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A jam submission

Obsidian AzureView game page

A short WIP interactive fiction that you can play in browser!
Submitted by Game_emaG — 5 hours, 25 minutes before the deadline
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Obsidian Azure's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Usage of Theme#122.9002.900
Gameplay/Usage of the medium#123.0003.000
Story & Plot#143.1003.100
Overall#162.7752.775
UI Design#202.1002.100

Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
anAudioSlave

Program
ChoiceScript

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Comments

Submitted

It was fun to see the theme being taken so literal, with the MC hanging on a cliff :P

It was a bit of a shame it was so short, as your writing is really nice and flows well. It left me a bit disappointed to see the final button called cliffhanger, making the story ends a bit too abruptly. It does seem like this is a very beginning of an introduction for a much larger story, which I think has a lot of potential. The availability of choices and their consequences were a nice touch as well.

Some of the formatting is a bit all over the place, with some paragraph having proper space around them, while others do not. The use of italics was a bit confusing at time, especially with the lack of spacing (and I say that as someone who abuses the italics). 

Since the game seems very much a WIP, I can't really hold it against you that some characters feel very one-note. I am not sure if having the choice to say you like a character or not after only one line or two of description is fair on the player. First impressions are important and all, and the MC supposedly has known them for a while, but the player has too little information to make that choice worth it. 

(for the glitch below, you might want to check if you enabled the scrollbar in the settings of the itch page, or change the format to go fullscreen. That way people will be able to change the font size without worrying about not seeing the continue button.)

Overall, it was neat and has a lot of potential in its future build! Thank you for creating it!

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the review and all the detailed feedback! 

It did end up being shorter than I was aiming to create for the jam, yes. This stopped about halfway into the first chapter of what I was thinking of in total (eventually) being a 3 chapter (or Act) story. I'm very happy you think it has potential!

The opinion of the characters was meant to give some more control over the MC's prexisting relationships to characters, but yes on a first playthrough this doesn't make much sense. I'll look at replacing this with some less explicit choices as reactions :D

Thanks for mentioning about the formatting - I hadn't really thought about it but its obvious now that it's got inconsistent spacing regarding paragraphs which I will be fixing. (I blame choicescript requiring the *new_line command to create a line break... heh.)

The italics were meant to be the character's internal dialogue and so appear in first person.. Possibly this isn't as clear as I'd thought as this is the second mention of it, I'll see if I can find some examples where an author does this so I can better use it.

I've edited the itch page to fullscreen mode now - thanks for the tip!

Submitted

Ends pretty abruptly, and the formatting was a little wonky.  I did like all the little options to build the character.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing and leaving a comment!

Yep the ending is a bit sooner than I had originally planned in order to meet the jam deadline haha.

Submitted

I had a really good time until I ran into a glitch that prevented me from continuing: In the settings, I raised the text size, which hid the continue button underneath the description of the game. I was unable to click continue, and did not want to restart. I'll review what I was able to see, though.

Pros: You paint really great pictures with your words. I got a really good visual sense of where I was and what was going on. The choices felt complicated, yet they all made sense. For example, I chose to wait out the storm, thinking that was for sure the safest option, and the lightning storm ended up getting worse and causing me to fall. I really like how my choice had a consequence I didn't anticipate that didn't feel cheap. The gameplay elements of tracking the stats is great -- although I didn't get to see how they affect the game -- and I really, REALLY appreciated a menu where I could check it at any point.

Cons: Obviously, the glitch. I also struggled with the formatting of the text. It might not be a fair criticism, but giant blocks of plain text with nothing separating them is really hard on the eyes. It's also difficult when it's not structured intuitively: for example, your dialogue was represented in italics, which took me a while to realize and caught me off guard every time it came up. I also never got to learn about any characters or where the plot goes because of the glitch, but I get the sense that you have a really good sense of the world, but less sense of a good story arc. I think too much time was focused on the worldbuilding exposition up front, when it could have been spread out a little more seamlessly with what was happening and the choices you can make.

I enjoyed my time with this, though. I know it's a work in progress, so keep it up. Congratulations and really well done.

Developer

Hey thanks for the review!

 Sorry about that glitch :( I set the game submission as a fixed resolution and didn't test the larger font setting! 

That's a fair point about it being long blocks of text, it's something which seems common with most choicescript games since the library doesn't let you much with styling, but perhaps I can break it up more into shorter pages.

I have a good idea in my head of the world and background, yes, that's great you have pointed out story arc is something I should work on so I have something concrete to improve, very helpful!