My Friends the Monster Trainers
👾 Gotta deduce 'em all!
Stuck at home while your friends go catch monsters and battle trainers, can you still complete your Monster Tracker? Follow the story and search for clues in your friends' letters in this short narrative deduction game.
How to play
- Read letters from your friends and follow their monster-collecting adventures.
- Use your powers of observation and deduction to identify the appearance, alignment, moves, and habitat of the monsters.
- Click on the dropdowns in the Monster Tracker to fill in the details, then click Validate.
- Each time you identify three monsters, you'll get more letters that you can open to see what happens next in the story. Click the mailbox!
- Optionally, take notes on each monster's page, the Notes page, and fill in the Alignment page to track strengths and weaknesses.
Progress is saved to your browser local storage.
Credits
Originally created in 72 hours for Ludum Dare 58. This is a post-jam version with additional updates. The theme was "Collector".
- Celia did the design, writing, and code.
- Rose did the art.
- Hunter helped with the monster names.
- Music: "Out And About" by FesliyanStudios
- Sounds: SubspaceAudio, Rhodesmas, HarpyHarpHarp, SkyernAklea, Nomracer
⚠️ Some comments have spoilers, so be cautious reading them before playing!
After playing, if you want to talk spoilers, try the html details technique.
Development log
Comments
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I really liked it!! The format was really nice, as well as the length! It provided a cute and enjoyable afternoon before the weekend 🥰
GAME COMPLETE!!!🎉🎉🎉
I got everyone except for Vursus! (Needless to say, I had to cheat with Pharolith.)
EDIT: I completed the game!
I got teary eye towards the end. A wonderful experience.
Monument monster? Monument Mythos reference??? (very fun game :3)
Afraid not, I just had to google that! Glad you enjoyed.
Very cute, was a good way to wile away the time as my friend recommended! Though I've never played a deduction game before, I was surprised by how much redundant info there was. It's almost like the game was designed around different unlock paths to the next letter, even though I used every available bit of information as it came, so alternative paths would have needed blind guessing.
Very fun game. It was a lot of fun reading the letters trying to figure out what monsters used what. I honestly guessed with part of the puzzles, but overall a joy to play and I look forward to trying more of your games.
That was so fun and really satisfying to complete !!! I like the unique way the "pokedex" was embedded as well. Great presentation and very fun.
This was an absolutely delightful bite-sized puzzle game! Really captures the Pokemon-style whimsy, and the monster designs are very cute. The two friends' different perspectives on events are fun too!
So cute! It feels like a wonderful tribute to monsters-collecting games but with its own mechanics. I had a blast.
I'm very impressed with the personality all characters got from so little text. Loved having two takes on some events, and quickly becoming able to tell right away which friend wrote this letter -- I love these kids and want to protect and nurture them!! So wholesome ;w;
I want to keep playing in this world for hours and hours :)
Beautiful late night experience... still have class tomorrow... 10/10
I really enjoyed the game — it was so charming and cute!
By the way, do you have any plans for other language versions? I’d love to help voluntarily if that’s something you’d ever consider.
Thanks! I don’t currently have any plans to translate it, but if you’re offering to do a translation and you think there’s at least a few players who would enjoy it, I’m open to it! Message me on Bluesky?
I’ve translated other itch.io game into Korean before and the players really loved them, so I thought your game would be a great match too!
It looks like your DMs are only open to people you follow — feel free to follow me at @ericanoh.bsky.social if you’d like to chat more ❤
This was really fun and cute! I sent it to my friends with the message "What if Obra Dinn but pokedex?" :D
Cool game! I had fun going back and forth through the letters and it realy made me feel smart!
So, there's supposed to be music? Oh, nevermind. That's for the future... Well... The green start button is a non-symbol that's saying it's supposed to be 23FB...
Here on Firefox Windows 10
Fun to play again, seeing what I remember and deducing again what I didn't!
Thanks for checking it out! Yeah, I wanted to get it updated since this version has a lot of improvements over the jam version, but I also want to commit to adding sound before calling it done and posting the update devlog and so on, so stay tuned...
Thanks for the speedy report on the start button! I changed the font to one that definitely supports the power symbol - let me know if you can see it now.
I'm seeing the power button on Firefox on Linux and Windows 10! Woo!
scratched my roottree/obra dinn/golden idol itch so bad i started purring
i dont think ive ever seen a “reading comprehension” type game before. this is really cool!
Thanks! It's inspired by deduction games like Obra Dinn, the Roottrees Are Dead, and Riley & Rochelle. I'm really into those games and realized that a Pokedex would be a fun thing to have to fill out!
This was super cute!
Pharolith gave me the standard ambiguity problems, but I feel like the big problem there is that I didn't fully understand the type chart? I went back through the letters and I couldn't see where (rot13) lbh jrer fhccbfrq gb yrnea gung Zrephel vf jrnx gb Znef.
Other than that, the game was pretty smooth, and I'm kinda sad that we won't get to see the rest of Harper and Ollie's adventures.
