PI Heirless Wonder (WIP) Demo

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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#1

I’ve finally gotten one of my games to a stage I would like to have some feedback on, it’s not much and in early stages. The working title is PI Heirless Wonder. In it, you play as a private investigator, who just inherited their former bosses business. You can play as a man, woman, or non-binary character and just about everyone can be romanced (no romantic interactions yet) You can try out three different case types (seven more to come when written in the first chapter alone) select what ever city you want to live in, although chapter two will be driven by 14 city specific cases (don’t worry if you don’t select one of these cities, I got you covered) chapter three will lead to Paris, where you help out an old colleague, and chapters four through seven will follow “the big one.” There is some drug use reference, mild adult language, and themes.

I took a fourth wall breaking approach with this one where the narrator interacts with you and so far only one other character and it is not always the most friendly of interactions but it is all in good fun. There are some pop cultural references but nothing is named directly, but you should get the references, pretty easily. You can be straight, gay, or other which does have an effect on one choice so far. The first jobs only last a “week” and you get to play all three of the cases available since I looped it around to check them out as well.

If you would be interested in one of my other works I have listed below and would like to message me on here with your feedback, questions, or any issues with the game feel free to do so. With now owning the PI Agency, you will have to watch finances and character depth can be worked on in this chapter as well, any suggestions are welcome.

Currently it’s about near completed, 1 Chapter, and roughly 13,000 words done, and I plan on updating every so often. I have several other works in progress at different stages of completion (most early in the stories) a tie in for my book series working title being Zombiearth: Choose Your Fate. An alternate world based in a Roman Empire Era timeline, working title Fate of an Empire. Extreme Ball, which follows your career from a freshman in high school to several years into the professional level of a sport with the same name. An old Western with the working title of Under the Willow Tree. Also another one tied in with my Zombiearth book series, but the working title is a spoiler so I can not even mention it. All works titles may change, but these are all rough descriptions of them.

To play the PI Heirless Wonder demo, go here: https://dashingdon.com/go/7434

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#2

That was pretty fun. I expected a PI character to narrate sarcastically like Marlowe but that was different. Text needs a bit of polish, but that can wait.

I ran into a bug in the missing dog case.

chapter1 line 1306: Invalid expression at char 7, expected NUMBER, STRING, VAR or PARENTHETICAL, was: EQUALITY [=]

And another, in the infidelity case.

chapter1 line 1451: Invalid expression at char 14, expected no more tokens, found: OPERATOR [+]

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#3

Fun playthrough, hehehe, encountred this tho…

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I also encountered the word “Private I” which I think was meant to be “Private Eye” :smiley:

Will you be adding a save option soon?

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#4

Thanks, going to look into it now. Yeah the text will definitely get polished. Just more for me to get feedback for motivation to stick with it. Easier to correct my mistakes early on. I want to add more interactions as well with NPC and possibly have the narrators responses differ with what they “think” of you. This is definitely just the tip of the iceberg for this story alone. I’ll update asap.

Glad you enjoyed, sorry you encountered an error. I’m still learning to code and sort of rushed to have this demo out on Christmas. I’ll look into a save option as well, still a noob. Looking into the issue and I will update ASAP. Oh and I’ll fix grammatical errors later.

Alright fixed both issues, I think… Should run smoothly now :crossed_fingers:

If you come across anything else I appreciate the input, bonehead mistakes mainly. If you select “none of these” from the city selection I have a couple of codes for it for something I’m working on for chapter 2 to work and I messed up on one of the variable names in a couple of selections, but it wasn’t on every option, so I had to dig through all 50 states (not Mexico, Canada, or other) just because a space was in the variable name.

#6

I’ve been looking into saves and honestly it is a little over my head, but once I get more written for the story I will have to learn it. For now I just have everything loop as much as possible to test the three available cases. There will be seven total cases to start and depending on what cases you pick you will be able to start another case within in those seven. They are broken down by “time frame” which the three playable cases take “a week to complete,” there are a couple of two week cases, a three week case, and a couple of four week cases.

So if you pick a three week case only these one week cases will be available to choose, where as if you pick a two week case you could end up selecting two, one week cases. Hopefully I explained that correctly, but the first chapter will only cover your first month of operating the business. Each case will be pretty unique and eventually you will be able to expand your employee list. I want to maintain a “your choices matter,” aspect (which I hope to do with all my games) which can be difficult. Especially in the long haul.

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#7

Hi,

Had a quick run of your game yesterday and ran into the following when creating ‘cancun’ in Mexico and choosing El Paso as closest:

Screenshot_20201229-200814|236x500

Once I have more time I’ll give it another go, just wanted to let you know :slight_smile:!

#8

Thanks for informing me. It should be fixed now, it worked after I fixed and tested it. Hope you enjoy and if you come across something else let me know.

