Rats will kiss the gunner's daughter by Mr.Houdini
First ludum dare! Thank you for entering.
Game Description
Power is and always has been in fragile balance. Human nature makes us ambitious and greedy. Dive into a high-seas adventure as a ship’s captain that must solve the problem of an imminent mutiny. Discover the secrets your sailors keep, and attain all the information needed to uncover the mutineer.
With Rats will kiss the gunner's daughter we’ve wanted to take on the challenge of generating a game with content created in a simple and functional way. Firstly, we turned the theme around, taking “you are running out of power” to mean the social kind of power, and not the mechanical or physical interpretation of the phrase that the mind first goes to. Also we’ve created a game environment that puts a lot of focus on human behaviour.
We hope you fully enjoy the experience and above all, that you make the mutineer kiss the gunner's daughter!
Game Instructions
Click teh skull to open the daily note and the parchment to see the instructions and your crew.
This game lasts 5 days. On the 6th day you will have to execute the mutineer. Every day you will ask each sailor on your ship a different question.
You’ll have three options:
Blue button: Ask peacefully.
Red button: Use violence to get the information. This action will cost you a coin (to hire a bully).
Yellow button: Bribe the sailor to get the information. This action will cost you a coin.
Each day have two coins to spend. You can't save up coins to use the next day
IMPORTANT NOTES:
We strongly advise you to write down the information you acquire. These sailors will say many things and it may be hard to remember all of it.
Every time you play the game, the sailors will have a different name and appearance (face, head and body). Don't be afraid to give it a second try!
Extra point question: where is this ship exactly from?
Updates:
We have removed the unfinished language option (it was available in the windowed mode because it wasn't set at 16:9).
We have correctly set the game icon.
Now it is possible to see the results of the game: who was the mutineer (in case you lose) and who were all the members of your crew (if you succeed).
The player can choose to execute a sailor anytime in the game, so you don't have to wait 5 days if you know who the mutineer is.
We've updated the font. The new one is quite a bit more readable.
This new build works at both 32 and 64 bit computers.
This is an extra update post-jam, so remember it doesn't have to affect on your ratings. This is for the players.
Download game here
Ratings
| Overall | 63th | 4.035⭐ | 117🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 153th | 3.635⭐ | 117🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 76th | 3.861⭐ | 117🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 239th | 3.774⭐ | 117🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 106th | 4.311⭐ | 121🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 97th | 3.847⭐ | 113🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 99th | 3.532⭐ | 111🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 68th | 4.026⭐ | 116🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 135🗳️ | 185🗨️ |
This is really polished for a game made in such a short time span.
Really good job. Congratulations! And good luck :)
*There is an extra point question... where is this ship from?
Great concept and executed very well with fitting art, music and writing.
Apparently I'm a bad judge of character though, taking a saltwater nap now.
I love it when singers sing in their own language in Eurovisión, so make sure to finish translating it to Català, there needs to be more games in every language!
I soon found out they were the language select, and that the spanish(I'm not good at languages so just guessing, sorry) option was a fair bit incomplete, with a lot of placeholder text and UI issues. Only the sailors' speech wasn't English. Once I restarted the game and booted into full screen I was able to continue in English.
On the first day, every sailor except Vaugr told me that the mutineer was Vaugr. All 4 of them. I wanted to end the game there and execute Vaugr, but after a couple minutes of random clicking around the room I wasn't able to find such an option. The game did continue to scold me for not making up my mind soon enough though, so maybe I was missing something.
So for the next 4 days I dutifully clicked through all the text, giving a light reading to each to make sure I didn't miss some major plottwist where everyone BUT Vaugr was conspiring against me. They weren't; Vaugr was the mutineer. So until the last day, I spent all my gold on making Vaugr's life miserable. I would send a bully out to beat him up before he came in, just to make sure he had all the reason in the world to hate me. I even bribed some of his shipmates to encourage distrust. And then I killed him.
I really wish I could have the option to kill him earlier. The bulk of the time I spent playing this game was a bit pointless, with no real deduction to do or particularly amusing text to read (The writing isn't bad, but it tries to communicate information more than it does entertain, so when I didn't need any information it was a bit moot). Or maybe you could've spent the first 4 days trying to figure out who can be trusted and what sort of social structure exists on the ship (maybe manipulating that structure?), with the "who's the mutineer" question only appearing on the last day, to keep the player in suspence.
As it stands, the game's reasonably pretty, with some interesting mechanics and a very solid aesthetic. I wish I could've enjoyed my time with it more, because the effort and polish you put in really shows.
P.S. - the song you play as the backdrop to the intro and main game has been bugging me for years. Literally years, because for the life of me I can't find which of Bach's pieces it is. So please, save me from that misery and tell me what that music is.
Thanks for all the comments, we (the team) are reading it and discussing it.
There are some things to comment. The Català version (our natal language) is not ready and shouldn't be enabled. It appears in a windowed mode(we are building the game again to fix this bug. *Shame* on us because we didn't test the windowed mode). Sorry for the inconvinence.
It is hard to balance a game like this, so there is the possibility of knowing who the mutineer is the first round. We recommend you to start a new game. The names and aspect (face, head and body) of the sailors change every time you play. You won't know who the mutinner is the second time. Accept our apologies.
The music is a version of Johann Sebastian Bach's *The Little Fuge*. I'm a huge fan of his work so we decided to use it for the game.
Aqui teniu el nostre:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/orcs-in-space
Thank you **ALL** for your comments and support. It is overwhelming for us to have all this amazing comments and opinions. Even if we knew that ~~almost~~ everyone in Ludum Dare is constructive and peaceful, this is amazing.
