Solve The Case
Game created in 82 hours for the Wowie Jam 4.0
Learn all the details of a kidnap case by communicating with various people (AIs).
Fill all blank fields in the case file and find out how well you did.
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great game
Ah, the hilariously unforeseen problem of being too polite. Such highlights include:
- "Oh I'm so sorry about this ma'am. Could I please ask you some questions?"
"SIR PLEASE GET TO THE POINT-"
- "Can you describe the kidnapper to me?"
"The kidnapper was allegedly this build, this hair, drove this color car."
"I DON'T WANT TO KNOW!"
"The kidnapper was this build, this hair."
"Oh yeah that guy."
If you ever wanna mess with an AI, just treat it with more love and realism than your average gamer! I refuse to be tactless on principle though XD
This game was pretty cool! I got everything except for the weight. I guess the guy didn't take kindly to me asking him his exact weight in kilograms...
Had such a fun lil' time playing this game, only thing I have to say is that I wish there was a sequel or something cause I had so much fun!
Great game! Unfortunately, when I told the wife what happened to her husband, she never replied to me again.
Great game
The concept is great. The game itsef was really immersive, beautiful, well written and entertaining. The only problem is the Ai having some issues, but it was so goofy that i enjoyed it.
lol sorry i didn’t spend enough time on the ai for it to behave correctly all of the time but thanks for the feedback!
the AI is really funny man.
Solved everything correctly except "Hair" (probably my mistake), took 27 minutes and the intro-curve was steep (took some random message, to get the first progression)
These types of games probably need multiple people writing dialog options full-jam-time to account even for the most basic options:
Thanks a lot for feedback! You’re right, this kind of core system really should be worked on really hard. Unfortunately I’ve only got to it on the last day of the jam and I’ve had only one playtester so I couldn’t know a large chunk of messages that people might try to ask.
I assumed that people would type detailed requests and questions so I mainly tried to work on them but as you can see a lot of the time AI still acts really silly.
I think you likely spent way too much time on the environment (the office), which in this case is high-effort, but low-yield task (I only looked around the office and even noticed all the details after solving the case). That seems a common problem. I personally probably shouldn't have bothered with procedural generation this time.
When playing I assumed you just checked for keywords, something like:
if (toldAboutMurder && message.Contains("where")) { ... }that would make bots more "accepting/understanding/forgiving".
But in the case of my second screenshot, simply asking "where?" seems like a legit response I would write to a human.
That is true, I’ve actually always had this problem. I understand that the primary goal and the first thing that needs to be done should be the main mechanic, but for some reason I need the game to look cool (at least in my eyes) to have motivation and urge to continue working on it.
I kind of did this but in a weird way. The code you provided doesn’t assume that the player could’ve asked any kind of question starting with the word “where”. But at the same time vast majority probably really would’ve meant to know where the body was so I guess I really should’ve done this.
The kind of answer you got (“You don’t need to know”) is the type of response one is intended to get when he tries to ask some random question that has nothing to do with the actual walkthrough.
It is generally really hard to get “chat bots” to behave correctly but I really liked the concept of this idea so I just went for it. Once again, thanks a lot for a very detailed feedback!
You're welcome:)
Yes, but you could have several keyword checks:
if (toldAboutMurder && message.Contains("where") && (message.Contains("murder") || message.Contains("kill")) { ... }Have you played "Her Story"?
It's purely keyword based and there are absolutely no restrictions to what you can request at any moment. It will provide you with the first five search results, which means common requests like "where", "murder" will most likely lead to earlier story responses and to get to the later ones you naturally need to ask for something more specific. But still, the game doesn't restrict you from accessing the "later" story, you could just randomly stumble on it at the beginning, but you won't understand it yet, so you still need to "explore" a lot to be able to puzzle together what happened.
Yes, I absolutely loved it!
Of course I have several keywords. The problem was that you’ve texted only one word “where”. Key words to get response in that situation are: “where”, “did”, “you”, “find”, “the”, “body”, “corpse”, “location”, “city”.
I haven’t played “Her Story”, but I’ve heard a lot of positive things about it. Guess I’ll try it soon.