1-Bit Murder Theater
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
The laughs of the party are replaced with the screams of pure terror of the guests: a body has been found. Who did it? And with what?
In 1-Bit Murder Theater, the victim, killer, and murder weapon are different every time. Search the house for clues, interrogate the victims, and accuse whoever you think did it. Be quick, though, you only have two minutes...
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There's potential! I like the user interface and the timer is generous enough where if you don't meander you can get all the clues needed pretty fast.
However, the current algorithm doesn't guarantee solvable murders, at best narrowing it down to a 50/50 shot, and at worst making it a complete crapshoot and probability-based, so it doesn't matter if you investigate the whole map and talk to everyone, you'll lose just 'cuz you were unlucky.
The murder victim died in the bathroom, and adjacent to it is the master bedroom with one entrance. There was Colonel Acid (forgot his in-game name lol) in that master bedroom alone, meaning if they were innocent, the murder would've been impossible as they would've seen the killer head in. Additionally, they were guarding the pillow, but that same pillow could reasonably be the murder weapon.
It is said the victim had no visible wounds. In the master bedroom, there's a pillow. In the bathroom, there's a painkiller. Lady Lilac testified to being with someone else, but that someone else testifies to being alone.
Logically, everyone who is by themselves cannot be trusted - they lack an alibi. So, the only way to disprove them would be with their supposed location and who they'd block the movements of.
In-game logic doesn't work this way tho - Lady Lilac is the killer. She obtained the pain killer from the bathroom, somehow passing by Colonel Acid (making the map and room positioning completely irrelevant), murdering the victim, putting the pain killer in the same room as the victim, and the ONLY thing that makes her the killer is "she lied lol".
But, in a 1 on 1 situation, how can you even prove which one lied? Lady Lilac could've been saying the truth - she WAS staying with that someone else. And that someone else could be saying a lie - that she was alone. Without any evidence, or map positioning, it is actually impossible to prove who's telling the truth or not.
The mansion layout is simple enough and easy to follow, and if the locations did matter, witness positioning could easily be factored in into the solving logic. The time-waster objects also don't deduct too much of your time so you can recover by investigating actually useful spots and obtaining possible weapons. I like that you can also narrow down your search for potential weapons by examining the body.
Hi! Sorry for the late reply, but I did not get your notification. It's a very interesting post so I want to give you an answer anyway.
You are right that the way the game is coded makes it so sometimes it's a 50/50 shot guessing who the killer was. While I noticed that I had no time to find a way around it. I meant to have slightly more complex witness mechanics but unfortunately no time to implement them.
However, as far as I can remember, it should always be 100% possible identifying the murder weapon. This is because map positioning is actually taken into consideration, despite what you may have thought, although not with the level of complexity you expected. Witnesses aren't able to comment on movement, they only know whether somebody was with them or not. The killer however DOES take into consideration the position of other pieces while carrying out the murder and not before.
Simply put, this means that since Acid was in the Master Bedroom, once Lilac was in the bathroom, she could only use whatever she found in the bathroom to kill whoever the victim was. So she had to take the painkiller from the medicine cabinet and then hide it in the washing machine after the murder.
This is because each room has at least 3 elements: a weapon spawn and a weapon hiding spot. Originally I planned for some weapons to be able to be put back (for example, the painkiller bottle could be put back on the sink, while of course a knife would have to be hidden somewhere else) but this didn't make it in. This means that, if you find an item outside of its spawn, you can always be sure it's the murder weapon.
Anyway, once Lilac took the painkillers and murdered the victim, the algorithm looked for a hiding spot. Since the next room over was blocked, the only hiding spot available was the washing machine in the very same room, so she put the painkiller there. Had Acid been in another room, and the master bedroom been free, she could have decided to exit the bathroom with the bottle in hand and hide it in the closet.
I am really fond of this little game because I had lots of fun making it, but it is undeniable that it was severely limited by being an experimental jam project, my first Godot project, and the fact I am not that good of a game designer to begin with. I'm happy you still enjoyed it, tho, and I thank you for your comment.
Oh nice! This makes sense, for the time constraints you can definitely use what you have as basis to expand on the concept! I think there's potential here.
Also I suggest looking into "a matter of murder" which might have good reference for you. While I don't like motive being used as evidence, in that game they treat it the same as they would a murder weapon, so it's consistent with the game universe and you can have logic apply to some thing that's usually impossible to definitively prove (even a confession can deceive) .
I have bought A Matter of Murder! It looks very interesting and aesthetically pleasant, although I can't hide that it burns a bit to see somebody execute an idea you've also had better than you. Especially because the first idea I had, whenever I considered maybe expanding the game, was turning it into a point and click (I only made it a top down game because that was the style of assets provided for the jam).
Given their importance in the genre, motives are always at the back of my mind, but honestly I never figured out how to "model" them, and they were the first thing that was dropped when I moved from brainstorming to actual programming. I feel like it may be the kind of thing that is better implied rather than modeled explicitly by mechanics, but maybe I'm just being blind. I'll see how AMOM does it.
I was thinking about maybe putting my hands back in the game just this week (that's why I popped back into itch.io, which is not a website I visit often) so this conversation comes at a great time. At the very least you helped me find out about AMOM which seems to be a game I'm going to have some fun with. Thanks!
No, I think your approach to motives might be right! In fact I don't think motives should ever be something you solve. At best it should be a reward for catching the culprit as they tell you the reasons why they did it in an epic confession, as a reward for solving the crime mechanics wise.
Basically the "why" can never be truly proven, only assumed or revealed. You can't really solve what's going on in someone's brain after all.
Hello! Long time no see. In case you're interested I've begun working on a new version of the game. You can find the new prototype here: https://knockout.chat/thread/39529