#9

Okay so after taking a break from all my projects this week, I’ve looked more into the saves, as well as working on the other cases available for chapter one. With using dashingdon it should be pretty easy to do actually, but I can not put in the code until I’m through writing/testing it out myself since CSIDE doesn’t recognize the code and every thing else I’ve looked into is over my head by a mile or so. But hopefully I will be able to update the demo within the coming week and it will also have a save system :crossed_fingers:

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#10

I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I have chapter 2 and 3 planned with some of the material written. Due to how I coded the first demo I want to make sure the game doesn’t break before releasing an updated live demo. Any volunteers to help out?

#11

What issues are you anticipating might exist in the code that will cause a problem with chapters 2 and 3?

#12

Well the actual issues would probably be in chapter one. I’m adding more cases plus possibly a special case and I’m wanting to make sure when you are able to select the “next weeks cases,” your previous cases won’t show up as well as keeping certain cases unavailable if you play a certain way.

There are the three 1 week cases already in the story, two 2 week cases, one 3 week case, and three 4 week cases to choose from. The first chapter will be the equivalent to “a month” so you could do all the 1 week cases equaling 3 weeks; which is why I’m adding a special case also so it will be a “full month.” Pretty much I’m wanting to make sure the cases = 4 weeks. On top of that some how one of my intentions got messed up so I had to test what I already had to figure out a space was added where it didn’t need to be.

Due to having input text, I can’t just random test it and from my understanding to do a save system, it would only work on dashingdon, not on CSIDE, where I’m writing and coding the game. With the complexity of being able to choose locations etc I’m wanting to make sure the city specific cases work out smoothly. I’m also wanting to have a place where you can upgrade your business and personal stuff, which I haven’t worked out exactly where or what I want the upgrades to be for certain aspects, such as upgrading your car or phone system etc.

I also want to add some more material for relationships, so I’m working on figuring out exactly where to put that (more than likely at the end of chapter one) which I have kids, so focusing on testing for every little thing gets tedious while making sure the kids don’t poke an eye out or something.

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#13

I guess I didn’t hit reply sorry. The previous comment was supposed to be a reply to you.

#14

Sorry, I had seen this and never replied for some reason.

It sounds like you know what you want to do. The best thing is probably to take each scenario and come up with a simple way to control it within the game. For example, a case menu which is controlled by a series of flags that track where the player is in the game and which options they have selected.

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#15

Fortunately I have been able to fix any errors when they do arise so far. But when I test it myself I play the quickest way possible. My wife tests them, since she plays differently than me also, but sometimes it’s just simple indention mistakes or goofing up a code. Usually if I take a step back and work on something else and come back to it I see what I done wrong. Total n00b at choicescripting.

Also no worries, I’m not always on the forum and don’t always see my email notifications. Working on my sports one right now and hoping to get out the demo for the freshman year within a week.

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#16

I just wanted to thank everyone who has liked my demo, for PI Heirless Wonder. PS the name has multiple meanings. Of course PI stands for Private Investigator, but I’m also wanting to throw in some puns about pi and pie somewhere (not sure where yet) and the big case focuses on an heir trying to clear her father’s name from a Ponzi scheme and murder charges (so she can get rights back to her inheritance) while her father’s name is Leslie “Les” Moore. Who will joke about less is more.

There’s some other meanings but that would be spoilers :wink:

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#17

Really enjoying the Game, Me as a PI :fire::fire::fire:

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Don’t know if it’s an error or I just don’t know the meaning of it :sweat_smile::sweat_smile::sweat_smile:

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#18

I think it’s ”continuing” with a loose space in the middle…?

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#19

A goof. Nice investigating skills :sweat_smile:

#20

That would be it.

#21

Had someone point out the Missing Art job jumps to the Infidelity case’s story. Can’t figure out where they mentioned it, just wanted to let you all know I figured out the issue. But I won’t be able to update it until I finish out the other cases you can take on for chapter one. I am working on those now.

Update: I completed one of the two week cases you can select, last night. About to jump on the next two week case today hopefully finishing it up :crossed_fingers: I’ve edited a couple of things also. My goal is to finish one of the chapter 1 cases per day and update the game ASAP. This was my first game I got to a point where I wanted to see what the world thought about it. Thanks for all of your support. I also figured out who the bad guy will be for Chapter 2 and how it will lead into Chapter 3. I am work on my other projects as well, but this one has my attention until I get Chapter one completed at the very least. If any of you arell artists or know artists I would love to “include” them in for the Missing Art case. Basically it will just be a sub scene with links to their art pages etc.

Update: unfortunately I pulled something in my neck earlier today, so focusing on any writing that would take more than minimal brain power did not happen. I did get the artist page done up and the okay from all but 2 of the artists I talked to for inclusion. Hopefully I will be able to hop back into writing the story for the rest of the chapter 1 cases at the very least. My goal was to get at least 1 a day done, but if my neck will chill out tomorrow I will try to knock out 2 of them.

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