[Release] wrong thread - a detective game

[SuperBiasedMan]

My name is {INSERT NAME HERE}, and I'm a bit of a fixer. When the threads of a mystery get all out of sorts, I untangle that mess, tie up the loose ends and then cut right through the gordian knot. You've gotta wade through all that wrong before you can finally find the right thread.

 

Note, this is not the wrong thread. For those of you unfamiliar, it's a silly thread we had ages ago, where all the wrong thread posts went. I'm using the "Wrong thread" diversifier, and theming my game with the silly banter we came up with in that thread.

 

I've been getting into tabletop/pen and paper games in the last year, so I wanted to think about how to use ideas from there in my game. The main things I think I can introduce are:

 

• Fail forward - A player 'failing' isn't bad, it's an interesting way to take the story and should carry on rather than just halting progress.
• Character building - A short intro lets you decide on your stats, but also think about who the character is and how they approach things, to give their stats and the character as a whole some context.
• Chaos - A player will choose a skill that has an influence, but a random dice roll determines if it goes well, poorly or mixed. Combined with fail forward, this shouldn't make it feel unfair so much as interesting.

 

I'm currently thinking of it being a Detective game in an almost Pheonix Wright courtroom style where you'll be interviewing people. You can press on specific points they say, using your different skills for different effects. They'll be along the lines of 'bluff', 'intimidate' and 'outwit', but I'll get better names. You gather up some evidence before solving the mystery of who/what/where the wrong thread is. I don't know yet how mystery solving works, maybe a sequence where you're using all your skills to connect the dots of what evidence you have? I might not have one canonical result to the mystery, it might be more interesting (and easier) to have the solution flow from what evidence the player has gathered. That also avoids needing to funnel a player through gathering specific critical evidence.

 

Diversifiers obviously include the wrong thread one, as well as  Learn by doing, Uncle Who Still Works at Nintendo for some fun responses to character names you enter. Given time, I'd like to be able to do Box art. And also Nice segue would be a fun one, but I need to figure out an art style to decide whether or not that works.

 

Speaking of art style! If an artist wants to join on, I'd be happy to have you. If I don't get an artist I'll squeeze out some drawings myself, that will hopefully not ruin the game too much. @Arthur has graciously offered to do the art! The game is meant to be goofy in the trappings of noir style detectives, so in some ways it will look dark and serious, but in other ways... not at all. It'll be a very faux noir look, Arthur suggested Calvin and Hobbes' Tracer Bullet character, which is basically bang on.

 

 

For soundtrack I'm going to look through forum member Eric Matyas's great site soundimage.org to find some moody and silly. I'll put together some sort of playlist along with my mood board.

 

I also may try streaming some dev of this, expect updates in this thread as I try but who knows if it'll be interesting!

 

[osmosisch]

54 minutes ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

Pheonix

Aaaaaaa

[SuperBiasedMan]

wrong

[clyde]

Sounds interesting.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I've been working on the game and have a basic system in place. I'm using a library called Fungus that makes dialog windows and trees very easily manageable in Unity. Alongside that I've set up my simple skillcheck system where when you come upon a dilemma, you can choose to rely on one of your three skills, tentatively called "bluff", "charm" and "tough", depending on what you're trying to do in a given situation. Each gives you a different bonus (or even penalty) depending on what you're good at. But they also have different effects. So even if you're best at being tough, toughness isn't always the right tool for a job. The way this skill is tested is essentially a dice roll. Your skill's bonus, plus two regular six sided dice are rolled. I have this woven into the game now, so you can choose a skill and it executes the roll:

 

A lot of putting this together was actually using the Unity animation system. The dice are rolled and updated with timed function calls in there. You can see the mess of animation keys I have here:

 

Highlighted in blue are all the dice updating function calls. I used animation because I wanted to time them out to give the sense of rolling quick and then slowing to rest on the final number. I foolishly tried to do that in a script before realising that you can calling functions in an animated sequence anyway.

 

[Mythalore]

Looks awesome @SuperBiasedMan, that rolling system is really smooth.

I didn't know you could use the animation system to trigger functions!

[SuperBiasedMan]

Thanks! And yes, it's real handy. You can't pass arguments or get return values unfortunately so I have some custom functions that are just "roll dice 1" etc. But it's incredibly useful for pacing like this, to have better control without needing to try set up some threading system.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I have a video put together of the game's opening now! Arthur has some portraits of the main character and I put them into the character creation opening. It shows the basic way that Fungus, the interactive fiction engine I'm using works. As well as some of my hacky stuff and nonsense about dice that have -1s on them. Now to write a ton of Content TM

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jake]

omg two mid jam entries based on this mid-jam episode title. incredible.

Edited November 28, 2016 by Jake
Wrong thread

[SuperBiasedMan]

Apologies I went so quiet on this, but it is out! I spent some slow post jam time with fixes and adjustments. I've got an updated build with Actual Screenshots on the itch.io:

https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-4/rate/102166

 

 

Thanks again to @Arthur for the artwork! And to  @Eric Matyas for the music and sound effects in the game. It's been getting some downloads so I hope people have been having fun with it.

[Nappi]

Excellent art and writing! I hope there will be more.