So I mentioned yesterday that my goal for today was to have guests extrapolating their lies a bit better, so they could tell lies which included information that they were only guessing at. However, with holiday stuff going on, I actually didn’t get a whole lot of coding time to make progress on that front.
I did get time to look into a few other things, though. Today I fixed some issues which would allow guests to choose to “move” from a room into that same room, which sometimes led to guests spending hours in just one spot, or wandering back and forth between two spaces in a single room. I also set it up so that guests wouldn’t ever stand in the same spot as another guest (either factually, or in their lies). This was necessary just because of the graphical way that the information is presented; the player will find it difficult to tell what’s going on, if two guests have their tokens drawing on top of each other!
Finally, after some extensive testing, I think I’ve decided that the game works better only being able to see one guest’s testimony at a time, instead of overlaying multiple testimonies together so that the player can see differences between the guests’ stories at a glance. This is more like the original Nicholas Spratt game, but is still a good easier to use because you now have buttons to select exactly which guest you wish to question, instead of having to cycle through the guests in order. In my own opinion, this back-and-forth checking process feels more “detective-y” than either the original Spratt game or my “automatically overlay everything” mechanic. On the other hand, I could use the “overlay” behaviour as an “easy” mode; that’d be pretty trivial to wire up, and it does point out the contradictions more obviously.
Incidentally, I still don’t have a title for this game. Since the iPhone/iPad can only display a maximum of 11 characters for an app’s name, “The Incomparable Deductions of Police Constable Sir Nicholas Spratt” wouldn’t quite fit under the icon. I’ll probably use that as the subtitle. Maybe I’ll just call the game “Spratt 2” for the time being, until a proper title occurs to me.
