Little Shops of Murder
Day 1: Choose your detectives name and open the letter you recieved from the police. Read it carefully and try to find the 3 clues inside it. You can find and extract them either by hovering the text with your mouse until the cursor changes;-- or by pressing the H key.
After extracting all three clues, change to Persons view (use top left buttons). With the information from the letter, you should be able to drag two of the clues over the right persons. If you succeed, these persons get revealed. Tasks your Assistants to interriogate them by dragging their profile chip from the left side over the revealed Persons.
Also on Day 1: Switch to Places and apply the same steps to reveal and search the first place. As there is nothing more to do, you can End the Day by pressing the button in bottom right corner.
End of Day 1: Your assistants present all the new findings and items they have collected during the day. The new findings get listed in the Persons Register on the left edge of your Desk. All new items will be present on your Desk as well. Search for new clues by reading and observing the register and items carefully.
Repeat these Steps to reveal more persons, clues and places until your are ready to solve the case.
Paper Textures and Flower Petals from freepik.com.
Wooden Table texture from unsplash.com.
Several sound effects from mixkit.co.
Office Background Ambience from YouTube.
Town was generated with Village Generator (image was then digitally post-processed into a map, made a donation for this great tool)
Other than these assets, the game is entirely hand-crafted with ♥ and passion. We developed the story from scratch, the art is hand-drawn and all the coding was done without framework, utilizing the full potential of the webtech stack (native HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no canvas).
Comments
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I' stuck. where does the sapphire ring go
The ring is one of the evidences to solve the case at the end of game. Have you found the security cam footage? If not, send another assistant to the Jewelry store to get it. It gives you two hints leading to the end of game (a button "Solve the case" will appear top of the screen when the case can be solved).
i have figured it out. thank you very much tiger
great game with awesome art as usual! I was stuck at the phone scrolling and get it after reading the comments lol. Then I get lost a little after unlock Ophelia and start to brute force try all combinations....still a very cute puzzle game!
Awesome game! The UI with all its animations is fun to use and the pictures are cute. I can tell there went a lot of work into the story as well and I was kind of guessing until the end! I got stuck at some point because I didn't realize I could scroll down in the group chat - found that out after reading the comments. Should have read the controls more carefully ^^'
Good job to all of you :)
Great game and I'll leave a full review in a bit, but right now I'm stuck--I've unlocked all the NPCs and all the locations except Blue Dream, none of the clues I have left work on Blue Dream, the H key doesn't highlight anything, and none of the NPCs or unlocked locations have any clues left. What am I missing?
You reached the point where you can solve the case. There is a new button „Solve Case“ coming up. The Blue Dream stays locked - time was running out and I had to cut this corner.
Huh--when does the "solve case" button come up? I've just ended the day a bunch of times and I didn't see it.
I haven't been able to open the safe, and none of the clues I have will open it--don't I need to do that first?
Yes, unlocking the safe is triggering this button. You need a code for doing so. You can find it in the security camera photo. Wish I would have had more time to "envelop" all this with more logic and deduction. Was watching you playing these games yesterday, and constantly thought: "woa... these games are miles ahead of ours in terms of coherence and proper conclusions".
Oh, OK--I played through again and there was a bug on my previous playthrough. The security cam image never showed up and the jewelry store was marked as finished.
Ups, never ran into this one, I think. Is it working now, in your 2nd run?
The story was nice and the mechanic fits well. Impressive artwork for such a small jam. High-quality all around.
Impressive artwork and well thought-out scenario. We had a lot of fun playing this and felt great about solving the case. It's clear a lot of time and work went into this. At times, the screen felt a little bit cluttered, which would be our only suggestion for the future.
i love games that allow me to keep items for further examination (it's the collector in me), and i really enjoyed the narrative mechanic of sending assistants out to do similar tasks with them bringing back new information and clues each time. it's true that sometimes a problem could really just benefit from another set of eyes!
the mystery was fun to solve, and characters were all fascinating to learn about. thank you!
