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

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

#41

Post by MD87 »

galapago wrote: post #16
MD87 wrote: post #10

It's a cool idea but it fell a bit flat for me. > However, it's important to note that every clue you view will have an impact on your overall score. Exercise caution and strategic thinking as you navigate through the evidence and interrogate the suspects to piece together the ultimate solution. That sounds great! But what actually happened was I clicked through clue after clue about person X being in room Y at time…

Hi, thanks for the feedback! > That sounds great! But what actually happened was I clicked through clue after clue about person X being in room Y at time Z until I eventually got told what the murder weapon wasn't three times in a row. I didn't feel like I could exercise any caution or strategic thinking; it was just "Nope, this isn't enough information" over and over until "Yes, this is now enough information". I ne…

> I need to think about this, but for sure the clues will be refined to encourage this. Right now, there are only a couple of types of clues and they don't feel very organic.

Yes, with some more varied clues I can see how it could be very fun. Maybe an extra type of clue could be associating suspects with potential murder weapons (e.g. "Alice said she never touched the rope" or "Forensic testing found traces of Bob's DNA on the poison bottle").

Or maybe another type could be like: "Alice heard someone in the bedroom when she was in the kitchen at 09:30". In the right circumstances that could give you _just_ enough information to deduce something.

I'm looking forward to see where you take it! :)

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

#42

Post by thaumasiotes »

nemo1618 wrote: post #28
tnecniv wrote: post #26

If you like solving mysteries like this, I suggest getting a copy of Cain’s Jawbone. It consists of 100 pages out of order and multiple murders. To win the game, you must not only solve each murder but correctly order the pages. It’ll keep you busy for a while.

In the same vein, I highly, highly recommend playing Return of the Obra Dinn. Slowly piecing together the fates of all the people on the ship is deeply satisfying, sorta like a sudoku puzzle.

> Slowly piecing together the fates of all the people on the ship is deeply satisfying, sorta like a sudoku puzzle.

Return of the Obra Dinn relies completely on the fact that you can make guesses and the game will confirm for your benefit whether or not those guesses were correct. The information you're "piecing together" is not actually present in the game - you have to guess it, and sometimes the game will tell you that that's what the game developers were thinking too.

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

#43

Post by jstarfish »

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 near upholstery. Guns are usually found in bedrooms. Living rooms usually have something ropelike. If this is random, it's a bit fantastical, and all of it is suspicious in itself. Maybe limit randomization to shuffling 2 of the weapons around, because some red herrings are expected.

Poison is kind of a crappy weapon for this game if you don't account for it being able to kill without the suspect and victim in the same place at the same time, only them both being in the same place at some point in time.

Also:

There isn't much reason to use the "?" flag on the chart as it stands. Having a witness give vague, "don't remember exactly" or excessively-timeboxed clues ("I was in the bathroom from 9:00 to 12:00, leaving only to drop off some vinyl covers to the living room so I wouldn't shart on them, but don't remember when that was") would add some challenge. The murder solves itself if you just follow the clues, plot the whereabouts of each suspect and look for overlap.

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

#44

Post by jonas-w »

galapago wrote: post #23
jonas-w wrote: post #5

Reminds me of Black Stories: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stories https://www.moses-verlag.de/black-stories-English/103646

Uhm, interesting, but I cannot find any examples of these story/puzzles. Do you know where I can take a look to them?

Mhm interesting, didn't know that it is seemingly just a German thing, only with some editions that are translated. The stories are often very hardcore, but nonetheless we played these as teens after School together or even in school. It's an analogue "card game", one side of the card is known to all who participate which contains the story and the other side is only known to one person which has the solution. The participants that don't know the solution only can ask yes or no questions to the one who knows the solution. I don't own one personally, and the only things I found on the internet are some images of these cards, but in german. You could try to translate one with Google Translate. If you search for black stories on the official store you can see that there are 135 different versions of it (some are called different colors/names, e.g. pink stories, which are more harmless stories for children or "pferde stories" which are about horses)

Many of then have an example image attached.

