Five Day Detective
FREE DEMO. Full game expected 2025
Trailer:
He hates crime. All Inspector Dermot Dervish loathes more are early mornings, his boss, and any technology from the last thirty years. But he won’t need any of these. Armed with his trusty notebook, razor wit, and an assistant who’s trying to pretend she’s not a traffic warden, only Dermot can solve a series of shocking and intriguing murders, and bring the city’s criminal scum to justice.
Or let them go if he thinks they’ve got a good enough reason.
Controls: WASD (or arrows), EQ. Controllers supported.
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Available Languages
简体中文
Français
Deutsch
Italiano
日本語
Português (Brasileira)
Русский
Español (LatAm)
Known Bug List
-XY Octave Background to be fixed in browser version
Download
Development log
- Five Day Detective [Alpha Build for Testing]30 days ago
Comments
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I think it's cool, though the E/Q+arrow system isn't my thing. I agree with other comments, his walking speed could be a bit faster.
My gameplay (Spanish version). Spoilers!
Its beeen soo loong!! I'm glad to finally see the detective game released! Bunny hill horror was such a fun game to play! I'm looking forward to playing this one XD
Hi Vaken, good to see you back! Hope you enjoy it :)
(minor spoilers for players) I enjoyed playing through the game! I love how you're creating a different game than your usual ones and I like the direction its going in. Now for the critiques! The major issue is same as the rest of the comments - the walking starts slow and the whole animation kicks off - that feels very slow, it'd be better if the indicator popped up when walking by an item but I read how you want to keep items hidden, so a workaround might be to give hints after a little time of being lost in the form of thoughts of the main character showing up in a dialogue box - it could be riddles ("I should probably call the store", "Where did I last see paper? I believe it was in my office.", "What did my superintendent tell me to do? I should get to it!" ) or show the indicator only for a brief window, or maybe bolden or color the interactable items in a slightlyyy different color which can only be noticed if a player is focused enough which might be a good workaround, just some ideas! XD. Then, my game hung when wrong-un told me that my name was written on the wall. I could keep calling the store over and over when I first got the phonebook and called. It might also be helpful if things of notice were written in the journal such as ("Trash outside the police station, its a miracle noone has burnt it yet.", "why is the trash outside the basement window?", "I'm done with the job, I'd best report to ma'am") like little scribbles or thoughts. I got stuck on finding items or how to progress for a long time and coupled with the slow starting movement and having to stutter walk, it took a long time!XD
I enjoyed it and look forward to the full version, (I'll play it as well after you make any changes just to test it out)
Thanks for your comments- glad you had fun!
We have actually given in to popular demand and added hotspots to the next build of the game. This will be uploaded soon (we've also fixed the Wrong Un bug).
We haven't given in to demand with the puzzles yet, though! I think these are hard but fair ;)
I'll keep you posted on the full version. This could be some time off but we do have the main coding elements and most of the story done now.
Was a fun little experience. Liked the puns. Characters do be pretty damn dense, but not annoyingly so. Liked the heavy "Britishness" as well. Not something you see too often in games nowadays. Though one thing I'd like to see changed is having interaction prompts show up while walking. Now I had to stutter walk a bunch to find the interactions.
Thanks for your comment! We're umming and arring a bit about the prompts/ hotspots. The worry is, it might make it too easy if we show every interactable object, but this is certainly something we'll think about for the full game.
Heh, the game wasn't intended to be heavily British- maybe that's just how it came out XD
This needs to be 100% mouse-driven, like the intuitive adventure games of the 90s. Clicking somewhere should path-find to it and interact with it if it’s interactive. Hovering something should change the cursor to show whether it’s interactive. These innovations are more than 30 years old now.
We wanted to go with keyboard/ controller character movement for this one from the start. Sure, some people will prefer using a mouse and cursor, but this is the road we've gone down, and there's no turning back now.
I see no reason why the keyboard controls couldn’t coexist with a mouse input system.
I like where the game is going definitely. I do have a few critiques though:
-One of the biggest, and hopefully easiest to address, is that 'interact' icons only appear while the character is stationary. I feel like I have to come to a full stop next to every piece of scenery to see if it's interactable or not. Which leads on to the next thing,
-Movement feels a little bit clunky. I think that what's happening is that the entire 'walk' animation needs to finish before the character stops moving, which means there's a significant delay after releasing the movement key before I actually halt.
-Inventory navigation is a bit slow. I think that you could make the entire game work with only WASD/arrows, no QE needed actually. One of the things that could be changed easily is that if I try to combine items, after I select one pairing I have to select the initial item again before I can try another. So to clarify, instead I could select item A, then select item B. If the two don't match, I can immediately try item A and item C, without having to select item A again.
-As a more overarching item, it would be nice if I could skip some interactions if they obviously aren't going to be helpful. I had some ideas of what I was going to have to accomplish, but I was forced to talk to the perp about every new piece of evidence before proceeding. That makes scripting a lot more complicated I know, but I think overall that will make the game feel a lot smoother and more intuitive.
-Oh yes, I did encounter one bug. Sometimes after interacting with bad 'un the game locked up and I couldn't move or open my inventory. I was able to open the settings and quit to menu, then continue, and that fixed the problem. At least one time was showing him the handbag after already talking to him about it.
There are a couple other rough edges, but those are the biggest issues. Don't get my critiques wrong, I really like where the game is going, there are just some things that can be improved. Keep it up!
Thanks for your comments! Yeah, we'll certainly have a look at the movement. The 'interact' is a bit tricky. Part of the reason for having a controllable character was to try and avoid the pixel hunting you get in a lot of traditional point and clicks. Obviously stopping everywhere is similar but making it obvious what's interactable on a screen might make things too easy. We'll have to have a think about this, and your other comments. Glad you liked it :)
Could you hook it up to a proximity sensor that just toggles the visibility of the icons if the character is, say, ~2 feet or less away from the interactable? Or would that still make it too easy?
One solution that I've seen some more 'traditional' point-n-click games use is to make a little periodic twinkle, just a little subtle one, on stuff that can be interacted with. I'm not sure that that solution would work as well for 5DD though, if only because of the art style. But perhaps something along those lines could be workable, a tiny animation, or even a fly circling around an item you can pick up, idk, it's your game and I'm just spitballing here lol.
Spitballing is good! Think I'm gonna take tonight off, and coder Mike and I can talk it over for the main demo build and see what we come up with. It might be that this would just be less frustrating if the character's movement was changed to come to a dead stop before the walk cycle was over. There'd be a trade off with the animation quality though. There always seems to be a trade off!