Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#61

Post by chrisoverzero » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 12:38 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

chrisoverzero wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game is completely solvable with no guessing.

That's just not true. Most of what you do is guessing. There is nothing in the game, for example, that will tell you who the second mate's steward is. You assume that it's the guy who you frequently see standing near the second mate. There is also no indication in the game of who killed John Naples.

> You assume that it's the guy who you frequently see standing near the second mate.

Men wearing steward uniforms frequently hanging around officers do tend to be stewards.

> There is also no indication in the game of who killed John Naples.

Probably the Swedish-speaking man being hauled away from the bloody sword to the lazarette while the captain shouts that he was “twenty years my steward.”

These are not guesses.

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#62

Post by Thristle » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 5:36 PM UTC

Great game although i have some feedback

1. Make the score more clear. If i ended up opening 15 clues is it alot? very little? no idea

2. Have an option to play previous days. Most daily games have that option

3. When i put a check for person X in room Y at time Z the crosses should just appear in the other rooms. QoL change to reduce errors

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#63

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

galapago wrote: post #58

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. Most of what you do is guessing. There is nothing in the game, for example, that will tell you who the second mate's steward is. You assume that it's the guy who you frequently see standing near the second mate. There is also no indication in the game of who killed John Naples.

> There is also no indication in the game of who killed John Naples Spoiler alert?

The opposite?

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#64

Post by lolsal » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:12 PM UTC

Thristle wrote: post #62

Great game although i have some feedback 1. Make the score more clear. If i ended up opening 15 clues is it alot? very little? no idea 2. Have an option to play previous days. Most daily games have that option 3. When i put a check for person X in room Y at time Z the crosses should just appear in the other rooms. QoL change to reduce errors

More than one person can be in a room at one time I think.

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#65

Post by lolsal » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

jstarfish wrote: post #43

Cute exercise in timelining and contact tracing. Is this just randomized? It makes no logical sense and seems unnecessarily confusing: > The killer took the murder weapon from one of these rooms: > The gun from the kitchen > The knife from the living room > The poison from the bedroom > The rope from the bathroom Poison (of the pharmaceutical type) is usually found in bathrooms. Knives are found in kitchens, never ne…

A little imagination goes a long way:

- poison in the bedroom is someone’s bedside medicine that would be fatal to someone that wasn’t prescribed it. - some people have ceremonial/sentimental knives on display, above a mantle for example. - a gun could easily be stored in a drawer near a door, like a police officer taking off their gun and badge when they get home, or a farmer keeping a varmint pistol for east access when going out to a field. - the rope could have been in a utility closet in the bathroom, like where laundry machines are sometimes installed.

Poison could be put on a toothbrush (bathroom), cologne bottle (bedroom), tv remote (living room), or a plate (kitchen) and kill without having to be present.

Part of the fantasy is imagining why those things would be where they are; it doesn’t have to be realistic.

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#66

Post by Jimmc414 » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 12:01 AM UTC

I'm not sure if anyone is using this this way, but this seems like a great way to test LLM reasoning performance as it is created anew each day and there is no chance it is included in the training data.

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#67

Post by Thristle » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

lolsal wrote: post #64

Thristle wrote: post #62

Great game although i have some feedback 1. Make the score more clear. If i ended up opening 15 clues is it alot? very little? no idea 2. Have an option to play previous days. Most daily games have that option 3. When i put a check for person X in room Y at time Z the crosses should just appear in the other rooms. QoL change to reduce errors

More than one person can be in a room at one time I think.

Crosses should appear in other rooms at the same time slot for that person

Re: Show HN: Mystery-o-matic – A daily murder mystery to solve

#68

Post by triceratops » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

laurieg wrote: post #53

ehnto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't have to wait long, that space is red hot right now. People are rushing to commercialize LLM powered NPC dialoge. nVidia's ACE might cut everyone's lunch though we will see. There is one tech demo which has you piecing together what happened at an accident by talking with the NPCs. There's also a Skyrim mod that replaces all the NPCs with LLM actors. I think the turning point for that technology will be loca…

I think it will be a long long time before we see an LLM generating a genuinely novel, interesting and fun to play mystery game. Good mysteries involve providing just enough hints so that the player can make the fun leaps of logic and experience "Aha!" moments. People don't want to play the job of a real detective (collect endless witness statements, construct extremely detailed timelines) they want to be the hero in…

> People don't want to play the job of a real detective (collect endless witness statements, construct extremely detailed timelines)

You underestimate how many people would be really into what you described. Lots of wildly popular games are work in a fun-looking package. Factorio is just programming. Football Manager, and every other sports manager game for that matter, is spreadsheet after spreadsheet with some cool graphics.