This is great. I have never played Ace Attorney but I would like to play it, and after playing your game, I’d like to play Ace Attorney even more. I would love to see you finish up the game - everything works out but the end could be edited to make it feel like it’s its own thing. It would be a good ending without the mention that it’s the end of the jam.
The only other cons, besides the natural minimalistic presentation of the game, is the animation when we move from one character to another. It made me a bit dizzy and uncomfortable in my eyes, so I would prefer if there were an option to disable this animation or make it smoother and less flashy in some other way.
Aside from that, I had a really good time and I was eager to play more, in a good way. So I have to ask if would you be interested in continuing to develop the game?
I would love to see more of it, or see other similar types of games from you, expanding on your great writing and whodunnit creation skills.
What’s more, I’d love to see you make this game blind-accessible. There’s a recent mod for Ace Attorney that lets blind gamers play it. Check it out here: Blind Gamer Playing Ace Attorney. It doesn’t relay every single visual information that it should, but it’s playable and fun. I think if you’d like, you could definitely make your spinoff, make it blind-accessible by default, and let a whole new market enjoy it. Because what you just have to do is mostly make the game keyboard-navigable (not just clicking with the mouse), and have the text information be sent to a screen reader (which you can do with unity’s screen reader support guide), and you have about 95% of the game accessible for blind players as well. By the way, a screen reader is a software that blind people use that converts textual data and strings (coded in the game, website, program) into speech (or even braille).
And with that, you can provide the basic screen reader support and then fully finish the game or continue making it, or making other visual novels and whodunnits like this.
So even if making it “ace attorney” might not be legal (I don’t know how that would work), you could still make a heavily inspired game or just something else but I think you could do it and I would love to play it.
And seriously - if you’re interested in what I’m suggesting, I’m part of this game jam community that makes “Games for Blind Gamers”. And we’re even having a chill jam this July, called Making Games Accessible, where you can work on old projects to improve them (and new projects are also welcome). It would be a good opportunity for you to test this, and we have many blind playtesters over there who would love to play this, I am 100% sure. I would love to see you there, and likewise I’m happy to help in any way I can and answer any questions.