Murderous Manor (progress thread)
I'm a little late to the progress-thread game, but I just managed to get something "playable" in the last few days :)
The repo: https://github.com/fabiorodella/LPC2012Game
In my game the player is a detective who must solve a randomly-generated murder mystery case. All the chain of events leading up to the murder is simulated and the player must then question the people involved in order to determine and then accuse the killer. It's based on this idea: http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=69
In the end, I may have bit off more than I could chew with this game, as the code turned out to be quite complex. I'm also not sure if the "gameplay" itself is any fun, which should have been my main concern from the start, but oh well... I'm submitting it anyway in hopes that someone finds it fun, and hopefully I'll revisit it some time in the future.
What I intend to work on in this last week:
- character sprites
- make the accusation part work
- make the weapon-finding part work
- tweak the questioning engine, as there's a lot of bugs yet
- include an endgame screen
- add sound of some sort if possible
There are some screenshots from the game's current state attached to this post.
PS: Linux people, I need to your help! I have ZERO experience in developing open-source software, so I'm not sure if my build system is good enough. I did manage to compile the game from scratch using an Ubuntu VM, but I'd like for other people to try it and report any problems or suggestions they might have. Thanks a lot! :)
Regarding name:
MY STill-to-be-named EntRY
:)
Ha Ha that name is really cool and funny
Indeed it's a great name, I may end up using it, thanks qubodup :)
Some more progress: I implemented the weapon guessing, murderer accusation, and the endgame scene. It's now possible to "win" or "lose" the game.
looks nice, although I'm not much of a detective.
Compiled fine on my Gentoo... It seems great so far, but definitively need a background misterious music to add some depth!
More progress!
- Some "light effects" to improve the mood
- All character sprites done
- Sound effects
All I need to do now is put the finishing touches in the song for the game and create a tutorial, and then I'm done :) Will probably push the final commit tonight and then I'll work on uploading some binary packages for all supported OSs.
Thhis looks really great!
What do you guys think of the name "Clue Me In"? :)
Hum, I cloned the git, "cmake . && make" gave me a LPC2012Game binary, but running it just get me a black window where nothing happens.
I'm not sure it's your fault, because I got the exact same problem with FLAT which is also using allegro : http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3332
I've added more pervasive error checking (which I should have actually done from the start), could you please update your code and tell me if any error messages spit out? Thanks!
No error message is showing.
I used gdb to have backtrace:
This is definitely the same error as for FLAT. Not sure wether you can do something about it or not. (And it seems that this is related to me not using pulse audio, so I guess it would run fine on an Ubuntu installation, which is the most popular)
I'm neither using pulse audio, but here (gentoo, x86_64 architeture) the game runs fine.
The only problem is due to the button's "clicks" sound being a lot delayed (it takes 1 to 2 seconds after the press to do the "click" sound). But it's only a minor problem after all...
Thanks for narrowing down the issue, I will try to see if there's any way to solve it from my end.
Hmm, that's weird, it doesn't happen in any of my computers. I'll look into that as well.
In other news: the game is "done" :) I've added some background music and there's now a tutorial accesible from the main menu.
It also has a new name: Murderous Manor!
We found a solution to the allegro problem on the other topic I was refering to :-)
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3332&p=33131#p33131
The game is really hard…
It must need a lot of paper to note all useful information and find the murderer
Otherwise it's nice.
I found one bug : http://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1343837896.png
Yeah, that's what left me unsatisfied with the final product... It needed some kind of UI to help the player piece together the events rather than just relying on textual information. But I only realized that late into the development, so that's how it ended up :(
Maybe someday I'll revisit this concept to make it more approachable, when I have the time.
As for the bug, thanks for pointing it out! That tile layer must have the wrong z-order, I'll push a fix to the repo ASAP.
Ha, I look forward to bringing old-fashioned pen and paper into it! I still have fond memories of all of my Carmen Sandiego jottings...
Could you provide a map of the manor (maybe just a picture with the whole map and room names) that people can print or anotate in GIMP and such while playing?
If you have Tiled, McMic, you can open up the .tmx and then "Export as image" (that's what I did). But hey, look! I also grayscaled it in GIMP for better printin'
(I haven't played the game yet, this is just the .tmx file that looked most accurate when I cloned the git repo)
Thanks makhrohn! I took your grayscale version and added the room names, hope that helps MCMic :)
Now we just need the cloth map and maybe a controller decal!
Up and running! Allegro was the trickiest part - they forgot a couple of dependencies like gtk+-2.0. Playing later today.
Hmmm. I ran ./MurderousManor, and the solution caught my eye as the pre-game scrolled past! Would it be possible to make it so that the game runs with the pre-game suppressed, but can be run with a flag (preferably and traditionally -v) to go into verbose mode, if you WANT to see the pre-game? Yes, a solution is to just make sure to minimize the terminal first... but it might be a nice touch.
I like the game a lot, and the controls are pretty smooth! I did get stuck going "up" after checking out a vase once, and I confirmed it wasn't my keyboard. Not sure why or if I could even reproduce it.
Building on OS X was easy enough. I installed physfs and allegro5 (in that order) using homebrew; must tap homebrew/versions to get allegro5. There were a handful of build errors in the Xcode project... It complained about the assert statements, so I commented them. ;)
This game was a good puzzle. My first case was solved with the murder weapon using a single accusation, asking 30 questions, in about 14 minutes! Great job. :D