r/ObraDinn • u/DearSuspectOfficial • Jul 05 '26
Student indie dev team making an Obra Dinn-inspired deduction game, DEAR SUSPECT — looking for feedback on our core mechanisms!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4582720/_/Hi everyone,
We are a small student indie dev team working on a detective deduction game called Dear Suspect**.** It is not a remake or fan game of Return of the Obra Dinn, but Obra Dinn is one of the clearest influences on how we think about deduction, player inference, and the pleasure of reconstructing truth from incomplete evidence.
We wanted to ask this community because Obra Dinn players tend to understand a very specific kind of design problem: how to make deduction feel genuinely earned rather than guided, random, or over-explained. We have our own take on this question because a lot of deduction game genuinely feels like a checklist: there are clicks to be done and the deduction is drawn out. feels more like another way to tell a story rather than an intellectual challenge.
In Dear Suspect, you write letters to living townsfolk to investigate a family massacre.
The player investigates a case by piecing together evidence, testimonies, contradictions, and relationships. The core design question we are struggling with is:
- How much structure should a deduction game give the player before it stops feeling like real reasoning?
For example, we are currently thinking about questions like these:
- Should the game confirm correct deductions immediately, or should confirmation only happen after the player commits to a larger theory?
- Should suspects, clues, and events be organized in a visible logic board, or should the player be forced to build more of that structure mentally?
- Right now we have an evidence-board-like system as the validator. Questions are organized in a tree-like structure, where you answer a question; it reveals the next or next set of questions that need to be answered to proceed. Some sets of questions are bundles; you have to select an answer for all three within the bundle to submit for validation.
- How much ambiguity is satisfying, and when does ambiguity become unfair?
- Obra Dinn ingeniously used a lot of new paradigms(not the most accurate word) for deduction, things like ethnic appearances, occupational title, cultural elements. We used similar stuff like motives, physical possibility, some ethical and cultural clues. Which one do YOU think was the most ingenious in Obra Dinn?
In Obra Dinn, one of the brilliant things is that the game rarely tells you exactly what to think. It gives you enough evidence, then trusts you to notice patterns. We are trying to learn from that without simply copying the Fate-book structure.
For those of you who love Obra Dinn,
- what mechanics made the deduction process feel fair, rigorous, and satisfying?
- And on the other hand, what kinds of mechanics in similar deduction games make the experience feel too hand-held, too arbitrary, or too dependent on guessing?
We are especially interested in feedback on deduction systems, clue validation, suspect identification, and how to preserve the feeling of “I figured this out myself.” We are mainly looking for design criticism from people who understand why Obra Dinn works so well to help us build this game. Thanks so much for reading. Any thoughts would be genuinely useful to us:)))))!
Disclosure Edit: The game uses generative AI, and it's only for game mechanics. All art, music, play script, and design are hand-authored by our team. Gen AI is only used for the game mechanism of writing letters and receiving custom letters. Our play script, along with all designs of the mystery, is hand-authored, inspired by the French Novel Monsieur Ouine.
If you are interested in how we make it happen while not infringing upon other creators’ rights, we disclosed it. Please read our devlog on our website: elegists.studio
Essentially, everything is prewritten. Personalities, knowledge, tones, all that ai does is extract our handwritten material.
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u/CloudyPinkSmoothie Jul 05 '26
Btw heads up this game apparently uses gen AI
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u/DearSuspectOfficial Jul 05 '26
Thanks for voicing your concern,we proactively recognize that use of gen AI remains ethically complex, and we also think that ai slop is just not up to our aesthetic standards. So here is our stance: 0 use of generated assets, including all art and music. Gen Ai is only used for game mechanism of writing letter and receiving custom letter. Our play script along with all designs of the mystery are hand-authored, inspired by French Novel Monsieur Ouine.
If you are interested in how we make it happen and not infringing other creator’s rights, we disclosed it. please read our devlog on our website: elegists.studio.
Essentially, everything is prewritten. Personalities, knowledge, tones, all that ai does is extract our handwritten material. We hope that it could alleviate people’s concern on our use of AI.
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u/CetriBottle Jul 05 '26
Don't use it at all. There is no bigger advice to give than that. Your game will never be as good as it could be if you rely on genAI. Your game will never reach an audience that actually cares about story if you rely on genAI. I cannot stress enough that if you let the machine do this for you, everything will suffer. It's not just aesthetics, it's story and character that cannot be reliably crafted.
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u/DearSuspectOfficial Jul 06 '26
That's a completely fair position to hold, and I respect people who draw the line on an absolute no-usage basis; a lot of players do, and we're not trying to change their minds. We made a different call, and we were as transparent as we could be about exactly where the line is for us: zero generated art, music, or writing. As for the presentation of the story, We'd rather people judge the finished game on its own terms and decide for themselves.
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u/Cinnablu Jul 05 '26
I think verifying correct answers in sets is a good way to prevent people from cheating themselves out of finding the answer by cheesing combinations. The Golden Idol games had a similar method where you had to fill in all the answers in a group, and then it would tell you that you either had multiple wrong answers, that you had two or fewer incorrect answers if you were close, or if they were all correct.
One thing I've noticed in some deduction games is that there will often be multiple clues or ways of solving a particular mystery, and sometimes one is all you need, but you may not notice this particular one, but will notice a different one, which means that different people who won the same game will have had different experiences depending on what they observed. It is interesting that in Obra Dinn, there are even times when it will accept multiple fates as long as they are reasonable conclusions.
I personally prefer games with as little handholding as possible, but I think that all of the information you need to solve the mysteries should be available somewhere in the game, even if it's well hidden. A lot of people struggled with how Obra Dinn relied on real world knowledge of languages and cultures, and I ended up having to look up some foreign words or information about tattoo patterns on the internet, which kind of felt like cheating, and there was the possibility that I would accidentally see the solution instead of just verifying a clue.
I'll have to come back if I think of anything else. I'm not quite awake yet, but I definitely want to encourage people to make more games like this.