The Daily Murder
The Daily Murder is a daily puzzle game where you solve a whodunnit murder mystery, generated daily. Make use of your CSI experts and a unique crime board of hex tiles to deduce your way to the murderer, the motive, and the method.
Inspired by games like Case of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Dinn, and numerous adventure games.
I've already spent the last two years working on the engine that procedurally generates the background story and characters for each murder, but I found the puzzle-solving mechanics lacking. So this is a newly redesigned UI that focuses more on the puzzles than the story. Up next is the combining of both to produce a compelling murder mystery with surprising motives, suspicious and quirky characters, and mind-boggling puzzles to satiate all types of sleuths!
I have used one piece of placeholder AI art while I prototype. If things go well, I would love to replace it with hand-crafted art some day in the future.
Please note: the version on itch.io does not have a new, different game daily because that is something that needs to be generated on the server side, and itch.io only supports client side single-page apps. More to come...
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Development log
- I finally put up a How To Play guide in the game - hope it helps any newcomers...61 days ago
- Improved user interface: Drag gestures, edge buttons, yarn lines64 days ago
- Announcing the New "The Daily Murder"79 days ago
- Still alive!Mar 26, 2024
- Development RoadmapAug 17, 2023
- Introducing The Daily MurderAug 17, 2023
Comments
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As others have mentioned, this is a really fun idea but the mechanics are very much not intuitive. My main issue has been with linking hexes, I was eventually able to get the cause of death button to show up after some confusion but I have found myself completely unable to get the search records button to show up when linking the digital archives, high school, and year. I feel like I have tried them in every possible order (as well as both zoomed out and zoomed in as I saw others mention not being able to get it to work unless they were zoomed in) and nothing I do seems to work. I don't think there's anything else I can do to make any progress without this so I guess I'm stuck there unfortunately.
I don't know how to get the records keeper, there is no hex of him in my board.
My headquarters hex only has forensics expert, attorney, and medical examiner
Just wanted to say, despite some difficulties figuring out how to make things work, even with the 'How to Play', I found this game idea/mechanic really unique and intriguing! Please keep working on it!
Cool idea but agree the interface is a huge problem.
I can't figure out how to use the yellow link hexes. The process is quite opaque. I have information to look up using the records keeper, but no combination seems to do anything. I also know which wound happened in what order, but no idea what to actually do with them to represent this information.
It was not obvious at first that I could rotate the hexes, but I had to figure out how to do it to open the combination lock. I then tried rotating the yellow links to make their gray lines point into their targets, but even that doesn't seem to do anything. This mechanic seems like a "read the author's mind" puzzle, unfortunately. What am I missing?
Update: I managed to get the yearbook by turning the arrows around the other way, and I identified the victim, but I can't then use the name to get any more information from the records keeper. I tried lining up the arrows the same way as for the yearbook, by pointing out of the Lookup Person edge (and many other combinations as well), but the hexes never light up and I can't get any response. Why is looking up a person different than getting information from an institution? Edit: I managed to get cause of death, but only by following the screenshot, which was completely counter-intuitive to me.
Edit2: Managed to finish the prototype. It would certainly help to have some sort of feedback when items are connected in the right order but aren't the right answers, or when the wrong kind of item is connected. I spent so long on two things: trying to connect the key to the locker (was that locker just a red herring?) and trying to connect names to the records keeper (wrong item) and the next of kin (wrong name). I think now that I've finished the prototype, I kind of understand the interface better, but it took a lot of trial and error. It'd be helpful to show specific examples before throwing the user into an actual puzzle. The screenshots were helpful but showed outright solutions to a few pieces of the one puzzle that's available. Hope you can generate more puzzles soon.
Please add some kind of tutorial to the new version, I have the Record Keeper attached to the school/year which are lit up but nothing I do adds more information and I have no idea what else to try.
Duly noted! I'll be making the UI more intuitive and will be adding some tooltips as well
For now, the record keepers edge turns into a button that you can press. I'll make that more intuitive soon.
Seconding this step being completely opaque. I've tried putting the school and year adjacent to the records keeper in many different ways, but I cannot get the edges to respond at all. I'm completely stuck here and can't find any more information about how I'm supposed to do this. Help, please? I like this puzzle method in general and would like to see more.
I just tried replaying after finishing the prototype, and I think there must be a bug or glitch somewhere on PC (I played on mobile first). Even knowing how the interface works and what the answers are, I am unable to get the records keeper to generate the yearbook. I have the two pieces connected and lit up, and yet the records keeper edge doesn't do anything. So I just went back to mobile and tried again, and there it works just fine.
Coming back to say that the yellow button that appears when you make a correct deduction (to get the yearbook for example) ONLY was clickable at certain zooms. It became unclickable if I was too zoomed out on the board.
Confirmed! Changing zoom level allowed the edge buttons to work properly. I encountered the same thing again later with unlocking the house; the turn key button wouldn't work when too zoomed out, but as soon as I zoomed in further, then it worked.
Fun game
thought there would me more than one but still a good game
Simple gameplay but enjoyable to play
Love it!!!