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[Oddball]

Söze A game by David Williamson with music by feeblethemighty The deadly bomber Söze has planted a bomb. Time is short and nobody knows who Söze is. You have rounded up the most likely suspects. Each suspect knows one fact about Söze, but beware Söze will lie to you. Can you identify Söze in time? Downloads ~1.1MB Mac(Intel) OS X | Windows XP/Vista/7 Old builds in case those above don't work Win32(RC2b) | Win32(RC2a) | Win32(RC1) | Win32(RC1 Windowed) | MacOS(RC1) Hints and Tips - WARNING SPOILERS The key to finding Söze is to remember that Söze will always lie. If two suspects give the same clue then we can deduce that they are telling the truth as Söze is the only suspect that lies. We can also assume that neither of the clue givers are Söze as they are both telling the truth. If a suspect gives you a clue that could also describe themselves then their clue is true and they are not Söze as he never describes himself. If some of the suspects are obscuring each other then clicking an empty part of the screen will cause all suspects to shuffle their positions.

[Source] [Click for full screenshot]

I'm not going to have much time to work on this one so I'm keeping it simple and will have a go at speed coding it if I get a spare hour. After missing out on the last few compos I'm determine to churn one out for this contest.
Wish me luck.

[LiquidAsh]

Good luck.  Sounds like a promising premis.  It kind of reminds me of the board game "Guess Who".

[Oddball]

Okay. I've whipped up a release candidate for everyone to pick to pieces. I develop on a Mac which means I've coded all the Direct3D stuff blind and so I've created a fullscreen and windowed version. I'm hoping one of them will work. I've not got any computer time now until next week so if there is something major wrong with them you'll just have to wait for a fix. Dev time was a couple of hours with most of that going on graphics. Enjoy.

Downloads ~6.4MB
MacOS(Intel) | Win32 | Win32(Windowed)

Special mention goes to feeblethemighty as I've used his Assemblee music.

[Melly]

Your windowed build gives me a 404, and your full-screen build has the game screen stay on the right of my widescreen monitor, while the empty space has very fast flashing black and white, which made it impossible to play the game confortably.

[Oddball]

The 404 was a mistyped link. It should be working fine now. The other issue will have to wait until next week. I was hoping to get it right first time. Oh well.

[Oddball]

Just had an idea for a quick fix. Hopefully this will clear up any glitches. If some Windows people could test both new builds I'd be very grateful.

Downloads ~6.4MB
Win32(RC2a) | Win32(RC2b)

[JMickle]

rc2b works fine. rc2a doesn't line up properly.

[Carrie Nation]

Oh dear...

They're on to me...

[Hangedman]

Cool! Like the clean art style.

Reminds me of Where's An Egg.

[Oddball]

@LiquidAsh: Superficially it's the same idea as Guess Who? but having one of the suspects lie makes it tactically quite different.

@JMickle: Sorry to be a pain, but could you post a screenshot of the RC2a bug, or describe how it's misaligned. I'll just go with RC2b as that seems to work, but I'd like to see how I've messed up the other one.

@Keyser Soze: Ha. You're much easier to find when you openly use your name.

@Hangedman: Just tried to keep a similar style to the cart. I'm no artist so it's convenient that it's a fairly easy style to replicate.

[JMickle]

well, it goes fullcreen, but the actual screen is 800x600, placed at the top left corner, with white space filling the other sides. But the buttons act as if it is fitting normally (this is incredibly hard to describe)

For instance, for the X button, it is shown  around 3/4 along the top of the screen, but you have to put the mouse right in the top right corner to click it, not over the graphic.

http://imgur.com/xqy4S.png <-- screeny and better graphical explanation

[LiquidAsh]

Nice work, The liar does put an interesting twist on the classic Guess Who, and makes for an interesting puzzler.  I wonder how it would work to limit the number of questions the player asks rather than the amount of time that passes (?).  The current mix certainly presents an interesting mix of strategy and tension though.  Nice work!

[Melly]

I played the windowed version of the previous build, which worked fine. The game itself is pretty interesting, though you should make sure the clues are at least somewhat varied. In one game I got everybody saying that either he was a man or he wasn't blue, and that helped me in nothing.

[Oddball]

Melly, you need to think a little more laterally. If suspects are saying the same thing then you can immediately discount them, as Söze, being a liar, will never say the same thing as another suspect. Looking for the suspect who is saying something different from the rest is a valid and highly useful tactic.

[deathtotheweird]

Too many times I hit the wrong button and arrested the wrong person, unintentionally. That made it more frustrating than it had to be, I think.

I quit at the extreme difficulty and the frustration of hitting the wrong button. Cool presentation and every thing, and I like the concept. Just a bit too hard.

[miconazole]

This was pretty tough until I figured out the trick! Interesting concept. It was a bit of a pain clicking on buttons on a moving subject though, maybe they could stop moving when you mouse over them?

[Oddball]

maybe they could stop moving when you mouse over them?

That's actually a great idea, and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it. If I get time I'll add it in.

EDIT: Added this now. Thanks for the suggestion.

[deathtotheweird]

That makes it better, awesome.

Finally got the bastard on 30 seconds. Woo

[guille]

I really like the concept behind this but I think that many things make it harder than it should be. (Söze lying, too little time, suspects moving around, etc).

I think the game would highly improve if you considered some of the following ideas:

- Discard suspects. You could "delete" the ones you know are not Söze. So you have less people in the game area distracting you (which just adds to frustration not challenge or enjoyment). If you discard Söze you lose.

- Not clicking on ? bubbles. Seriously, hovering the mouse over the bubble should be enough to get the clue from that suspect.

- Adding clue icons on top. Picture this, you get a clue from some suspect that says Söze is a man, then a man icon is added on the top of the screen. Then you get another clue that says Söze is not blue so another icon is added on top representing not blue, etc. So when you look at the top of the screen you know all the clues you have got on the current game just by looking. This way you could have more people and the game could be fast and dynamic.

Just some ideas, man. I really dig the concept and I think if you work it a little you could end with a very awesome game here. Congrats!  

[Oddball]

Thanks for the feedback guillermo. I'll comment on a couple of them.

• Discard suspects. I considered it but left it out so that you could get that suspects clue again if needed. I might give it a try and see what I think.
• Not clicking [?]. Pretty good suggestion. I'll add this if I get some time.
• Clue icons on top. Half the challenge was meant to be remembering which clues you have been given and by which suspect. Adding this would remove half that challenge. You would also get Söze's lie listed with the others so I'm not sure what help it would be.
• Söze lying, too little time, suspects moving around, etc. These 'features' are meant to confuse and frustrate the player. Confusion and pressure are part of the atmosphere the game is going for so if these things made you feel that way they succeeded.

Edit: Hovering over the [?] icon now brings up the clue immediately. You can also click the [?] icon to keep the clue open when the mouse moves away.