[UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

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Ferdielance
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[UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Ferdielance »

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Spoiler warning: This fancase contains spoilers for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice, and an implied spoiler for Spirit of Justice.

It's not easy going legitimate. When Winfred Kitaki is fatally shot behind the counter of the Kitaki Bakery, Wocky is charged with premeditated murder.

But don't worry! Apollo Justice is visiting from Kurain, and he has a plan, a witness, and an airtight argument.

The only problem is, he also has the worst defendant ever.


Features:

This is the inaugural case for UCANT, the Unity Custom Adventure Novel Toolkit! Features include high-definition graphics, customizable text display speed, sticky notes, and a Samurai Wolfman.
Download Links

If you are using a Mac, it may be necessary to right-click/control-click and give the executable permission to run.

PC Version

Mac Version

I appreciate feedback, comments, and bug reports.




Screenshots:
Spoiler : Preview screenshots :
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Credits:
Spoiler : Credits, spoilers ahead :
All Ace Attorney assets, trademarks, characters, and settings belong to Capcom Co., Ltd., which does not endorse this fancase in any way.

Turnabout Bakeshop
Designed, written, and scripted by FerdieLance

Unity components:
Unity Game Engine developed by Unity Technologies
UCANT Casemaker by Ferdielance
Additional UCANT assistance by Trybien
Reorderable List package by Rotorz, used under the MIT License

Beta testers:
The Armenator
Enthalpy
IKG Productions
Tiagofvarela
Trybien
Vagrant

Additional Graphic Assets:
Viola hat base sprite - Umineko no Naku Koro ni sprite edited by FerdieLance
Map - Edited from Capcom assets by FerdieLance
Wolf head - Karen Arnold
Kitchen BG base - ぐったりにゃんこ
Handshake - Dreamstime stock photos
Viola 'Hold It' frame - jokantola
Fox woodcut - Harrison Weir
Pie images:
* Igleheart's Cake Secrets (1922)
* Scott Bauer, USDA
* RJ Snider
* getdrawings.com

Additional Music:
* Kitaki Commercial ("Family Business") - Zebestian
* Samurai Wolfman stinger cue - Hasegawa Tomoki
* Trials and Tribulations Court Remix - MC Bomber (orpheusedm)
* Confession, from Kamaitachi no Yoru - Kota Kano
* Recollection, from Kamaitachi no Yoru - Kota Kano
* Viola's theme, from Crusaders of Centy - Motokazu Shinoda
* Hungry Like the Wolf (Duran Duran) Remix - allthings8bit
* Wocky GS Appellate Project Remix - Enter the Jaws Theme
* Post-Trial, from True Fortune - Noriyuki Iwadare
* Credits, Daily Training - Scaredsim

Special Thanks
To other AA casemaker developers for inspiration...

...and to my wife, for her patience, insight, and support.
Last edited by Ferdielance on Sat Jul 06, 2019 4:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Trybien
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Trybien »

Congratulations on finally releasing Turnabout Bakeshop, Ferdie! Beta-testing was a blast, and I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did!
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by DWaM »

While I utterly failed in giving a report in time, I did play a beta of this and you should absolutely give this a play.

Also isn't it a good time to allow non-AAO games to post in 'Your Trials'? I feel like they're bound to get more attention there. Especially if people here only for the cases don't even bother checking the general chatting section.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by 123fendas »

Oh, it's you, Ferdilance! The mushroom person! I saw this on r/AceAttorney, but I didn't know it was the mushroom person.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Kroki »

Oh boy, I'm into that.
I'll play this at some point.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Enthalpy »

Worst defendant ever indeed. As another one of the testers for Bakeshop, this was a really good case!
DWaM wrote:Also isn't it a good time to allow non-AAO games to post in 'Your Trials'? I feel like they're bound to get more attention there. Especially if people here only for the cases don't even bother checking the general chatting section.
I'm with DWaM on this one, so moved. If people want to discuss this, I'll set up a separate topic.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Vagrant »

I kinda (lol) playtested this and it was good. I suggest you play it
coming soon

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¿Acid Rain?
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by ¿Acid Rain? »

Hey, I gave this a shot and figured I may as well throw some feedback at you.
Spoiler : Story :
Overall, this was a well-written, well-plotted, and well-executed game. The writing was consistent, the characters were true to their canon personalities, and I didn't have any problems with the logic or pacing. There were some minor issues, I thought, and I'll get to them in a second, but Turnabout Bakeshop gets my stamp of approval. This was fun, and, clearly, a lot of effort went into it, even setting aside the whole, y'know, custom engine thing.

