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[Joh]

i’m into it but i def think the look is currently a turnoff. it’s like...just polished enough that not being more polished feels iffy. ironically it’d look better to me if it was slightly worse, lmao

basically i’d def focus on upping the quality of presentation if possible. i think as a concept for a game this is pretty great though. it’s basically a very long drawn out last of us level meets a game of mafia. i love it.

This is pretty much how I feel about it, like not bad enough to be "eww, this better be placeholder" but not good enough to be "this looks awesome", just somewhere weird in the middle that's like "this is ok, yet not right". I'd see it as effort & time can't cover for lack of formal training/technique; it just kinda shows. But that's alright, I'll have to revisit this at some point.
Any specific feedback?(pixelart?full model?backgrounds?colors?) No guarantee, but if it's something I feel I can fix, i'll go for it; dont want to turnoff anyone. Everyone is welcome in here!

Interesting take on the idea of a downgrade, I might actually go for that

and thanks for the kind words on the concept, it's such a pain to work on, being reminded its great (I mean, I think so too) is always nice!

[gimymblert]

Yeah the concept is great, can't overstate it enough

[Joh]

Thanks!
Heres a long overdue update. since it was all small, didnt post about those but they stack up.

Entry 60
Presentation & convenience

Have spent a lot of time on presentation. Not actual new spritework but accessibility element, convenience of life as well as some special effects & polish.
Just making sure information is better conveyed to the player. If theres one thing I am very scared of, it is how daunting the game might be to anyone who… isn’t me I guess.

Accusation change. Now sides are clearly defined, the bar split is better defined and the player display takes the time to disappear during the voting. Much closer to my final vision. Remains to see if I add some character representing icons on the side they support.


Clash change. Nothing changed really, except I made it feel like Clash in… everything I guess, good vs evil, anime protag vs anime rival, Pheonix wright vs incompetent prosecutor. Definitly more alive now. Also shows Cancels I mentioned a while back. By selecting the current Consensus, the clash gets canceled.


New Section intro. Phase has been moved up, to make place for a display of all evidence available during the current phase. It’s a lot like danganronpa, I felt it might be useful to know what evidences are available to you before everyone starts talking.

there is A LOT of evidence being generated. since its all generated from whatever happened instead of predetermined, theres a lot of “evidence” (event witnessing) most of which are completely irrelevant.
Only a select few are taken, and extra useless ones as redhering. but those change from section to section.
It can be a bit long when there’s more evidence but it can be skipped (sped up to be exact)

New evidence formats:
Another thing is I’ve shortened the evidence titles. used color code to convey part of the evidence hoping for them to be shorter and more easy grasped.
The color actually represents from whom the evidence comes from. It’s all green here since its all been witnessed by myself. If I learned the info from someone else, it would bear his color. There’s also an implied “seen”, thus an evidence is read: [color_person] [saw] evidence_title. still wish they were all 1 line, so maybe I’ll reduce the font size.

I hope it conveys the meaning just as well, with less reading.

So yeah, lots of little polish and improvements to try to make things look better without actually redoing major artwork. I'll get there eventually. I'm running out of "little things" to fix/add.

[gimymblert]

Looks solid!

[Joh]

Thanks!

-Entry 61-
Inventory... Hand and pocket.

Been quite a while! Working more on narrative/story side so not much to show.
Here is a return to the basics! Added Hud element for the “Inventory”.



Might have went over this very early on, but you can hold 2 “hiddable” items at a time. A hiddable item is something you can hide in your pocket.

Although unsafe, a Knife could fit in your pocket… a sword not so much.(this is not a statement of sword existence in the game)

Anyway, if an Item is hiddable, it can go in your pocket and be invisible to others. Items in Hand are visible and may trigger... reactions.

You can freely switch items from pocket to hand. If one item is in pocket but the other is “unhiddable”  then you cant.

Now if only I could think of innocent ways to use items!

[gimymblert]

Mark brown released a GMTK (gamedesign toolkits) video that match your game a bit lol. It's about detective mechanics in game. Also All I see in your GIF is a non existent Resident evil prompt to combine knife + towel to hide knife LMAO.

[Joh]

Interesting, i'll look into that. Not sure how to better convey "inventory" though. I can see what you mean though.
Time really flew by, hadnt noticed it had been so long since my last entry. Most of my progress went into my story editor though.

-Entry 62-
Storyteller part 3

If it wasn’t that its not even V1 yet, this would totally be V2 worthy. Already started to face situations where I wanted to duplicate text & events. I already had copy paste but only for text and one at a time. Made it so everything can be copied and multiple elements in a group can be copied.
Also added Helper. Since I kept forgetting how each Event works in terms of


Characters now have colors associated with them. Originally was meant to be loadable  images, but colors are clean. Currently based on which element their index, I intend on allowing color selection.(not priority).

Iv’e added a cast predictor. According to text & events path it shows which characters are present in the talking group. I can manually set the cast, but for the most part it is done automatically. (just add everyone that will talk) However sometimes du the forks or addition & removal of people the present cast is not what would be wanted. In those cases the predictor can come in handy and allow me to manually fix it.


Added 2 new categories of Ressources: Backgrounds and locations.

