I really liked the art style of this game. The start of the game is great. (I would secretly eat more cake than Chris) The splash of color is great throughout the house. I wish there were some splash of color on the monster as well. The game itself is not too scary, but did a great job of creating an unnerving atmosphere. I am curious what more is to come for the full game. I have a couple critiques for the game. One, I would avoid any word breaks in the text box to make it easier to read. Second, maybe change the color of the font when you highlight an item on screen. Sometimes the white get blended in. Overall, good job dude!
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Thanks Berry for giving the demo a try. Glad the unnerving atmosphere hit its mark. Since there isn't any direct player urgency in the demo, I wouldn't be surprised some won't be feeling it's scary in gaming context. I hope the full game will be able to give that much needed urgency though, so I look forward to having you test future builds and give me feedback. I'll definitely being opening up closed testing to gauge what works and what doesn't.
I want to dig into that text break part though. Do you mean when a sentence preemptively breaks like in your video where the "I" sits alone as the sentence carried on? Like you'd rather after a sentence ends, the following sentence will sit on its own line? Or do you mean you'd rather hyphenate words that wrap so it flows like a block.
The rest of your critiques I can say are definitely already planned, so hopefully you'll be happy with the goals of the end product.
THANK YOU for the critiques. I'm really appreciative of it. :) Stay in touch! You can definitely reach out to me over on twitter if its easier over comments.
Yeah, urgency is big driving factor for a lot horror games but there are plenty that did well without it as well. You could try adding a timer or a reverse loading bar when selecting text options or just searching around in a room, if you wanted that moment of panic. Maybe you could try quick time events if you like.
For the text breaks, a good example I can think of is during the demo where the shaking "YOU ARE WORTHLESS" appears. The "less" is truncated and goes to the next line which breaks the immersion a bit. Perhaps if you play around with the spacing of powerful statements such as this you could have one word on each line centered or flowing diagonally. The majority of the text so far in this demo is solid. The shaking text really makes it feel more interactive. Characters have their own text color which is awesome and they provide a paragraph gap after they finish talking. (except for that one time where Chris slapped his belly) Staying consistent with text spacing will go a long way so when you break that consistency on purpose it sends a different message in a strong way. I hope this makes sense haha.
I would love to see your future builds and help you out in anyway I can. I don't mind either way to communicate via twitter or here in the comments. Good luck on your project!