Subpoena Magus -- Post-Mortem

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The Good

  • Art by Kamiyoshi once again! She previously did the art for our LD53 entry, "Foxcrate", which we later released on Steam as a full roguelike.
  • All of the symbol-drawing stuff: the randomized symbols, the visual representations of them on both the court record and when drawing, the sound and visual effects... everything worked out perfectly.
  • I did manage to include some dynamic music; we were running out of time, and I was worried I might have to just make a simple loop, but I had enough time to have extra tracks that play whenever evidence or a witness is present.

The Bad

  • No real victory or failure screen, just a "Congratulations" or "Game Over" message. There was no time.
  • Not much to actually do, other than wait to know which symbol to draw. These waits were also a bit too long; I should have at least made the time lingered on each dialogue bubble to be shorter.
  • The HTML5 version is a bit buggy. Sometimes the sound breaks up, or the tracks get slightly out of sync. Most importantly though, the symbol drawing mechanic is supposed to put the mouse directly in the middle when you start drawing (to help prevent accidentally hitting symbols you didn't intend), but in the HTML5 version it doesn't do that.
  • I originally made it easy to tweak a lot of the game values (such as the complexity of the symbols or how much time you have to draw them) for the purpose of making different difficulty levels, but ran out of time before they could be implemented.
  • I'd like to have written longer music tracks; what we do have is very short.

Future?

  • I unfortunately don't really see this as being a good game to expand; there just isn't enough places to go with the base mechanics of the game, so we're more likely to just keep working on more content for the Steam version of "Foxcrate" instead.