Heya, thanks for the feedback. I'd have gotten to this way sooner but life's been kinda wild in and out of hospital BUT ENOUGH MOPING.
I can only say that I agree with your first segment. Yeah. I may have dove too much into flashbacks and character banter, and missed out on a lot of characterization of the BBEG. My initial document even noted this saying that I never really established a lot of their motivations, and you kinda come away knowing so little about them. In a larger project yeah, I'd have done both but yeah I feel like you are right in saying that I should have put my focus there.
Presentation was probably where I struggled the most. As a team we had pretty limited time, I had work and my artists had exams at the end of the month, and we both had Confuzzled to go to. So we ended up missing out on a lot of CG's and Sprites. The initial plan had 2 sprites per character with expressions, and a few CG's. However it just became not practical in around the 23 odd days we had. As I said in one of the comments below, my fault as the creator for not properly doing scope management. This was the first time I've coded in over a decade, and that was in Scratch, so I was very much learning by doing. I still have nightmares about how finicky I was finding the text box and name tag sizes. My initial idea was to have a colored name tag, and the name itself be in white, however after 3 solid days of trying that, I decided that I just didn't have the skills to do that at this time, and made what I did as a compromise.
Glad to hear you enjoyed the Spanish stuff., although I aimed slightly more at Catalan in particular given the region. So a lot of the names, they were helped by Umber, who is actually from Mallorca, where a lot of the folkelore was taken from. That said, MAN I went far off from the original tale. Re-imagining for sure.
As for your final note. Honestly. I think you might have been right. I went into this writing backwards, so I made each ending first. My main theme was actually the idea that sometimes we will need to do things that we'll never see the benefit for, even if it costs us. Perhaps fatalistically, I went in fully intending there to be no ending where everyone gets to live and things work out. That being said, as you said I think if there was an ending where you got away, you see that everything you loved is now gone, and maybe Oriel leaves you after you release him, would have been the better leave ending.
Thank you so much for playing, and your review. I hope to take part in the Next Maywolf, and hopefully be way less busy so I can actually review the others in time.