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This is excellent! I love working out people’s identities and relationships to fill in the family tree in what I’ve seen of Funeral for the Sun, so getting to experience that in a very tight and creepy package here was fantastic. It was engaging and dramatic to discover everything that’s going on, and then I went back over everything to slowly put the pieces together, and then it was really satisfying to finally understand what happened and what to make of certain characters. Creepy and fascinating!

The only thing I ran into was even when I thought I had everything complete, the end didn’t trigger. But after I restarted and reloaded the save it worked.

such a thing would also carry the unfortunate implication of the “foreigner from a dominant position” dictating the future of a sovereign people.

Right! Before I say a bunch more, we need to just write it and see how it shakes out, but I don’t think I would want the player imposing a dissolution of the traditions, I would want that to be something that emerges from the characters themselves - more of a note of change at the end than a full plot.

I hope that my comment hasn’t made you concerned that others think less positively of your games than they seem to do.

Oh, not at all, like I said it was really refreshing! It always feels wonderful to hear what people like (and thank you for your nice comments as well), but I’m well aware there’s potential to improve, so hearing where we’re not hitting the mark is really useful. If you hadn’t enjoyed the game you wouldn’t have played all the way through and given it enough thought to look at these questions, so don’t worry, I completely appreciate it and I’m not concerned at all.

At the risk of sounding pushy, feel free to join our Jamwitch discord - we have some dedicated channels for gamedev and there’s a lot of other folks there working on projects in both the narrative deduction and language game area, who are sharing their progress and getting playtests and so on. Would love to have you, but no pressure. Thanks again for your thoughtfulness!

Yep, the current prototype adds a word to the lexicon if you search for it, even if you haven’t seen it in a document yet.

That’s why I said one-to-one! Sevol and leevoth are our existing examples where there’s not a single word English translation, and olesata is a cultural word where what it entails is clear to the speakers but not immediately to the player. We want to add more like those.

You’ll be interested or perhaps frustrated to hear the seed of the idea for Trevosa was an alien family tree where you’d be mapping out very different family structures, relationships, and cultural practices than humans’. (The focus was always going to be on understanding the culture, not on any complex linguistic puzzles.) I love scifi like Ann Leckie’s and Arkady Martine’s where you’re asked to figure out the culture from context clues and how it informs the characters and story. When it came time to put that idea to the test in the 72 hours of the jam, though, we had to scope it to lean on more familiar fantasy tropes and structures, for both our own ability to come up with the story and to make it more approachable for players. (I haven’t given up on the alien idea for the future, though!)

It’s been clear to me that we missed some opportunities to have more interesting and less English-related terms, but only recently in revisiting the story have I come to see what you’re saying: following the bloodlines and understanding the strict rules about succession is a good deduction puzzle for a family tree game, but if identifying that “rightful heir” is the happy ending for the game, that does indicate that that’s a good way to value relationships (and that monarchy is a good way to govern, which I obviously don’t agree with either.)

With making an expanded/reworked version of Trevosa, we have a new (at least new to me, an inveterate game jammer) opportunity to actually take the time to put thought into the overarching themes and values of the story. We’ve already mapped out other groups the player will be meeting who have their own values for what family means and how people relate to each other. But your points made me feel extra convinced that we need to think more about the player’s role and what we’re presenting as the happy ending to the tree investigation.

I always feel really energized when I hear thoughtful critiques of our games, because it’s bracing but makes me excited to do better! It makes me wonder who else has thoughts that they (out of motives of kindness, which I appreciate) don’t want to tell us directly in a comment or on discord. But I’m glad I found this one and thank you for being so thoughtful about it!

I hope to see your work in narrative deduction sometime! For something like Dungeon Descent, truly my ideal outcome for making something like that would be it giving others ideas for how to make something better than what I can make in the time I have, so hearing you’re drawing inspiration from our games is awesome, thank you.

