Let's Be Happy in Our Small World by Tuomo

Catch the mischievous culprits who threaten our happy small world with their antics!
This is a simple and silly game where you try spot the "evil-doer" from group of randomly generated characters. Be patient, sometimes they take their sweet time before doing the "wrong" and you get to point the culprit. And also this my first solo effort for Ludum Dare.
Controls:
- Mouse clicks for selections
- Escape to quit the game
All assets by me except:
- Raw sounds from freesound.org and GDC sound bundle
- Fantasy in E major by Ilya Truhanov & Minuet C moll by Sergey Rybytskyy from freesoundtrackmusic.com
- Luna & Big Bottom Cartoon fonts from dafont.com
- Animations use Sprites and Bones plugin forum.unity3d.com/threads/release-free-unity-sprites-and-bones-2d-skeleton-animation.219915/

Links
Edit: Reset highscore for the build and added one for Mac os.
Win: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7gwzt2aiqr7xv7j/LetsBeHappyInOurSmallWorldWIN.zip?dl=0
Mac OS : https://www.dropbox.com/s/fxmgdmfwemdtc65/LetsBeHappyInOurSmallWorldMACOSX.zip?dl=0
Ratings
| Overall | 167th | 3.758⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 275th | 3.364⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 274th | 3.333⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 244th | 3.697⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 190th | 4⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 181th | 3.242⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 190th | 3.636⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 60🗳️ | 67🗨️ |
I'm seriously impressed at this game, and I honestly have trouble finding critiques of it. One of the parts I found especially neat was exactly how diversity is used as a game mechanic. I though the difficulty was incredibly well tuned, and it's very hard to make a point and click program feel clunky... ok, excepting all of those Point of Sales programs, but still... I'm glad I was able to find this through the random link.
See you next year, and I hope this game goes far.
Overall, good job. The graphics were well-drawn, and the music selection complemented everything nicely.
Just out of curiosity: I had one level where I swear two of the people were exactly the same, and one of these two were the culprit. Was I wrong, and everyone is guaranteed to be different? If they can be the same, was I just lucky that I picked the right one of the two or would they both have counted as correct?
IF nothing stops people from being identical but the game still counts them as separate people, then that would be my only complaint.
Well done, unique and polished game. (A high score table might have been cool for this too! Mine is 3594)
(Maybe this happens at later levels and I wasn't good enough) But maybe a neat extension of this would be have multiple things happen in one level (e.g both a vase is smashed and a cat spooked) and you have to remember who did both, it would certainly add to the difficulty.
I was so surprised by the simplicity of the concept at first, and how you managed to make it very interresting by feedbacks, sound effects or animations.
I surprised myself giving little nicknames to the characters like Mustachio, or Ethnic minority (sorry couldn't help it) in order to remember better who did the "crime" !
The art is very nice and the music is super relaxing !
Great jobs guys !
I managed to get up to door tagging, and it got real hard with 10 possible culprits and 3 possible items.
Well done!
Great job!
Extra thumbs up for dimming the music in decision time, thought that was a really nice touch.
Got to 3753
Vases and Cats are avenged.
Very nice game with lovely art and polished mechanics. In my opinion, the text screens were displayed a little too long, but overall, the game was really fun.
The art is quite nice, especially the animations, that work quite well in causing a distraction.
The difficulty progression was very satisfying, as the number of intersections, people and distinct characteristics increase steadily. And all it takes to fail, is a single mistake in observation...
>Who is the culprit?!
>Through observation powers,
>point out the guilty!
It could be a fun idea to have a game mechanic, that when there are more things that can be broken, you have to guess in the right order.
Thank you all for the really nice and wonderful feedback! I had blast making this game. I’m really happy you all liked the art and animations. I just wished I had more time make even more diversity in characters (some lower body option are too similar at moment).
As many of you have pointed out the need of some kind of tutorial or instruction in beginning. I guess the gameplay is so clear for me, it didn’t even cross my mind to add one.
Also due to randomness of this game there are cases where characters bunch up in front of “the incident” and pointing out right person becomes unfairly hard. Same random nature causes the slow build up before something happens. In worst case scenario the characters could just idle/jump/wave in place forever. Definitely something I would fix if I’m going work on this.
@stupidpawn Thank you for giving my game some much time and effort!
@davidthelazar There is a mechanic preventing identical characters. Game creates characters by randomizing their gender and skin tone and then picks randomly head, upper body and lower body from library for that gender/skin tone. After that they are given a “name” which is something like gender + skin color + head graphic name + upper body name + lower body name. That name is then compared to existing characters, if that one already exists process is repeated.
@ptsnoop I opt-out from audio category because music wasn’t by me (it’s royalty free piece from site mentioned in description) and I didn’t make any of the sound effects, just did minimal editing (like combining sounds and cropping).
@juju-adams Now that you mention it, it looks bit like you are sniping people out of rows. Makes it so much more grim.
@gurkenlabs My idea was to make transitions last bit too long so that your memory would start to fade. Makes choosing the right person bit harder.
I had a lot fun playing this, well done!
The gameplay is perhaps a bit simplistic for long term engagement, but I could see this as a part of a mini-game-collection! Or maybe if it had different things in the "world" that could go wrong. Like someone eating a whole cake while the vase is also in the level, so you have to keep your attention on several things at once.
@rodrigo-denubila @pascalman Thank you for nice comments!
@hunttis Did you play until there was more events than just the vase? After level 3 (I think?) cat event is introduced. There is total 4 different possible event types after you get to levels with 20 people. The last event which I don’t think anyone has mentioned yet (no one got that far I assume) is bit evil on game design side:) Interesting you mentioned mini game collections, games like Mario Party or Warioware were some of the inspirations for this game.
I played this on stream at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/143780402 - time 2:40:25
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMCwacAGwrA