hey! so i’ve finally finished act one of my new if game. it’s about a detective with surprisingly bad luck and a case that may break one of the most popular companies in the city (not if it breaks him first). this is just a little example of it. the full game will be much different, i’m just putting it out there so i can get some feedback before i totally refine it! thanks a lot!
It’s difficult to judge without the rest of the game, but it started quite well (I mean in a classic way for a hard-boiled story with a private detective like Sam Spade).
I saw some mispellings (or maybe slang ?) : “shoo”, “detetctive” for “detective” (I’m quite sure of this one !),“impaitently” for “impatiently”, and maybe I missed others. I made some screenshots to help you :
Shoo is a legitimate word. The lack of capitalisation is slightly odd, though! I haven’t played the game yet, but I’ll be sure to give it a try. I like a detective story!
As frolic said, it’s really hard to tell because it’s so short, but it seems like an okay setup to a detective story.
My major criticism is that every choice boils down to “do you want to me nice, or do you want to be a jerk?” None of the characters were mean at all, so I’m not sure what the incentive to be a jerk is. This may just be a personal preference of mine though, but I don’t care for that style of choice; being mean-spirited unprovoked just to see the result.
I think a better set of choices (for an example using the “return the ball”/“tell him to get it himself” choice) would be something like “ask how the ball got here”/“ask where his parents are” or so. The “ask his name” /“ask about scar” set of choices shown above is a good one.
Speaking of the scar though… A scar is something that is formed after an injury has healed, which makes sense when the kid says it happened a while ago. But there’s no way a detective would be wondering if the kid got the scar from being in your office for like 5 minutes.
Anyway hopefully this came across as constructive criticism and not nitpicking. The story has potential. Keep it up.
thank you so much for the feedback! i’ll be sure to tweak those questions, as well as the scar one (i may have to reword that one!) but thank you so much for playing it!
