Thank you for the super detailed comment, this is really helpful feedback! I’ll try to respond to as many points as I can:
nice typewriter font, seems very fitting :)
Thanks! Meta found that hunting around on Google Fonts and specifically picked a creepy and somewhat obscure one to make it feel unique
Controls are layout-independent!
I’m glad other keyboard layouts work, although that was not intentional lol, I guess it’s just a side effect of the library I used
Dots to show interactions + dynamic indications: really user-friendly. :) Including the red colour; by the way, tints of grey + red is really great relatively to the theme.
Thanks! It took a few iterations to get them looking nice. They were originally grey, but they became extremely difficult to see
Ah, you can examine things only once! Actually, good to know what has already been done. :) BUT you have not to miss the lines!
It drives me crazy in games when you can interact with something over and over again and get the same results, this also made some other things slightly easier to code.
Just realizing now that the view (including top-view characters) and flashbacks are reminiscent of “Hotline Miami”. :)
Never played Hotline Miami, I was actually inspired by Darkwood
in the past: misspelling “themself” -> “themselves” (first one I spotted including the game page; I noticed the writing seemed conscientious :))
‘Themself’ is correct grammar when referring to a single person of indeterminate gender, or at least that’s what I was taught
dot on lamp not obvious, as there is a circle! XD Really small detail, nothing serious. Suggestion: maybe make the white dots’ opacity ‘oscillate’? This would help ensuring the dots are always visible. Maybe also add a black outline as safety, in case a dot gets displayed on a white element.
The dots originally did have a border, but we thought they looked ugly, but I might experiment with it a little more
You REALLY see the coffee stain rings on the coffee table! X) Awesome attention to detail.
Thanks :), Meta insisted that they be clearly visible
Weird, during the line on drawing people, the camera is centred on a couch with nobody on it (although I sat), and on one of the screen captures, this very same line is displayed while the character is shown sitting at the table… I wonder if it is a bug.
The player is there, but they’re hard to see due to low contrast, I’ll try to fix that for the next patch
Small detail I notice: the walking animation keeps the right frame when you turn. Yes, I am a sucker for checking details. ;)
Me too, I spent way too much time perfecting the player’s walk cycle. Did you notice that the characters shoulders and hands are visible above furniture, but their feet are not? It’s almost never noticeable in game but I spent an entire hour on it lol.
misprint? “somebody who wants to poison” -> “what somebody who wants to poison”
Thx, fixed for next patch
Takeaway: very atmospheric narrative game, both visually and for the ears, with awesome writing. Having the constraint materialize as a flashback is cunning. The debugging-turned-final feature of dots and the use of colour also made interacting very clear, including knowing whether some action is a point of no return or not.
Thank you thank you thank you!!!
The only and obvious possible criticism I can really think of would be on gameplay: I tend to think having the player as an actor rather than a spectator is paramount, and even if you go for a heavily narrative game, you can still make things less linear or let some guesswork for the player, so if it were just me, I would wish there were something along those lines in the prototype and the final version, but it depends on what you want to achieve, and if your aim is to tell an interactive story, then discard this. ;)
This was for two reasons:
- It was easier to code
- We wanted the story to feel inevitable, we know the Escapist is already dead right? We didn’t want the player to feel like they could have any action that would save the Escapist in order to make the story feel more tragic. We may end up giving the mortician more agency though.