There is this other long-term project of mine. Completely different genre, but all about collecting items and deciding when and how to use them best. Might not be your cup of tea, but maybe tickles the item collector in you even more than our detective game. It has a lot of hand-drawn graphics in it - I love to draw these small motives :-D
https://humane-tiger.itch.io/9-dayz
This was lovely. Such a short game, but the potential playtime it can provide is impressive.
By the way, I was also stuck for a while because I didn’t know you could scroll the group chat. Otherwise very nice.
thank you, thanks to you I found out about the scrolling chat, I was stuc
stuck
I also got stuck with unmatched clues. I couldn't talk to Willow -- none of the clues from the group chat would match to her, maybe the bug is there?
Also, my dark mode browser extension made the text very light and unreadable. I realized and toggled it off, but just a heads up if this happens to anyone else.
#SPOILER# #SPOILER# #SPOILER#
How to unlock Willow (tested it successfully again):
#SPOILER# #SPOILER# #SPOILER#
(some spoilers below)
Thanks for that. I didn't realize you needed to scroll, so I thought the Pink Floyd reference was supposed to open the shop or help access Willow.
I got through but did encounter something that I'm pretty sure was a real bug at the very end. I used something that wasn't the code to unlock the safe (not exactly sure but I think it was the jewelry receipt). Because of this I was one piece of evidence short on the first murderer. On a subsequent playthrough, I made sure and used the code and was able to solve the case (in 15 days).
Cheers :)
Thanks - two very interesting feedbacks here. Got so used to the scrolling phone screen, that I wasn't taking into account, players could miss that. I will add this point to the Controls section. And dragging the wrong clue over the safe - I have to check that, this was one of the last things I added, maybe I did something strange there.
Thanks for coming back and for playing our game! Really happy about that.
The safe behavior you observed was indeed a bug. I didn't check the clue id at all :-/ Uploaded the bugfix now.
Hey, actually i think that's what happened for me too, i used the 300 flowers clue on the safe. I will try the game again now that the bug is fixed !
Where do you get the DnD poster? I'm stuck in the same area, but missing that.
Hi vulturous. You get the DnD poster by searching the diner (again). You can drag your assistants on the same persons / places over the course of several days until certain icons (crossed out speach bubble, crossed out house) come up - signalling there is "nothing more to get here".
I have one clue that can't be matched with anything. No new insights could be found from the existing places and suspects. I'm stuck too. I am also unable to get the music store or solve the second suspect. Seems like it's a bug based on previous comments?
Alright. Will check now if this is also happening to me. What browser do you use?
I use Chrome.
I replayed it. Managed to solve it now. Probably assumed what was in the previous version would apply for the updated version. It works now and i enjoyed the mechanics!
#SPOILER# #SPOILER# #SPOILER#
How to unlock the music store:
#SPOILER# #SPOILER# #SPOILER#
I solved a lot of the case, but iam stuck with 2 last clues and i can't use them, i don't know if its a bug, but iam stuck 😓
Can you remember where you got stuck? Any unknown persons or places left?
There was 2 unknown persons, and i think i only had 3 places unlocked
Think the issue was found. For the safe a very particular clue was ment to unlock it. But in fact any clue was doing it. Fixed the issue and uploaded a new version.
Nice👍
I was able to solve half of the case, but I can't get the music store or solve the second suspect, but the last two clues I have won't go anywhere.
Someone else had the same issue, see my answer: https://itch.io/post/9048568
Really well polished for a jam game, the mechanic of linearly discovering elements of the mystery is a lot of fun. What's the lowest amount of days the game can be beaten in?
Hi Shmael, thank you for your kind words. The lowest amount of days... mmh... I did a lot of partcial test plays, but no consecutive one. I will try and tell you later. Have you solved the case? If so, want to share in how many days?
I did solve it, but didn't go for a lowest amount of days or anything. Around 25 if I remember correctly?
Day 17 is when I solved it.