I translated this one with DeepL for you. https://www.moses-verlag.de/black-stories-8/106746

(Trigger Warning Eating Disorder)

Translation (story): > The queen

> After the meal, the queen died. If the guests had been more boring, she would still be alive.

Translation (solution): > A beauty queen (like e.g. Miss America) was invited to dinner every night after her election. To maintain her weight, she stuck her finger down her throat after each meal. At a reception she was involved in many interesting conversations and forgot to retire to the toilet after the main course. Her overfull stomach ruptured and she died as a result.

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

#45

Post by ajkjk »

galapago wrote: post #21
ajkjk wrote: post #20

I guess it's implied that people only travel between rooms on 15-minute boundaries, or something? And maybe it's implied that the murderer always lies and the non-murderers don't? I dunno. The clues are really confusing without understanding the meta-rules behind them, which don't seem to be written down.

Hi, thanks for the feedback, let's take a look: > I guess it's implied that people only travel between rooms on 15-minute boundaries, or something? Yes > And maybe it's implied that the murderer always lies and the non-murderers don't? Right now, clues are always true, but the murderer will omit saying something very incriminating. But since the website is a prototype, this will most likely change in the near future…

(I still think it's really, really cool, by the way; please don't get discouraged by the criticism. With some UX / intuitability improvements it'll be awesome.)

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

#46

Post by triceratops »

I've long felt that the mystery game genre is cool in theory but doesn't work in practice on computers. Most games end up being menu clickers. Or you have to add puzzles. Which is fun, but a puzzle game isn't the same as a mystery game.

Generative AI changes things. It's possible to make a more open-ended game where you can act like a real investigator. Draw up lists of suspects, order forensic tests, call experts, interview witnesses, whatever you can think of.

I wish a game like that existed.

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

#47

Post by GenericPoster »

Really fun game. From a visibility standpoint, I would recommend improving the visibility of the notebook. Once you're deep into it and a lot of boxes are filled, it becomes harder to keep track of checks and crosses. Native dark mode would be nice to have as well.

Another nice to have feature, quick clearing the notebook would be nice. I didn't need it this time and I guess refreshing the page does it. but it also closes the clues.

Gameplay wise, I would like it if you were more explicit about how people travel from room to room and how long they spend in each room. It's still solvable but I can definitely see how people would struggle to understand.

All this being said, really great job on the site and the mystery. I absolutely love it and look forward to playing it more.

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

#48

Post by chrisoverzero »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #42
nemo1618 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same vein, I highly, highly recommend playing Return of the Obra Dinn. Slowly piecing together the fates of all the people on the ship is deeply satisfying, sorta like a sudoku puzzle.

> Slowly piecing together the fates of all the people on the ship is deeply satisfying, sorta like a sudoku puzzle. Return of the Obra Dinn relies completely on the fact that you can make guesses and the game will confirm for your benefit whether or not those guesses were correct. The information you're "piecing together" is not actually present in the game - you have to guess it, and sometimes the game will tell you…

The game is completely solvable with no guessing.

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

#49

Post by nathan_douglas »

This is really cool! I had some of the same points of confusion as others did, e.g. what do times mean, does “I was in $place from $time to $time” imply being somewhere else before and after, etc. I think being more explicit with what you _can_ and _can’t_ conclude would go a long way.

I also echo the suggestion to add more clue formats.

But I think it’s really nice and shows a lot of promise. Good stuff!

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

#50

Post by ehnto »

triceratops wrote: post #46

I've long felt that the mystery game genre is cool in theory but doesn't work in practice on computers. Most games end up being menu clickers. Or you have to add puzzles. Which is fun, but a puzzle game isn't the same as a mystery game. Generative AI changes things. It's possible to make a more open-ended game where you can act like a real investigator. Draw up lists of suspects, order forensic tests, call experts, i…

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 locally run LLMs that can be very finely tuned and trained on your world data.

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