Dream Team (Captain Dreamcast)

In the far-off space year 2024, everybody has Naivigators on their phones: Smart AI assistants that make everyday life easier. 

Poor Joe saved up for months to afford his own Naivigator, but Vreena was not what he expected: She's lazy, incompetent, spends all day on the couch watching TV and is kind of an AI supremacist. But she's cute, so it's ok (her words).

When Vreena decides on a whim that she wants to learn more about what it means to be human, it's the beginning of the greatest detective adventure you have seen since opening this itch page.

Controls (Controller):

• A - Advance text, talk when available, confirm
• B - Run, back
• X - Talk to Vreena (not in web and not when disabled)
• Y - Look around the scene
• Start - Hold to skip dialog / Start game on title screen / Confirm Vreena Question

Controls (Keyboard):

• A - Advance text, talk when available, confirm
• S - Run, back
• Q - Talk to Vreena (not in web and not when disabled)
• W - Look around the scene
• Enter - Hold to skip dialog / Start game on title screen / Confirm Vreena Question
• Keyboard Input - Ask Vreena question on question screen
  

I tried doing a detective VN for the last Ludum Dare, and I liked it so much that I wanted to pick the genre for my next attempt at a larger game.  The game does feel a bit smaller than the Ludum Dare one, despite me having spent the full time between Demo Days on it. Not sure how that works.

Despite the theme, there's only a small AI gimmick in here: You can ask Vreena questions during the investigation and she replies to them in character (maybe). I liked how you could always ask Mega Man for help in the Battle Network series, so the idea kinda came from that. Querying the OpenAI api requires calls to the API, and I'm not too hot on just randomly connecting to the internet from my random game, so you can opt out of it during the beginning. It also doesn't work from HTML5, it's a bit more involved to get it working with Emscripten and I ran out of time. Also forgot to write out some questions, so if the dialog flow ever feels like the protagonist is answering his own questions for some reason, it was probably one of those.

The dialog was written by me (as you might be able to tell) and none of the art was AI generated either. A fun minigame is "Which game was this sprite traced from" though.

Thanks a lot for trying it out! Please let me know what you think!

Original release date: 03/03/2023