Been working on this game for about half a year. I'm very excited to have just started the devlog today. Here are some of the transitions from the first vertical slice demo. I'm pumped to share progress with y'all!

[A Case of Distrust]

A Case of Distrust is a narrative mystery from 1924 San Francisco. Play as private investigator Phyllis Cadence Malone in this historical 2D adventure game. Explore underground speakeasies, smoke-filled billiard halls, classic barber shops, and more. Catch suspects in lies by using evidence, statements, and your wits. Intrinsic challenges face our heroine, as she struggles against a pushback on emancipation, leading to many doubts, both internal and external. Uncover the truth in a mystery full of deception!

OUT NOW ON MAC AND PC!

 

 

DETAILS

The game requires careful attention to clue details and character statements. Interaction is with objects and text on each screen -- think something between Phoenix Wright and 80 Days.

The art style borrows heavily from the ideas of Saul Bass, Dieter Rams, Olly Moss, and other visual designers. I wanted to go with something that didn't distract from the world, but stayed within the style I wanted.


GAME CREATORS

Ben Wander - Game Design, Code, Visuals, Writing
@TheWanderingBen
Website

Mark "Marowi" Wilson - Audio Design
@MarowiTweets
Website

Virginia Woodall - Talent Producer, Editor
@Ginniffer
Website

Taylor Pereira - Roadie, Additional Art
Doesn't have Twitter
Doesn't have a website
Such a hermit!


AWARDS



PRESS

• "Stunning two-dimensional noir silhouettes... perfectly mirror the vintage cloak-and-dagger tone of the narrative" - Luke Winkie, PC Gamer
• "Impressed me with its nuanced, careful construction of its milieu and characters, and the resonant comparisons it draws with the world of today" - Jen Glennon, Newsweek's Player.One
• "It evokes its setting of 1924 San Francisco perfectly" - Holly Green, Paste Magazine
• "It’s a beautiful game with an intriguing premise, setting, time period and gameplay loop" - Tyler Robertson, Hardcore Gamer
• "A stylish noir detective story [with a] distinctive graphical style" - Pascal Tekaia, Adventure Gamers
• "The game's writing [is] downright phenomenal" - Taylor Danielle, Twinfinite

MEDIA

Travel animation (with the old name!):


Promo:


Screenshots:


Old Stuff:

GIF from the ancient demo:

Great idea for the freeze-time trailer -- those videos really capture a classically "epic" feel, perfect for a god game. I'm personally loving the black-on-red look -- it feels like a real material.

In terms of the UX mock-up, I'm just confused why the Add button is an arrow pointing to the left on the left side, and the Don't Add button is an arrow on the right pointing to the right side. Usually right arrows on the right side mean "Next" or "Accept" or "Forward", whereas left arrows on the left side mean "Cancel" or "Back" (just take a look at your browser buttons!). Otherwise, I'm loving the mouse-over and slide animations; they're both very clear!

I hope that makes sense!

Whenever I hear about a game using many colours as a mechanic, I immediately worry about the art. But not here! I can tell your screenshots are early, but it seems you're using a smart palette that's slightly muted -- this doesn't look like a ball pit, it actually looks really good!

Using each colour as a different mechanic for a different shape could also lead to many interesting puzzles. It'll be hard to communicate, but do it slowly enough and players will understand. I'm imagining some mind-bending end-game puzzles with all the permutations of colour/object.

Good luck guys, I hope it comes together!

Simple concept, expertly executed. Voted for you on Greenlight. Good luck, brothers!

Fantastic style, and I love the idea of re-imagining a fairy-tale. Excellent work so far, just posting so I don't miss updates. Excited for the future of this, good luck! 

...and without having to spend too many work hours (this was a compromise after all).

This.

This is the hardest thing about game design. Infinite monkeys with infinite time could make the next Minecraft, but unfortunately none of us have either. JobLeonard has some well-intentioned and honestly good-sounding suggestions. But only you guys can know what works for your game and what's within your budget. Good luck, I'm interested to see the final solution! (this is why I love dev logs!)

This games is meant to explore the evolution of religion and the relationship between god and humanity. It asks the player who shapes whom, and if a god is truly omnipotent if people have free will. We're also interested in broadening diversity in the game scene so we chose to depict a fictional culture inspired by ancient African civilisations, such as the Dogon, Ashanti and Zulu. And we've also tried to give some space to other gender expressions and sexualities. We're also trying to find new ways for players to make their own stories by procedural means.

Love this! It seems like a great way to explore existential and politicized topics through interaction. And the idea of controlling your people indirectly (via commandments) is an ambitious mechanic that I haven't seen before.

It sounds like you've been hard at work on this game for a long while now. Continued luck guys! Posting to subscribe to future updates

Beautiful backgrounds -- reminds me of those photos of faraway galaxies that NASA takes with Hubble. I'm imagining a light piano score? Could be soothing. Excited to see the puzzles themselves! Good luck

...we had to delete the combat of the game...

So we have focused the gameplay on... Walking with Souls, the platforms, the exploration elements and the puzzly ones.

Exploration is what first drew me to your game. Maybe others won't share the feeling, but exploring is my favourite verb in the platforming genre. I'm so happy you took out combat to focus on the parts that I think I'll like more. I'm even more excited for this now. Keep it up guys!