We are analyzing all this aspects you are referring to, such as difficulty (which is more random than we want to). Maybe asking directly who the mutineer is, wasn't a good decision even if it is at the start of the game (when the player doesn't know who is lying). As @nerdyherbivore said in the comment below, choosing the question to make would be great, even if it would be so hard to balance.
We didn't expect that amount of people playing until the end. It is quite hard to retain a player more than 5-10 minutes, so **thank you** again!
I agree with some of the other comments that a "kill" option would be great if you already figured it out, but still being sure is good before murdering. :) I also would have likes to choose my question each day to change up the order. On the first day, I asked one of the more important questions. However, since I did not yet know my crew, I sometimes did not get answers (either they did not answer when asked politely or were offended by bribes). The first day I would have liked the option to ask something less crucial, like about who their friends were, while learning the best interrogation technique.
Great art style and music!
All in all, really good well rounded game, my team scrapped a similar idea on a spaceship about a mutiny but didn't feel we could make it work, glad to see a idea like that executed so well.
Besides that, I loved the theme and the mood of the game. Congratulations!
Really nice entry, with good art and a nice music. An immersive and fun experience! Thanks for creating.
Edit:
Only thing I don't like: the game was packed in a .rar instead of a .zip, so I had to go ahead and download a program just for unpacking. It was worth it, but still kind of a nuisance.
Given that the same personalities are used between games, I can see why you wouldn't reveal the true identity at the end.
The art was pretty good overall, and I think the writing and use of Bach's music gave the game a great atmosphere.
Keep up the good work!
(Couldn't help but notice the Westerosi map on the table... :wink:)
[spoiler]
It was really funny when I punched little timmy to ask him if he was lying and he said "Why would I lie to you when you treat us so well" haha
Altogether, you should be very happy with the final result - you did a wonderful job with the art and music, and the writing is top-notch. Well done!
The graphics were good, and the art of the pirates was very humorous to me. I felt really bad about using force, so I was careful to only use it when I felt it was necessary. Seemed to work out for me.
Good job on such a nicely-polished game. This has been one of my favorites so far.
[Danae streams Ludum Dare 39: Day 1, part 1: Rats will kiss the gunner's daughter](https://youtu.be/4KfQtLDzK-g?t=50m24s)
Interesting concept. Sadly on stream we completely failed to take notes properly so we didn't get the mutineer :D But I can see the appeal of a logical puzzle of this sort, where the player has to figure out who is lying and how to ask the pirates appropriately. The graphics were also very nice and funny (although serious pet peeve: mixing pixels of different sizes, makes it look a lot worse than it could have been!), and the music appropriate. Very well done!
Is the idea they tell you who the mutineer is on the first day because they're still loyal? Cause that seems to be the pattern. Excellent art.
Please play, rate and comment our game aswell:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/disaster-on-nebula-one
Great graphics, amazing music, rewarding gameplay. I sacrificed half of my nootebook to find the rat, I got him at the end and It felt really good!
Thank you for the experience!
So I played three more times, each time bribing the bribable looking person and manhandling the snitch looking fellow on day 1. Then I skipped the rest of the days by spamming the neutral question button, not reading any of the answers.
Every single time the person who got the most votes on the first day turned out to be the mutineer... You might just have a bit of an issue here.
I second @amras0000's suggestion of asking the direct question last. Why wouldn't you do that as the captain? That is when you've figured out who is the stern sailor type, who is the snitch and who likes money. Apparently you don't even need to know any of that, but you get the point.
The graphics, audio and mood are great, *so it is not all bad!* In fact it is mostly not bad; I'm being facetious.
By the way, guessed a mutineer from the first try! And this made me smile.
Must. Complete. It!!))
Likes:
- great interrogation logic puzzle
- funny characters that I still can't fully grasp
- great graphics
- overall wonderfully designed game screens
- nice music piece
- totally ace game title :)
Challenges:
- it's a bit spammy to read at times. Could this work with just 4 days?
Overall:
- a prime entry that stands out on many fronts
- definitely an unique puzzle experience.
**Update Note:**
- Now it is possible to see the results of the game: who was the mutineer (in case you lose) and who were all the members of your crew (if you succeed).
- The player can choose to execute a sailor anytime in the game, so you don’t have to wait 5 days if you know who the mutineer is.
- We’ve changed the font. The new one is quite a bit more readable.
- This new build works at both 32 and 64 bit computers.
- We have removed the unfinished language option.
- We have correctly set the game icon.
This is an extra update post-jam, so remember it doesn’t have to affect on your ratings!
The major note I have for improvement is the music. It's supposed to be a tense, paranoid game (and it succeeds with that in most aspects), but the music doesn't reflect any growing paranoia. Bringing in some more instrumentation near the end would be a really nice touch.
Also, a minor thing: when the text is being written, when it reaches the edge of the box, it hops down to the next line. It was a little distracting.
An amazing effort all around!
I don't have any negative feedback! This game looks solid! Well done! :smile:
This actually has a lot of depth to it, though I feel like during the 4th (?) day pretty much nobody was ever useful...
I'm confused as to whether to rate you for Audio or not. Did you use 3rd party audio assets? I recognize the piano arrangement.
Graphics are quite good, I like the generation of characters that makes them look sometimes suspicious even if they've done nothing haha
I think I found a typo (on the updated version) there was "desicion" instead of "decision", if I remember well it was at the beginning.
The game is quite hard but balanced so it give s enough control to the players to make their own choices.
Good job!
At the end I had two equally likely suspects and chose the wrong one so I ran out of power this time :-)
Nice that I can see the results at the end, I needed the certainty ;-)
The graphics are awesome, really interesting characters.
The music fits the theme and atmosphere of the game well.
I like the game play idea, gathering clues and making the one important decision in the end, this is really cool.
Overall a very well done game, great job!