Backgrounds are backdrops and CG, They can be added with an image. The image only serves as a preview though.


Locations are in reality a room equivalent. They store the size of the room as well as its background. This is only a story editor so theres no character or moving around involved. What it can do is give a visual representation of where I’m placing characters.


Using a screenshot of the room as background, I can accurately obtain the coordinates I wish to place the characters at.(instead of going in the game editor, finding the x,y go back to the editor and write them in.) This easily outputs a string that can be parsed by the game. (that was already there, but I had to write it manually and it quickly got annoying.)


Finally added Link flags. I had already implemented forking with flags (essentially variables) but I’d need to create each flag manually.  This is fine when speaking of flags that are recurrent, like the stats. Or even major event say “Witnessed Something”. But for say, having a simple acknowledgement of a previous statement that may or may not be encountered. Id need to set a flag “viewed_text_x=true” and check it in the other statement.


That’s what Link flags do, but they do it automatically. They create a flag, set it to true and checks it in the other statement. Since they are one time events I really don’t need to have them clutter the more important flags, or even know their names. Only the game does.

With this I hope to be able to make a much more personal choices sensitive narrative.

[gimymblert]

That looks complex, I'm not much of a programmer, programming interfaces scares me the most

[Joh]

Its actually quite refreshing to me, decent challenge, makes good use of theory I've learn and has quite concrete effect. It started that way but now I kind of want it to stay that way for challenge/aesthetic reasons but I made use of 0 sprite its all native shapes.

Project killer has been stale for a while, most features were implemented and now its mostly refining, polishing, fixing, improving already existing things. Not much to show but today I do!

-Entry 63-
Backlog

The forgotten feature. Although Ive been working on this for a very long time now, I actually haven’t really gone through feature creep. You can go back to the first posts and everything was more or less already laid out. The  execution was just much harder and longer than expected.


Backlog was something that was always meant to be in, and kind of just got pushed back to later all the time. Hell, there was already a menu option (Journal) just waiting for it.
Well, I finally got around to do it. Fairly simple but Might be useful to players. I have it store the last 100 viewed texts.



Was supposed to to only be a menu option, but I added a “in-game” version for quick checks.

As a side note took this opportunity to create a “text seen” record for the ability to skip text in extra playthrough.

[gimymblert]

Project killer has been stale for a while, most features were implemented and now its mostly refining, polishing, fixing, improving already existing things. Not much to show but today I do!

yay!

[Joh]

-Entry 64-
Menu mockup

Thought I’d show some mockups I’ve made, quite obviously not final. But i’ve been hating my current menus (last 2 pics) for a while and they have to go! They date from… Day 1? back before the first graphic overhaul.

[Joh]

-Entry 65-
Updating old content.

Been a while, mostly working on story, so not much to show. Trying to make everything come together for a demo. (that you can expect in about a decade)

But it does require revisiting lots of features that were made a long time ago, and those are always a pain to work with. I also have to add features every time I realize, “I can’t do X” needed in the story, but that’s for another time.
Anyways

Got some evidence prompt
When you discover evidence, These tend to be representative of whatever text got dumped on you before-hand. They are used in Trials.


Observation notification
Another thing I rarely ever encounter are Observation notification. When using fast travel, If you see someone or something, It still gets logged in your notes. Used to show an ugly bubble with what was seen next to your head. Made it simpler and a little prompt let’s you know it happened.
Pressing P (pause) while it there will jump straight to the notes that were added.

[gimymblert]

Happy murder arguing christmas!

[Ordnas]

The game is very interesting, at the moment I can't think of an another game were you are the murder and need to cover your tracks. 

[Hoj]

posting to follow. looks great 

[Joh]

Happy New year to all. 2018 lets GO!

Happy murder arguing christmas!

I am very happy I did not have a murder arguing christmas, but thank you for the kind wish. It's been great.

The game is very interesting, at the moment I can't think of an another game were you are the murder and need to cover your tracks. 

Thank you! Covering up murder track is not too uncommon, stealth games tend to have that, although its more be discret & hide the bodies. But that still in the same line. Now mixing that with detective story/gameplay is probably much more uncommon. And I can say it is a pain. Very complex, very hard and thats mostly because generating text from player made action, is very hard. Doable with templates, but doesn't feel right.
And that's without considering AI, where you want the AI to notice stuff, figure stuff out, but If you make them too smart, they would always figure everything out.
Also you want the player to be active. It's quite possible that the "others" know stuff (that you also know), but if they always say it... they can auto-play the trial for you. (which used to happen)
Working all that out is my burden, and I hope it will be worth it 

posting to follow. looks great 

Much appreciated, new following is always welcomed!

I've really been slowing down on updates, have had most features I planned done for a while so those update no longer occur, been working on story and that's spoiler land so nope.
So I just tought, If you have any aspect you are interested in learning about, just let me know. I certainly put a lot of time working on this game, I wouldn't mind sharing some of the thought that went behind it.

[gimymblert]

-Entry 65-
Updating old content.

Been a while, mostly working on story, so not much to show. Trying to make everything come together for a demo. (that you can expect in about a decade)

It's almost a decade, where is the demo?