LOGBOOK: Beneath the Storm is a narrative deduction puzzle set in a 17th-century maritime world. It is inspired by The Case of the Golden Idol.
You can play the demo right now here:
The demo is composed of the first full murder case to solve. In the final game, there will be 10 cases.
I am a solo developer, and this is my first game. I would love to hear your thoughts on the game.
The start of the trailer feels confusing. Usually when it’s a mystery, the picture should be so provocative or so clear what is the mystery. Add to this, you opened up very quickly with rapid clicking. Ideally you either want the first few seconds visuals to build mood or explain things a bit. Like maybe if you just add in a screen that says “solve mysteries” or something like your ‘reveal crimes’, you instantly prime the viewer’s mind to what the game is about. The visuals look good to me overall in terms of the paintings. Stylistically though, feels different to the blue picture you show above.
Thanks for the feedback! Indeed, I understand what you mean with the start of the trailer. When I have time, I will try some of your suggestions.
I like the art. The colors of the sentence thing seems kinda riotous and outside of the tone of the rest of the project.
Thank you for the feedback. The goal of the colour palette is to easily distinguish the words. But noted, I will keep this in mind when I will go over the project.
If you haven’t already, consider making your color palette be stored in a class_name like GameConstants (or whatever you prefer to name it). The font is beautiful but might introduce some strain due to the ornate serif. So you’re probably going to tinker around with the colors a lot.
Same goes for the actual font color itself. Right now for me personally i think the whiteness and sameness of the font makes the part where the player try to synthesize the info and mystery harder due to the coloring. You might want to do a simple book mark sort of system where the player themselves can tag the rectangle with a color, number, icon or some other way.
Part of the fantasy of being a detective is putting up tags on things, so this could serve a double function. The problem with my suggestion though is that there’s not much real estate left on the block of texts and it might cause more color issues. On the other hand, it’s done by the player themselves, so they can opt not to use it if it bothers them.
If you put them in a Resource you could also allow the player to pick their own colors in the config menus.
This takes me back, though I’m not sure to what… something like a Lovecraft Monkey Island 
My notes, in no particular order:
I really like the straight-forwardness of the gameplay for this level, it’s a good balance between what the game gives you / remembers for you, and what’s left up to the player. Judging by the video you posted, the complexity rises in later levels, which is good
Good atmospheric music. And is that Erin Yvette singing, Scylla of Hades 2? Great voice
The in-game music is quite repetitive though, and sounds oddly low sample rate / data rate? It’s also a little loud for being background music. I know the war drum style of soundtrack has been exceedingly popular this last decade or two, but it seems a little too aggressive for an investigation game at sea.
It’s probably not final, but the tutorial is somewhat long and dry. I don’t think a player is likely to remember what they read about (say) the conclude screen when they first reach it. You could instead display the tutorial in bits when the player reaches a certain point or feature.
You could also shorten some of it without losing any meaning - the entire difficulty section could be pretty much summed up as “You can adjust the difficulty at any time. This affects the feedback you get when checking solutions.”
You could allow things (like letters) to remain open when switching to the identify screen - that would make it a little easier to (mentally) pass information.
If you can find a nice readable hand-writing pixel font, I think that would distinguish the letters and notes more from general game text.
The plain stone-gray UI parts could use some polishing. There’s a pretty harsh divide between the beautiful, large illustrations and the menus.
I had no problems or considerations about the colors of the game, although the pinkish color for verbs does stand out a bit.
Thanks for the feedback.
I am taking note for storing the colour palette to iterate faster. So I can do that when I revisit this part.
That’s in interesting idea, thank you. I am not sure if I can use it for this one, but I will keep this in mind for a potential follow up.
Indeed, and that would give a bit more reason for the setting menu to exist.
Wow, thanks for the detailed feedback!
Let me try to answer some of it, and for the reset, it goes directly on my todo list as of thing to check.
I am pleased to announce that I made an update to the demo, and it, now, covers the first three cases. So you have two new cases to test, and this will give you a better feeling of what the game will be.
I mean all the parts of the UI that are just a flat color, but particularly in the explore section, where the illustrations live. The illustrations are really vivid and nice, so the contrast between them and the website-looking interface is very noticeable. To illustrate:
Thanks! You even went to make a picture to illustrate, that really nice of you! Indeed, now I get what you mean. Thanks for the feedback. I will try to see what I can put there.