I have no idea how I missed The Great Whale Road on here! I was a Kickstarter backer and still love(!) the concept -- more historical fiction please! The art you've shown thus far looks phenomenal, which is hopefully a good sign for the quality in general. Fantastic work, I look forward to playing this! Adding this comment so I don't miss future updates

That third image is right on the money! Well done, looking great

Nah, I've erased all the big tangles with that StoryIncludes trick. That's not to say it won't get messy, but I'm still at an fairly early stage in both writing and development. Maybe it'll get more messy (messier?) in the new year -- I'll keep ya posted!

Sounds like it could be useful for smaller Passages -- but honestly, don't think I'd use it over of just the regular Twine syntax; I like the arrows showing me the graph flow, whereas sub-nodes, being hidden, would just get confusing.

Many passages was a problem when I thought I was limited to one Twine story file. But now that I can link Twine story files via StoryIncludes, I'd rather have the more verbose syntax to show me where everything leads.

Side Note: If I were to suggest an improvement in that area to the folks at the Twine UI team: I want the ability to Group multiple nodes together, so that I can zoom far out and just see the links between Groups instead of the links between Passages (e.g.: "Campfire Hub" links to "Morrigan Conversation" and "Leliana Conversation"). While I realize a certain organizational pattern might get the nodes close enough to see that at a lower zoom level, every time I've tried I end up tangled in those node-to-node fishing wires. Groups would be a great feature for organization and alleviate the need for the aforementioned StoryIncludes.

But again, whatever works for you man. It just depends on the game/tech you're trying to make and what's driving you to make it.

UnityTwine translates a Twine Story into Unity. A Twine Story is just a text-adventure, so yes, all UnityTwine does is give you that text-adventure in Unity. But, that's pretty powerful: you can now display the story however you want, with whatever visuals -- models, animations, etc -- that you can create with Unity. UnityTwine isn't a complete solution, but can be a first-step for many things: from just a standard text-adventure, to a more traditional adventure game, to the conversation system of an entire open-world-RPG.

A Passage node in Twine is required whenever the player has a choice. For example:

   "What colour is the sky in your world? [[Orange]] [[Yellow]] [[Fuchsia]]"

is a Twine passage that has three player options which leads to three further Passage nodes. You can see how, just in a simple conversation with a few player choices, you could use a dozen different Passage nodes. Multiply that by the number of conversations in your game, and suddenly the number of nodes quickly becomes unmanageable.

Fantastic colour scheme -- loving the soft edges too. I'm also big fan of first-person narrative! Subscribed -- excited to see more

Good luck!

I'm writing a mystery game, so most of my variables are flags (bools) to indicate a player's dialogue choices based on what she's seen -- e.g.: <<set FoundMurderWeapon = true>>. The gameplay involves traveling to various locations -- talking to NPCs or searching the area for clues. Thus I have both descriptions of locations and conversations with NPCs that I'm writing.

If you're considering a similar solution, here's a more detailed breakdown of my setup:

The largest Twine concept is a Story, which contains all Passages, Links, and Variables. UnityTwine is only good at importing one Story and cannot connect multiple Story files together. Thus, my game is just one giant CompleteStory.twee file. Size isn't an issue -- the whole file is plain text, so it won't ever use a meaningful amount of RAM.

But, one recent complication I ran into: the Twine interface is absolutely terrible at displaying a Story that has 50+ Passage nodes -- so writing became a huge pain very quickly. Considering the scope of my game, I will have hundreds (if not thousands) of Passage nodes -- whoops! The prospect of no solution to this problem was frightening! If you use this setup, you'll probably run into a similar roadblock.

Thankfully, there is a very easy, though highly obscure solution: A feature of Twine 1.4 (that almost nobody seems to know about!) is called StoryIncludes. It allows combining multiple Story files together -- basically, sharing Links and Variables among Passages across as many files as you want! Works very well if you have multiple writers, too! From a Unity standpoint, I just export each one of those files into its *.twee format, then I have a script that concatenates all the files together into the aforementioned CompleteStory.twee file, which I then drop into Unity and it gets automagically converted to a CompleteStory.cs via UnityTwine -- ready to be parsed by my game!

That may sound a bit too technical without any Unity/Twine/UnityTwine experience, but if you go down this road, you will thank me for the detailed description (spent a bunch of time finding the easiest solution to these setup problems).

Again, if you're making something very similar to what's already been made (e.g.: Phoenix Wright or 80 Days) try seeing if you can use a similar system (ren'py and inklewriter are great choices for those!). But if you want something different, maybe UnityTwine is the way to go. I'm fairly early in development (I still haven't started a DevLog on these forums because I don't have the complete vision just yet) but so far this setup has worked wonders! I can update if I run into further roadblocks (and my solutions to getting past them).

Explorative, historical, surreal, colourful -- I have nothing but the utmost praise! This game looks absolutely incredible! Posting here to get update notifications.

Great job already! Good luck finishing the game!

Neat idea! Love the concept of buying back abilities -- are there gated areas/secrets that the player requires abilities to explore? I'm imagining a combination Metroid with Rayman.

Good luck, looking great so far!

You mentioned both Twine and Unity, so I'll share my current pipeline:

• Plan in Google Doc (e.g.: write character background, plot arc, each scene, etc)
• Write script in Twine 1.4
• Import to Unity via the (fantastic and free!) UnityTwine plugin

I haven't finished a full game, but have been using this system for about a month now and am quite happy with my progress. I can preview the entire story in Twine's interface before shifting into my engine work. Keeps everything separated in a nice way.

Really, it depends on what your needs are. Ren'py, for example, is useful for a very specific type of game, and InkleWriter has a simple output format but has no concept of variables.