PAPER PRECINCT

What a cliffhanger!

It's a fun idea. Visual Basic was a pretty ideal choice for this kind of gameplay. The point'n'clicking was fine, and I was happy to find at least a couple of spots to click that were there just to add some flavour. I guess the charming pencilled graphics also made it a bit less convenient to make the scenes update at all (apart from the rectangles placed like Penny).

I think the challenge of juggling windows could be taken further! Having more and more windows open that are still somehow at the same "location", for example. However, the way Penny moved around was a bit unintuitive to me (maybe that's another aspect of the challenge though): having to make sure the new location is first opened by Penny in the current room, then clicking to pop the character window out, then dragging the portrait. A couple of times I knew I was going to move, so my first step was to click Penny, but then I was "too far away" from the exit.

Still speaking of the windows, I wonder how much Visual Basic is capable of, compared to the various window-based games that have been submitted to Ludum Dares, for example. Is it possible to instruct the windows to move around on the screen, or to resize, based on a timer? The shootout sequence would be cool if based around "suspects" being individual windows, moving around and hiding behind other windows. You already have a known version of Windows and a known screen size, so there's less to account for.

I'm glad I waited until I got to play with audio. It reminded me of some LucasArts / Sierra era games, especially the HQ theme.

Love the noir setting and the drawings.
Couldn't get the sound to work, even tried messing a bit with Win3.11 control panel.

Thanks for the feedback @Aurel300!

I did experiment with moving windows based on a timer - the alarm clock at the beginning does exactly this. But the screen redraw in my emulated win3.11 environment was so slow that it was pretty painful to test. There's definitely a lot that could be done to add gameplay, but for me this was more of a 'development experience', than 'make a good game'. Drawing graphics 'offline', using clunky visual basic editor, even making the midi work (somewhat) involved using obscure microsoft tools to tag midi as 'windows general midi' to avoid triggering a warning popup every time a midi file was played - each of these was an interesting novelty or obstacle but I wouldn't want to continue working this way.

Overall this was one of those times where 'the (development) journey was more interesting than the destination', which isn't really ideal when you're making games for others to play, but nonetheless it made for an interesting jam.

I enjoyed the throwback to Window 3.11 a lot! I always adore how much you put thought and love not only into the jam theme and the execution, but also your games' style and story. This one is no exception, I instantly liked the character. Sure, the game's short, but it's special. To be honest I didn't think it would be possible to utilize several windows like that with Visual Basic.