A small little RPGmaker game about a lonely girl with a connection to another world that she sees in her dreams. · By
The volume was fine… until after the open movie.
After the opening movie, the volume was VERY loud.
I thought, 'oh, I'll just go into options and fix it.'
… I couldn't figure out how to open then menu.
Escape, X, and Enter didn't open the menu,
so I started pressing all kinds of keys on the
keyboard until I got fed up and Alt+F4'd.
Maybe have some indication in-game on how to open the menu?
If it's already there, could you tell me where?
If I lower my system volume, it lowers the volume of everything I've finely tuned so far.
And most of the stuff, like discords boops, and other such things, wouldn't be able to be heard,
due to how far down I'd have to turn down my volume;
it's currently at 25%, and the music from the game is near painful - not bad music, just very loud.
And I don't want to restart my game 20× or so until I have it at just the right volume.
This is unfriendly design. I don't think I'll be playing this game any time soon,
at least not until I have some way to access the same options on the title screen from within the game.
I'm pretty sure your OS should have an option to selectively change an application's volume (Windows Volume Mixer, for example), though I guess not playing the game works too. I agree that the menu being disabled probably isn't the greatest choice, but it definitely was the easiest choice Temmie could have made to prevent a mostly useless component from appearing in-game.
How many games have you played where there is no in-game menu?
I've played games where menus literally only had 'options', 'save', 'load', and 'quit'.
I get that this game might be going for the retro look, maybe?
But even modern callbacks to the old era still have menus, even if it has very few options…
… At least where PC is concerned.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but an RPG Maker game's default menu is full of battle and party related options that make no sense for Escaped Chasm to have, as there are no battles and there's only one party member ever. Saving seems to have been intentionally disabled (a run through the game is like max. 20 minutes so I don't really see a great need for it anyways) and shutting down you can already do via regular program controls, so that leaves the options as the only useful menu command.
Could the useless menu buttons be removed? Could the game be made to open the options menu instead of the main menu when X is pressed? Yes and yes, but both require modifying the game scripts which Temmie knows basically nothing about (as she's pointed out before) so it was certainly easier for her to make her test game simply not have a menu. To me, it looked like even less of a default RPG Maker game without it (which is a good thing).
You can change
return $gameSystem.isMenuEnabled() && !$gameMap.isEventRunning();
to
return !$gameMap.isEventRunning();
on line 787 of the www/js/rpg_scenes.js file to prevent the game from disabling the main menu. Interestingly, it looks like most of the useless options were removed in Escaped Chasm for some reason.