As for the minor issues I had, there were really only two that are worth mentioning, and I think they're sorta connected. The writing in Turnabout Bakeshop was extremely consistent - I don't remember any instances where the writing falters, and that's pretty impressive. On the other hand, though, there weren't many instances where I was really invested. With the exception of the very last scene in the lobby (which I really enjoyed), Bakeshop was kinda... flat? Or maybe "level" would be a better word? I honestly think that there was a lot of cleverness baked into (lol) Bakeshop, like Gavin keeping Marshall and Gumshoe apart, and just Wocky's flip-flopping in general, but none of the connections or discoveries I made got me actually excited. In a similar vein, none of the character moments hit home for me until the very end. And I realize that Bakeshop is intended to be on the easier side of AA fancases, which might be part of it, but I think it has more to do with lack of buildup and/or reaction. For example, Gumshoe swings in with five pieces of pretty damning evidence and the defense's response is more "Gee, that's a lot of evidence," than "Oh, $#&%!" from what I can remember. I don't necessarily think that this is a "wrong" choice, so to speak, but it does contribute to the other minor problem I had, which is that it took me a very long time to figure out what Turnabout Bakeshop was supposed to be. Part of the issue here is that the last thing I played by you was Phantasmagoria of Betrayal. So when I booted up the game and was greeted with a murder including a Samurai Wolfman, multiple quirky ex-gangsters, and a logical fixation on pies, I was pretty darn certain that this was going to be a comedy. Every time, man, it was like: "Okay, the defendant is adding a comical number of new statements to his testimony at once," and I'd be like "Okay, here it is - this is where the game collapses in Phantasmagoria 2," and then it just never did. Bakeshop's got jokes, it's got puzzles, it's got tragedies, and all of it is served to the player evenly, which that made it difficult to tell what the focus was (at least for me). I eventually realized that what I was playing was an AA-style murder mystery with a focus on Wocky Kitaki's character arc, but it took me until about the halfway mark to do so. Really, I should have known better - as a pseudo-advertisement for UCANT, I should have expected Bakeshop to be a pretty standard Ace Attorney experience, so this is at least partially on me.

And I realize that I just spent about three times as many characters writing about issues I deemed as "minor" than I did glossing over every else. Whoops. Lemme try to remedy that... As I mentioned a couple times, I really liked the end scene with Wocky. Made my eyes sting a little, if I'm being honest. Poor guy. Oh, and "You need to take that vacation. Now." I enjoyed the Plan/Plan?/Plan?! tab - that was a fun inclusion, both as a comedic outlet and as a map of Wocky's development. The counter-cross-examination sequence was fun, though I gotta wonder why there was only one of them. In conclusion: I really liked Bakeshop; it was a lot of fun.
Spoiler : Presentation :
UCANT looks technically impressive, though, that's really all I'm qualified to say on the matter. I did experience a small glitch (I think?) where the characters' talking blip noises cut out twenty frames or so from the end. There was some odd stuff happening with what I can only assume is automatic wait timers tied to punctuation? Like, at some point, there starting being a small pause between the "0." and the "40" in "0.40 caliber" that I swear wasn't there for most of the game. Also, there was always a small pause between the period at the end of the sentence and the closing quotation mark (That is actually an apostrophe?) if a character was quoting someone else. Not that that's important, but it was odd enough for me to notice multiple times. Also - back to that apostrophe thing - those were all apostrophes, right? I don't remember ever seeing an actual quotation mark in Turnabout Bakeshop. Dunno if I'm missing something with that.

Also, I feel like there should be some sort of border or division between the two halves of the screen, if not the four quarters. Just my personal taste.
Spoiler-Free Review: Go play Turnabout Bakeshop.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by SuperAj3 »

I haven't finished playing the beta of this but it's been really good so far! Clever use of sprites, a nice layout and an interesting new structure to the court proceeding!
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Ferdielance »

Acid Rain: Thank you for the detailed review!
Spoiler : Comments :
Another player also noted that the case wasn't emotionally engaging enough until the endgame. I think this is in part because I didn't find enough space for Wocky and Plum to speak early on, and didn't make Klavier enough of a threat when that pile of evidence came out. Making the player care about the defendant in a non-investigation case is hard enough as it is, and it's even harder when the plot ends up centering heavily on lawyer tricks.

