This was really great-the puzzles were satisfying and the atmosphere was mysterious and spooky. I fumbled around for a few minutes on the safe, but ultimately found the last clue I needed before I became too frustrated or went looking for hints. I was a little upset when the demo ended because I was excited to keep snooping around, haha.
If I had one bit of feedback it would be that I sometimes had a hard time getting the dialogue windows to go away; I'd accidentally click on the thing again and get stuck in a loop. I played in browser so maybe that was part of it? I also would accidentally click through some dialogue sometimes and had to click the object again. It wasn't so bad that it kept me from enjoying it, though.
Overall, I had a great time and I'm excited to play the full version. I'm wishlisting it on Steam right now.
Viewing post in Ashwood Conspiracy: Demo comments
Thank you for playing & wishlisting and I appreciate you taking the time to write your feedback!
I'm trying to better understand about the issue you experienced to hopefully improve it.
When viewing items, the dialogues are indeed shown in a loop so people can view it multiple times if they need to. We show an indicator so the player knows which dialogue in the sequence they are viewing.
Normal dialogues go away after some time, but some dialogues are persistent (eg. the dialogues at the start of the game, the dialogue when you first visit the storage unit). Persistent dialogues you have to click to dismiss/advance them. Clicking on normal dialogues does not close them.
Persistent dialogues cannot be repeated and require the player to dismiss them so we are sure they don't miss the important information.
Maybe the subtle distinction between the two types was what caused the issue?
Would you like to click on normal dialogues as well to dismiss them?
Or maybe there was an actual bug an normal bugs did not go away after some time?
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding and thank you again for your time!
Ahh, okay. You're right that missing that distinction caused a lot of my confusion. I don't think there's a bug with dialogue, I think it's just my playstyle mashing up against the UI.
I went back and played a bit again and I think what happened with normal dialogues was that I would see "1/2" or "1/3" and think, "okay, so there's two/three dialogue sections in this response" and not "I can click on this item two/three times and get different responses each time." So I'd read the first section, click (coincidentally on the item), read the second section, click, and so on, thinking that I was advancing through one response and not initiating separate responses each time that I clicked. If I still had my mouse over the item when it got to the final response, I would try to click to dismiss it and wind up back on the first response; if I didn't have my mouse over an item at any point during this process, I wound up wondering why the dialogue wouldn't advance or go away.
Adding an option for the normal dialogue to work like persistent dialogue instead seems like a really good idea to me. I read a bit fast and I do just kind of instinctively want to get rid of text as soon as I'm done with it. The option to intentionally dismiss or advance text might also be nice for people who read more slowly, so dialogue doesn't disappear as they're reading; here it would save them having to make their way back through all the other responses if the last response happened to time out as they were reading.
Regarding persistent dialogue, I think what happened to me (and I was able to recreate this in the intro dialogue in the car) is that I would click while the text was filling in and accidentally advance it. I think a lot of games where clicking as the text fills in letter-by-letter will cause the entire dialogue to appear in that window and will only advance if all the text is already on the screen; I'm just primed at this point to expect that to happen, even if the button says "continue." I've played a couple of text-heavy games that have an option for that as something you can toggle on or off in the settings menu, so that might be worth considering if you want to make sure players don't miss that information.
So no bugs! Just me misunderstanding and a couple of usability notes for you to consider.