Thank you for writing this, lots of great ideas that would be interesting to explore!

As a creator of one of the games above, I’m especially glad to have stumbled on this. We’re making a new iteration of the game and are currently discussing how we can expand on the parts that are fun puzzles and fun individual story moments, but put more thought into the themes and values past the one-dimensional surface we came up with during the jam - but wondering, would players even care about how those things land? So hearing someone does care about it means a lot, thank you!

Oh no! That’s a new one.

What browser are you using? Does refreshing the page help? It’s working for me on Chrome and Firefox, so you might try a different browser and see. My guess is it’s not a fundamental bug in the game, but some sort of interaction with a browser extension you have, or something like that.

Yep, if people playtest the tooltips and still feel they want a further step, we can have different settings for it.

This was a while ago but I think the idea was the way gamedev works is the game is either just fine or a rare smash hit? Haha. And we just wanted to mix it up.

Makes sense to make it toggleable, we’ll see how it plays.

Yeah, I definitely don’t want to lock in the translations, for the reasons you mentioned! I don’t think it’s possible anyway - what if someone phrased their translation differently than what we happened to put as the answer?

That’s similar to the tooltip idea, except I’m requiring the player to hover on the word to see it.

I think that’s important so you get a chance to think of the translation yourself before the answer is revealed. Of course we can see how people feel in playtesting.

Yep, I discussed it in the last Trevosa devlog.

Thanks! The biggest hint to understanding solaam is in the Final Note.

Thanks! It’s just vanilla HTML/JS, which I always use for game jams since it’s super fast to pull together and works well for a UI-based game.

Thanks! And to correct the record, the Steam version of Roottrees has totally original and great art (as well as a whole new segment of the game beyond the Itch version!)

Check out The Scepter Crisis document too.

Those are two words that don’t have a 1-1 translation in English, but looking closely at the examples in the tree should reveal the distinction.

Indeed! There’s another nonbinary character too.

Thank you so much for donating! 💜 I’m glad you liked the format, I’d like to do more with it someday too! (Though for now we’re focused on our latest narrative deduction game, The Archives of Trevosa.)

Good thoughts on the dates! Each document does have a date internally, and I was wondering if we should just show that to the player (given that documents are already ordered.) It might add an interesting layer of puzzling to ask the player to work out some specific puzzles using that date information… We’ll have to try it and see how it works out.

This post is covering all the changes we’ve made since the jam, not just recent ones, so sounds like you might have already seen it - if you were able to enter the True Heir title, then there’s nothing new beyond that.

And for sure, we’re hoping to add a few more cases of words without clear 1-1 translations in the expanded version!

Fun concept and art style!

If you don’t mind feedback, I had some UI complaints: the textbox text constantly changing size/wrapping was very distracting, and when I was dragging a chess piece, I expected to drop it so its base would land on the target square, but I guess my finger had to land on the target square instead. On mobile, I didn’t love having to zoom in and out of the different times - it would be nice to always have one board centered, but with a timeline that lets me switch or scrub between which time period shows.

Keep it up, this is fun flavor and an interesting game!

So glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for the thoughts, and I can say that those things are indeed on our list for a future update.

Thank you! I’ve super busy with other games, so I’m a little behind on adding in the translations I have so far… But I’d really like to and was intended to do that by the end of the month. So I’d love to discuss adding Spanish, would be happy to talk on discord.

If you’re trying to find all the documents, enable the undiscovered documents count under the Archive Filter section for a nudge on which documents have terms you should search for next.

For solving the tree, there’s no walkthrough to my knowledge, but you can ask here (use Rot13 or other spoiler method) or in Jamwitch’s discord if you’re stuck on something!

If you do, please share!

That’s up to you to discover from clues in the documents! 🙂

Correct answers are only locked in in groups of 3, so you’ll still need two more people correct before they all lock in and it goes to 3/30.

