So i thought of closing this up with a nice postmortem while i still remember most stuff
What went well?
Compared to my previous 3D jam game : everything
so in the previous game the level looked horrible,
there was only one puzzle (which i thought was easy but people had a hard time figuring out)
and on top of it all due to a bug there was no sound at all
(but on my machine as I used absolute paths for testing)
But this time the colors and map turned out nicely,
people figured out the puzzles pretty fast
the idea of chutulu (sic) prank calls you was well received
and the sounds.. well.. worked
What went wrong?
the difficulty
i was worried about making the game too hard
and even nerfed the last boss (way way too much)
so people went through the game like knife thru butter
in the end average gameplay time is 10 - 20 minutes
(which is not that bad in comparison to my old flash games
that had similar time and took a whole lot more effort to make)
the ending music
i found too late about that public domain is not the same as it once was
the music in question is "You Know What I Mean" by Al Bernard
which seemed perfect, it was from the time period,
i liked it a lot, and most importantly it had nothing to do with lovecraft
and i also double checked that it was in the public domain
but alas
as i uploaded the trailer turns out that youtube auto demonetises it
with some (bogus nonsense) copyright claim
how you claim copy right for public domain stuff is beyond me
but i hear these youtube anomalies are everyday now
anyway i never bothered to contest it
apologies to everyone who ran into it
revolver sound
the revolver sound got a lot of complaints for being too weak
strangely enough the wav file sounded fine enough
turns out i set the volume to be 60% of the original in code
Interesting stuff
many people pointed out that the water splash sound is from minecraft
but i remembered using the one from Klik & Play
and turns out it was a third one .. that i'm not sure where i got from
oh well, i guess all splash sounds are alike
there was a bug somehow nobody noticed:
i forgot to set a title of the map
so on the loading menu it just says "title"
and finally, some of the prank calls got a bit obscure
here are some explanations:
This one is pretty self explanatory:
"Is Mr Wall there?"
"No"
"Then may I ask what's holding up your house? "
Prince Albert was some sort of tobacco you could buy
apparently it came in a can
of course for my generation Prince Albert was a slang for ..
uhh.. something .. else..
making this call even weirder:
"Do you have Prince Albert in a can?"
"Yes"
"Well, you'd better let him out!"
"I see wetness in your future"
This was based on an anecdote about the man the legend the WOZ himself
allegedly he would call the telephone booth front of his dorm
and when someone picked up he would say
“This is Ramar the Mystic. I see wetness in your future"
and then he would throw a water balloon at them
"See you next crime..."
she is in Innsmouth
..
.. i got nothing
and finally
"I'm looking for Conflict-amphibians"
it was a battletoads reference and was cut from the game
..
i'll never forgive myself
i leave you with this