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mtrc
@mtrc

A screenshot from a Phoenix Wright-style game. You are talking to your editor about why you're late for work.

Earlier this year I played the Phoenix Wright trilogy (I only got about halfway through, I need to go back and finish it) and remembered why I loved the games so much. They're simple but fun, and the interface and verbs the player has feel really good to use. I kept thinking how simple the setup is, and how I didn't see a lot of indies riff on the format/structure - although I might just not follow the right interactive fiction/visual novel circles (update: see Cass' comments for lots of Phoenix Wright-adjacent games!).

The Phoenix Wright games can be annoying, especially when Videogame Logic rears its ugly head, but the thing I found myself thinking a lot while playing it was that I really wish I could tell someone what someone else had said to me. I feel this way a lot in games, but the simple evidence-based interface of Phoenix Wright made it feel even more relevant. Often this would clumsily manifest by you showing someone some evidence, which would then make Phoenix explain something he'd been told. But I kept thinking, it'd be great if dialogue itself was evidence. And then I thought about making a game about being a journalist.

A screenshot from a Phoenix Wright-style game. You're talking to someone in a park, and asking if you can begin an interview with them.

Implementing the Phoenix Wright-style engine was quite simple - I can't pretend I've added every feature, but the basics are there and it's really only got a few moving parts, which I like. I used Yarn for the dialogue system which... I mostly understand, and quite like. You can gain, look at and use inventory items, walk between locations, talk to people, I added in things like sprite swapping and dialogue choices. It was quite fun to implement, and didn't take long (although you can see it's a bit ugly and mostly uses prototype art).

The premise of the game is that you're a journalist, and each 'case' is a story instead. Like Phoenix Wright, you go and chat to people, solve simple puzzles, and gather evidence. However, you have two inventories - one for items, like a normal adventure game, and one for recorded dialogue. You can opt to interview people, and when you do, anything they say gets added to this log. Interviews are special, you only get to do them once, and you can't always ask everything. I wanted them to feel tense, and to reward the player for thinking about which questions to ask. If you don't prepare for an interview, you might not get the quotes you need, which might derail your investigation (or rather, stop you from getting the ending you want). Quotes can be presented like inventory to other people, but as a journalist you have to be cautious who you share your knowledge with. You can also be told things off the record, meaning you keep a record of the item but can't quote it or show it to anyone.

A screenshot from a Phoenix Wright-style game. This shows the front page of a newspaper, with selectable paragraphs that you can paste quotes into.

Each day in a Phoenix Wright case ends with a courtroom scene, which is a significant chunk of content and a great way to add climactic moments. Journalists don't (usually) go to court, so I envisaged each day ending with you writing a story instead. Here, you choose quotes and photos from the day to write a piece, which is then published. The piece you write influences the story both in the short term (what happens the next day) and the long term (what happens over the course of the whole game). Obviously, there's a lot of potential branching there, so some quotes will collapse into the same story element, and there might only be 3-4 effects each story can have, but finding the right combination of quotes should feel like evidence alchemy, figuring out what might sway the public one way or another.

The quoting interface from the game. It looks like normal dialogue, but it has a button to scroll through dialogue and 'quote' some of it.

Back to the newspaper layout view, the selected quote is pasted into a paragraph, and the main character narrates how they incorporate the quote into the article.

Interviews kind of take the place of the courtroom scenes - some are low-key, but are still tense as you need to get evidence. But challenging an important person to an interview that could expose them should feel really scary, not unlike cross-examination in Phoenix Wright. Can you get them to admit something they shouldn't, or have an out-of-character snap?

I haven't shelved the Journalist game, so it's more in the 'sleeping' category, but I put it away because I found the writing too hard to do this year. Writing seems to be something I find hard to do if the background stress levels are too high, probably because this kind of writing and narrative design requires you to plan a lot of threads out simultaneously, and lately my brain just isn't quiet enough to do it. I hope I get a chance to go back to it - my plan was to just write the 'tutorial' story as an example of how the game would work. It mostly had the code it needed for it, and I even had a sketch of the case done. So maybe someday I'll come back to it.

Another example of dialogue selection, this time it has a black and white filter and a red button that says OFF THE RECORD instead of the normal quote button.


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in reply to @mtrc's post:

not the point of this post, but there are a ton of phoenix wright-ish games. off the top of my head: murder by numbers, contradiction: spot the liar!, the centennial case: a shijima story, paradise killer, danganronpa, hotel dusk: room 215 (and its sequel lost window: the secret of cape west), probably loads more even i'm not aware of.

also phoenix wright is itself building on on many early japanese adventure mystery games, like the portopia serial murder case (arguably the first japanese adventure game, directed by yuji horii of dragon quest fame), snatcher and policenauts (directed by hideo kojima), famicom detective club, the silver case, and again, probably loads more i'm not aware of.

Thank you for this! I definitely phrased it poorly in the post, it made it sound like no other detective games exist haha. I was thinking of Murder By Numbers when I wrote it, I didn't know about a lot of these though. It's reminded me I keep meaning to play Snatcher and Policenauts but have never set aside time. I should do that ^_^

snatcher and policenauts are both very interesting and very flawed, which is to be expected from kojima. snatcher is overall better i think, if you play it definitely play the sega cd version. the third disc of the sega cd version is one 30 minute long cutscene that wraps up the story in the dumbest way possible.

policenauts is.... uh.... hornier? it is in some ways more ambitious, the only versions available in english are the saturn and playstation versions which are fine but imo inferior to the pc-98 version, which is only in japanese.

I really like this idea! Some of the games, I don't know which, do have situations where what people tell you comes into your inventory as a "statement", so it does exist in Ace Attorney, but I guess it suffers from the "but I think this is relevant, how is that moreso?" problem you come up against in it sometimes!

This sounds cool! And unlike court cases, news articles can have a gradient of success: could be clicks, or copies sold, depending on era. In both cases you'd prob wanna make it more of a meritocracy than the reality lol.

Norco might be worth playing as a reference point: at some point you get a dictaphone, and from then on you can click a Record icon next to any line of dialogue someone's said to you, then play it back at some other NPC later. You have limited space on it, so have to decide what to trash to make room for what seems useful.

That's a great point about the gradient of success thing! It would be cool to have the tradeoff of writing a good piece vs. writing the piece your editor wants vs. writing the piece that sells copies.

I forgot I played Norco and I couldn't believe it when I saw the dictaphone bit in there, it was exactly what I hoped for! I kinda wish it had been used throughout the game, it was such a good idea. I remember being annoyed about the limit though 😅