Hi folks! I’ve finally made a Jamwitch discord specifically for folks to discuss our games. Please join if you’d like - you can share your results (try it, it’s low pressure but creates a nice sense of community) and chat about either Yliad or The Importance of Being Earnest.

Here’s the Discord invite.

Thank you! And noted about the font size. For now, zooming in should work - I just fixed the tree so it can scroll horizontally if needed.

I don’t know if we’d go for that idea, since we’d like the characters to keep their identities as characters and for players to be able to discuss the story, which would be hard if the characters were shifting around - but fun idea!

Thanks!

For corporate politics, or at least office politics, try the very entertaining and engrossing narrative deduction game A Case of Fraud. 🙂

I love to hear that, thanks! Yeah, sorting was the plan from the beginning, if we hadn’t had a bug with it. In the model of Her Story, it means that the search limit more readily shows you early documents, so it’s more of a challenge to track down the later documents - that gives the game some structure while still being overall non-linear in what you happen upon when. But I appreciate that there’s a fun aspect to having to reconstruct the order yourself too!

Fun idea about the pronunciation guide! In the context of the game we have the documents and tree only, no Trevosan to talk to, so I guess it’s up to the individual player. 🙂

(Rot13) V guvax lbhe dhrfgvba vf n ovg bs n fcbvyre fvapr vg’f abg vzzrqvngryl boivbhf gurl’er gval ng nyy, znlor lbh jbhyqa’g zvaq hfvat Ebg13 gb uvqr vg?

Ohg lrnu, jr unir gurve cbegenvgf, fb jr pna frr gurl’er gval crbcyr! Jr jrer vafcverq ol “Gur Obeebjref” puvyqera’f frevrf, nzbat bgure gnyrf bs gval crbcyr.

It sounds like you may have the right titles per name, but the names in the wrong place. Gel frnepuvat sbe Ylfan gb svaq fbzr pyhrf nobhg jurer Ybanen vf va gur gerr.

Notetaking per word is on my list for a future iteration, but I hadn’t considered notetaking per person! Cool idea, thanks!

Our direct inspirations are The Roottrees Are Dead and Her Story. The Return of the Obra Dinn is also foundational. If you want another small, fun family tree deduction game, try A Case of Fraud. You should also try Type Help and The Red Pearls of Borneo for a different and super fun narrative deduction mechanic. And we (Jamwitch) have two other small narrative deduction games, The Case of the Dungeon Descent and My Friends the Monster Trainers.

That’s what I’ve got off the top of my head! Enjoy!

I got you, I knew that would be a possibility with the update so I made sure the leftovers can still lock in!

It’s a bit of a steep start to get going for sure! If you haven’t, try searching the additional titles you see in the tree (cynai-til, etc) to see what you can learn about those people.

Yeah my thoughts exactly! I’m definitely thinking a tooltip will work since it’s ready access to the info if you need it, but you can also test your own memory of it.

Naq lrnu, jr nyfb jnag cynlref gb unir gb gel abiry sbezf bs jbeqf ol svthevat bhg gur zbecubybtl! Sbe abj, V znqr fher rirelguvat vf npprffvoyr whfg ol pyvpxvat gb frnepu, fvapr vg zvtug or n whzc gb punatr sebz pyvpxvat gb glcvat va lbhe bja guvat, ohg va n (fgvyy ulcbgurgvpny, bs pbhefr) rkcnaqrq irefvba bs gur tnzr V jbhyq ybir gb unir fbzr zber punyyratvat yrncf yvxr gung. V’z guvaxvat nal jbeq lbh pyvpx be frnepu sbe vf nqqrq gb n tybffnel jurer lbh pna nqq lbhe bja genafyngvba/abgrf, cre vaqvivqhny sbez - ol yvfgvat gurz fvqr ol fvqr gur zbecubybtl fubhyq orpbzr pyrne naq zbgvingr lbh gb svyy va tncf ol frnepuvat sbe lrg-hafrra sbezf.