Part of what I wanted to do was to establish that Apollo is now a very experienced lawyer who won't get flustered easily, and who knows how to plan - and who is still thrown by Wocky's improvisation. But I overplayed that too much, I think. It might have been better to have the evidence bomb hit, then to have Klavier press the psychological advantage and make Apollo doubt what he knows about Wocky!

But the biggest explanation for some of the writing issues you noticed was this: the competition I wrote this for, "I'll Face Myself", emphasized writing to try to confront my own weaknesses as an author. From my entry post:
My first weakness is trial segments, and my strength is investigations.
My second weakness is traditional CEs, and my strength is gimmick puzzles.
My third weaknesss is writing stories where there is someone who deliberately kills, and my strength is coming up with accidental deaths that look like murder, or cases where nobody even really dies. This gets predictable.
My fourth weakness is maintaining a single plot thread within a single genre with reasonably consistent tone. My strength is genre-breaking.

So if I entered this it would be to make a by-the-book trial-only case with no presentational gimmicks, where someone really made a plan to kill a human being and carried it out.
I ended up slipping on the 'no presentational gimmicks' count, since the 'plan' tab was too good to not do. But this was definitely an exercise in trying to control my excesses, and perhaps it could have used a little less restraint.

On the timing issues: that's definitely a bug related to how UCANT puts in auto-pauses. By default, there's a pause after any period and a smaller pause after every comma, except in an ellipsis or a few other special cases. To escape that pause, you need to put <.>. It looks like I missed one of the <.>40 caliber pause escapes. Putting in the pause escapes manually is annoying, but not as annoying as putting <p20> or whatever after every period!

Thanks again!
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Blackrune »

I liked this case. It was refreshing to play something more simple and the little extra features and GUI from the custom engine gave it a unique touch.

It seems to be doing more processing than I feel it ought to, though. I can even hear it from my PC whenever text is in the process of being typed out and, sure enough, full CPU usage at those moments. Didn't affect playability, but... just leaving that note here, I guess.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Semper Solus »

So, I'm running it on Wine, and whenever I click out of the game, I can't click back in. Cursor goes back to the system default. If I didn't save recently, I lose gameplay data.

It's probably not that important, I can technically still play this, and in a way it's my fault for not using an OS compatible with one of the two versions you uploaded (I'm on Lubuntu 18.10). I just figured I should bring it up.

EDIT:
I've played the game to the end now (music didn't play).
What I liked most about it was that, out of all the games I was introduced to on this forum,
Spoiler : These probably aren't spoilers, but just in case... :
this is the one that made me feel the most like I was playing as a lawyer. Having a "Plan" tab made you stop being a loose cannon who does whatever he wants, whether it's to find the truth :phoenix:, get the verdict you want :fran:, or engage in personal vendettas :godot: . You're a lawyer who helps his client the way he wants to be helped. That's your job.
The execution was very well done.
I know the case was just to show off UCANT, but it had merit. I know next to nothing about Unity, but I hope UCANT has as well.
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Ferdielance »

Thanks for the comments and issue reports!

Blackrune: I think this has to do with how I'm handling dialogue pauses; I may be too greedy with my while-loop.

Semper Solus: There IS a way to make a Linux distributable in Unity! I just don't have a Linux box to test it on. It's probably best to make one on a Linux system, but I could try to make one and send it to you?
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by ikuzonos »

Hello there! I've been playing through this case and enjoying myself, but I'm really stuck and I'm wondering if someone could give me a hand?
Spoiler : :
I'm at Wocky's CE; I've gotten him to add the five statements about not tampering with the scene, but I can't figure out how to progress from there? I tried presenting both the glass shards and the fireworks on the statements about the cutter and the transceivers respectively, but both times Apollo said he couldn't go anywhere with it, and everything else I've tried has gotten me a penalty and I've already spent a good 15 minutes on this CE.
Thank you in advance! I really want to see how this case ends :D
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Re: [UCANT] Turnabout Bakeshop (Released!)

Post by Ferdielance »

Spoiler : Hint :
This is tricky, but if it’s the part I think you’re referring to, one piece of evidence will show, on close examination, a definite reason to think that something was moved. Rather than focus on things that might have been done to set up a crime, look for what might have been removed after the fact.
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
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