Development Update - The Jury Questioning
Greetings Counselors,
It has been a while since our last update, and if you haven't joined our Discord server yet, you're probably wondering what we have been up to. I can assure you that we have been very busy. In addition to working on various tasks, our main focus has been creating the content for the Jury Questioning, which is the topic of today's post.
Before we delve into the specifics, let's recap what the Jury Questioning is all about. The Jury Questioning spans four days, during which you will meet up to five potential jurors each day. The goal is to find jurors who align with your client and increase your chances of achieving the desired verdict. You have the opportunity to question each juror once, gaining insight into their opinions, beliefs, and defining traits.
Each juror possesses a political affiliation (ranging from extreme left to extreme right), a level of education (none, poorly educated, educated, highly educated), wealth (ranging from destitute to wealthy), a religion, and six additional defining traits. In total, a juror can have up to 99 different traits.
The more similar a juror is to your client, the less likely they are to convict. Therefore, having enough "friendly" jurors on the bench significantly increases your chances of winning the case. However, what if there are no similar or sympathetic jurors available? Fear not, because you can also influence the jury's perception through witnesses. The more similarity between a juror and a witness, the more the juror will believe the witness's testimony. So, even if the Jury Pool lacks sympathy for your client, you can still turn the tide by selecting witnesses that resonate with the jurors.
When a juror enters the courtroom, the judge asks them to introduce themselves, sharing their name, age, and place of residence. In their introduction, it’s possible that the juror might drop a hint of one of their six special traits. After that, it's up to you to get to know your potential jurors and uncover their hidden traits. Overall, the Jury Questioning offers 293 questions across 66 topics for you to explore.
Jurors will answer questions either neutrally or based on their specific traits. The system ensures that their responses are evenly distributed among the jurors, giving you a fair chance to discover them all. However, be aware that jurors may become offended or dislike certain questions. In a Jury Trial, it's up to the juror to decide how long you can question them. If a juror is particularly unresponsive, it may be better to let them go, as a strike-out might leave a negative impression and could harm your case.
To avoid cluttering your desk with sticky notes containing potential and excluded traits, the game provides a handy interface where you can make notes for each juror. These notes will play a key role once the day of questioning concludes. After each day, you will have the opportunity to assess the five jurors you've met and select the ten traits you believe each juror carries. If you identify enough traits correctly, you will gain an overall opinion bonus applied to all jurors at the end of the Jury Selection process.
Writing trait-specific answers for 99 different traits has been both challenging and rewarding. It has been fascinating to explore questions from so many different angles. Just to give you an idea, it takes approximately 8 hours to come up with 500 answers, including research and spell-checking. Currently, the game includes 1,723 neutral and 23,214 trait-specific answers. We remain committed to adding more throughout the development process because the more answers and perspectives we include, the more interesting and challenging the Jury Questioning will become. We also plan to give the community the chance to propose new topics, questions, and answers once you've all had the opportunity to test the game.
So, that's the basic rundown of how the Jury Questioning works. Now, you might be wondering what's next for Jury Trial. The work never truly stops, and since we've invested a significant amount of time into the Jury Questioning, there are a few loose ends we still need to tie up. Once those tasks are completed, our focus will shift to creating a demo case for you to play and provide us with much-needed feedback. Rest assured that even if you don't make it into the closed testing phase, the demo case will be released on the store page for everyone to enjoy! We'll share more details about the entire process in a future post, so stay tuned for that.
As always, we're delighted to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to head over to the Community Section, leave a reply below, or chat with us on Discord.
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.
It has been a while since our last update, and if you haven't joined our Discord server yet, you're probably wondering what we have been up to. I can assure you that we have been very busy. In addition to working on various tasks, our main focus has been creating the content for the Jury Questioning, which is the topic of today's post.
Before we delve into the specifics, let's recap what the Jury Questioning is all about. The Jury Questioning spans four days, during which you will meet up to five potential jurors each day. The goal is to find jurors who align with your client and increase your chances of achieving the desired verdict. You have the opportunity to question each juror once, gaining insight into their opinions, beliefs, and defining traits.
Each juror possesses a political affiliation (ranging from extreme left to extreme right), a level of education (none, poorly educated, educated, highly educated), wealth (ranging from destitute to wealthy), a religion, and six additional defining traits. In total, a juror can have up to 99 different traits.
The more similar a juror is to your client, the less likely they are to convict. Therefore, having enough "friendly" jurors on the bench significantly increases your chances of winning the case. However, what if there are no similar or sympathetic jurors available? Fear not, because you can also influence the jury's perception through witnesses. The more similarity between a juror and a witness, the more the juror will believe the witness's testimony. So, even if the Jury Pool lacks sympathy for your client, you can still turn the tide by selecting witnesses that resonate with the jurors.
When a juror enters the courtroom, the judge asks them to introduce themselves, sharing their name, age, and place of residence. In their introduction, it’s possible that the juror might drop a hint of one of their six special traits. After that, it's up to you to get to know your potential jurors and uncover their hidden traits. Overall, the Jury Questioning offers 293 questions across 66 topics for you to explore.
Jurors will answer questions either neutrally or based on their specific traits. The system ensures that their responses are evenly distributed among the jurors, giving you a fair chance to discover them all. However, be aware that jurors may become offended or dislike certain questions. In a Jury Trial, it's up to the juror to decide how long you can question them. If a juror is particularly unresponsive, it may be better to let them go, as a strike-out might leave a negative impression and could harm your case.
To avoid cluttering your desk with sticky notes containing potential and excluded traits, the game provides a handy interface where you can make notes for each juror. These notes will play a key role once the day of questioning concludes. After each day, you will have the opportunity to assess the five jurors you've met and select the ten traits you believe each juror carries. If you identify enough traits correctly, you will gain an overall opinion bonus applied to all jurors at the end of the Jury Selection process.
Writing trait-specific answers for 99 different traits has been both challenging and rewarding. It has been fascinating to explore questions from so many different angles. Just to give you an idea, it takes approximately 8 hours to come up with 500 answers, including research and spell-checking. Currently, the game includes 1,723 neutral and 23,214 trait-specific answers. We remain committed to adding more throughout the development process because the more answers and perspectives we include, the more interesting and challenging the Jury Questioning will become. We also plan to give the community the chance to propose new topics, questions, and answers once you've all had the opportunity to test the game.
So, that's the basic rundown of how the Jury Questioning works. Now, you might be wondering what's next for Jury Trial. The work never truly stops, and since we've invested a significant amount of time into the Jury Questioning, there are a few loose ends we still need to tie up. Once those tasks are completed, our focus will shift to creating a demo case for you to play and provide us with much-needed feedback. Rest assured that even if you don't make it into the closed testing phase, the demo case will be released on the store page for everyone to enjoy! We'll share more details about the entire process in a future post, so stay tuned for that.
As always, we're delighted to answer any questions you may have. Feel free to head over to the Community Section, leave a reply below, or chat with us on Discord.
Thank you so much for your ongoing support.