Thanks for playing! In the next update I'm adding a page to track the type chart, which I'm hoping will be fun to fill in as you go and will make that aspect clearer (alongside me fixing up some of the clues.)
To your question, gur pyhr jnf zrnag gb or va yrggre 16, gung Sver Fynfu vf tbbq ntnvafg Fvarfgryyn.
Ah, I see! I missed that.
Hey, I think I found a weird glitch in the game, when I came to Stagmite, I put forest as it's habitat, yet the game considered it incorrect? I feel like this is a bit off as the place it was caught was called 'Orion Forest'
I ended up finishing the game and I LOVE IT!!!!! I really hope to see more of this type of game from you two! Hell, I'd even spend like 15$ to get a full fledged version of this!
Thank you so much for playing, I'm glad you liked it! I'm working on some post-jam updates to what we have now, but I think it's unlikely we'll have time for an expanded version - but your vote of confidence is awesome to hear, thank you!
As for Stagmite, it was found "in the fields outside Orion Forest", so its habitat is Fields, not Forest.
This game was fun. Thanks for sharing it. I first found you with tongue tied, and all your games have been a blast to play through.
I only struggled with Pharolith. I thought it was grass as it was weak to fire, and ended up having to guess all elements.
Thank you, glad you liked it! And yep, in the rush to finish for the jam timeline, I ended up with Pharolith's clues as ambiguous, sorry about that. Will clean up those clues in my post-jam update.
yea i quit i cant figure out pharolith someone just tell me
You can find both of its skills in letter 16.
Letter 13 gives a hint to its habitat.
Letter 14 gives a hint to its dual element nature.
If you still want the answer, I'l drop it under this and strike it through:
Saturn,Merc,Desert,RockPunch,ArmorVery fun and clean! I really love identification-game in general, but I like the "pokemon first gen" mood on this one : especially how you mix both the fantasy we have when playing the game, and the strategy/data we need to learn to enjoy the game to the fullest. Really liked how you can also anticipate/guess some information by the name of it, or the colour. Help a lot in the "end game" !
As i was playing this i remembered that Pokemon is a game originally meant for children and all i could think was "how did children managed to internalize the strenghts and weaknesses of each type so well???" Stuff like water beats fire is obvious but what about stuff like rock beating flying?
Cause i'm an adult playing this and i'm struggling, i can't for the life of me figure out Pharolith. I figured it's a saturn mon from the desert but apparently it has two saturn moves?? i'm probably just confused. I can't figure out it's second alignment.
But in anyways great game, these characters are very charming.
I tried to make Pharolith tricky but I accidentally made some of the clues ambiguous rather than clearly pointing to what's going on with it, whoops. Here's an extra clue to make up for it: it has an alignment that Harper's team has two monsters of and Ollie's team has one.
really like this, just need to figure out vursus and malegora now...
Very cute game, and just challenging enough to remain interesting throughout.
Your writing continues to impress; that you managed to get me invested in all these characters with only a few letters is impressive. I could tell so much about Harper and Ollie's personalities just from the nicknames they gave their monsters, which I'd say is excellent character writing.
Another 10/10. I only wish it were longer so I could have followed Harper on her journey to fame and glory (and Ollie on his journey to cheer for Harper 😄).
OOoh! Mons and Deduce! WOO!
Mmm! Planets! I was looking up Golden Sun earlier in the (week?) Cool timing!
Ooh, siblings! Nice! ... Nevermind, Letter 15-16 corrected me!
I thought the Star meant "You have gathered all the info from this letter", but no? It's just STAR-t! heh.
Spoilers below!
Heh, Ignine being the odd-one out in the desert. Lol I just guessed instead of checking 5. heh
Doesn't save, but can "cheat" by filling in info ahead of time heh
Mmm. Pharolith breaks patterns! Heh
I would love a chapter 2(or even 3 or 4) on this, I really enjoyed playing it!!
Just finished the game, Pharolith was the hardest for me. Solution if needed: fng zre qrf nez epx cap (rot13).
Is Vincent Avery's father?
Yeah, I realized after the deadline that some of the clues for Pharolith are ambiguous, whoops. Will fix in a post-jam update. Folks should feel free to narrow it down with the clues and then guess, or check your answer.
No comment, I will leave interpreting the story up to the player. 😄
Very fun and interesting take on the jam theme. I could envision a mechanic like this included across an entire creature collector--let the player figure out the monster's info on their own! I thought the clues were generally quite straightforward but there's only so obscure you can make them when the framing device is "letters from friends excitedly telling you everything they saw" :'D I loved the little monster sprites, would love to see them on my gameboy!
Thanks! Yeah, I originally imagined more intricate clues like "And then I faced a trainer with three monsters, and two of them overlapped in alignment with one of my monsters, but one of them had a move that..." etc but it didn't come up very naturally in the writing. 😄 I will do some post-jam updates, and with some more time to think about it, I'll see what clue variations I can come up with!
Short and cute, I liked it!
This was super fun!
I loved this game!