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A jam submission

Match Made in CourtView game page

Match the criminals to crime by dating them
Submitted by grimmerwood — 19 hours, 13 minutes before the deadline
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Match Made in Court's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
💖 Heart#213.3953.667
Overall#292.9323.167
🧠 Mind#312.9323.167
✨ Soul#343.0863.333
💀 Body#492.3152.500

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

What did you revive? What was your inspiration?
Old game concept I created in Game Design class in 2023. I wanted to do it in Unity, but due to a skill gap, I abandoned it and couldn't finish a full prototype. Learning and changing to Twine made me able to show an idea better.

How do you play your game? Is controller required?
Clicking on buttons to progress. Flirt with and date the participants to learn who did it and why the murder occurred.

What asset packs did you use? What, if any, content is AI generated?
Love her template, I keep using it as it's so simple and good for mysterious vibes https://losingface.itch.io/a-sugarcube-template

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

It’s a strange concept. I think there’s an interesting idea there, but it’s hard for me to get into it. The conversations feel too short to get much useful information out of, and are a bit hard to follow. I don’t really feel like I am “dating” the suspects, just questioning them, but with one line of dating up front. Maybe this would benefit from stretching out to multiple “dates” to slowly uncover facts of the case.

Developer(+1)

I knooow. I was so unmotivated and didn't feel like finishing it but powered through creating this mess in the end. Very fair analysis,  and thank you for playing :)

Submitted(+1)

Law game is an interesting concept. I dig it. Crossover with a love match game...neat twist.

Developer

Thank you :) I hope I can develop it more in the future

Submitted(+1)

Ooh, I like text adventures! The concept is pretty interesting, and the character concept art you showed in the game's description looks great.

The premise of trying to solve a case through dating rather than investigation and interrogation is fun. But to me, the dates didn't quite feel like actual dates, and I felt that the characters' personalities didn't come through as well in writing as they did in the illustrations.

I ended up guessing the Grandma as the culprit, which turned out to be wrong. The game mentioned that the public was dissatisfied with the show, but never explained why. I think that could be a good way to give the player hints about what they missed and encourage them to try again.

I like that you decided to revive an old idea you never had the opportunity to make, and I think the core concept is very interesting. I'd love to see the writing developed further to make the most of it. 

Thank you for sharing your game!

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for writing this lovely comment :) and glad you enjoyed my prototype 

Submitted(+1)

This isn't really my type of game, but I find the idea interesting. The game worked right away, and there are a lot of settings in the menu. I also found the introduction easy to understand.

Graphically, it's very minimal and focuses on the text being shown. I think the system is meant to show what's possible in theory, but from my point of view there weren't that many dialogues with the three people, and not that many options either.

So it's a cool idea, but it didn't really grab me. As I said, though, text adventures and dialogue games aren't my favorite kind of games.

I would love to see the characters from the concept art in the game. That would bring the whole thing more to life.

Developer

Thank you so much for playing and even trying a game that isn't your cup of tea :)

Submitted(+1)

I think the premise and concept are interesting, but I'm a bit lost when running through the gameplay.

If the goal of the game is to make the player manipulate the social relationships then I feel like the limit of 3 questions and then you're done with the date becomes really limiting in the available interactions you can have. If the goal of the game is to be a mystery-solving deduction game then I didn't encounter a lot of objective evidence about what happened during the crime to make good guesses. 

I played two full play-throughs. Trying to be flirtatious with my dialog ended up getting social interaction responses that didn't have anything to do with the crime, but being direct in my dialog got a lot of dead-end answers that didn't give me new information. Ideally I was looking for conflicting information between different people, but they all seemed to not want to say anything about the crime. 

I took a guess on Granny the first playthrough due to her inability to just answer questions about her project and her removal from the scene of the crime after a heated discussion with the victim, but the game seems to want me to believe that answer was wrong.

I took a guess on Steven the second time through primarily based on him being a jerk that didn't want to say anything other than "cooking is a woman's work", which avoids the actual conflict of the murder entirely. The game seems to want me to believe that answer was correct, but I didn't have any objective information that would incriminate him so I feel a bit of a hollow victory.

Developer(+1)

thank you so much for a review and detailed explanation of your experience, it’s very helpful to understand what I should work on. I only focused on creating a start and finish of the game with the system and code that I can use for the future. You found everything that I didn’t put effort in (story, lack of mystery and relation effect)as I just wanted code to work. I do want to both improve the story, give more questions and for flirting to actually affect the decision for the suspect to give information or not (never coded that in twine so I will look into it). Again, thank you for being the first tester and giving me an idea of what issues people have with the game :)