobile was the deal breaker for me though. I wanted to avoid having to release two different versions of the game.

[tristydee]

And the game is now available on itch.io!

https://tristandahl.itch.io/oneshowonly

yay! It'd be great if you'd give it a try. Right now I'm getting less downloads than expected. Zero to be exact  But maybe that'll change and I'll post here again in a week or two, since some of you might be interested in knowing how many downloads a dev with no name can get on itch.

[tristydee]

The game has now been available on itch.io for 6 days and has sold 9 copies. Which is a lot less than I would've hoped. I have also gotten zero press and non of the 30 or so youtubers I've written have responded. So If anyone has any tips on what I should've done differently in the press release I'd be super grateful

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1trkyG988qMTBJKvwNTXe23PiMmB9zFlCrrRooflAd8g/edit?usp=sharing

Also! Here's the release trailer

[friendlydog]

9 copies is 9 times more than I sold in a year :-)
I think you should write it down as an achievement of sorts.

Indiegame marketing always seems to be the weak spot for most Indiedevs. I guess it takes a certain kind of person to grind through the promotion process - and I assume most Indiedevs cannot be bothered after months of development to put in another endless grind of PR work (that's how it is for me at least).

I guess the unpleasant truth is that it doesnt matter how great your game is, you still have to shove it down the throat of EVERYONE, or else you just dont get those 30 seconds of attention you need to get the avalanche rolling.

I would even guess promoting a game takes just as much time and effort than developing a game. and costs more money (for an indiedev), cos there may not be a way around online ads, daily social media spamming, paid reviews, fake downloads, or even showing up at indie events. and if you dont have a network in the press already (which most people dont have), then your press release mail will just disappear in the inbox among another 200 daily release mails.

sorry for my monday rant, it's early in the morning here and my coffee sucks.
what? it's not monday? 

I like your game! It's innovative, quirky, calm and has more mental meat than endless reaction clickfeasts (like my games) 
good luck!

PS: please anyone correct me and tell me I am so wrong, there is an easy method of getting audience attention.

[Hellfish]

Sorry to hear that the sales are disappointing. The game mechanic seems rather unique and the looks really stand out. One thing I can think of is that the trailer is a little bit hard to understand. Maybe adding some feature explanations between the gameplay scenes might help to sell the game mechanic. Stuff like "Solve a murder with a unique card mechanic".

When I only see the trailer I also have no idea on which platform the game got released, whether it's mobile or PC. 

Otherwise just keep going sending out emails and try to focus on smaller indie blogs and youtubers which have played/wrote about small but unique indie games in the past. Unfortunately marketing nowadays is more a marathon than a sprint...

Wish you luck!

[tristydee]

Thanks for the detailed responses you two!

Your feedback regarding the trailer makes sense Daniel, I'll make a note of that!

I'll try and find some smaller blogs and youtubers. I've already written quite a few youtubers, but one will have to bite eventually 

And for my next game I'll definitely have a more 'open' development, post demos on itch, tweet and post about it more often here. It's just difficult when working on a game part time to invest what little time you'd be able to spend working on the game on marketing/pr

[tristydee]

aaaand the game is now out on Android and iOS!  

Hopefully I'll get a few more downloads than the 11 I've had on itch.io so far. I did send out my press releases in advance this time (2 weeks) and touch arcade already wrote a short article announcing the release date. So I'm crossing fingers.

www.tristandahl.co.za/oneshowonly.html

I'll post here again with some download numbers in a month or so, because I think a comparison between itch.io (few users, but better visibility) and the mobile storefronts (billions of users, no visibility) could be interesting. But then it'll be time to start a new thread for some new game (finally)!