Post by Atas Fun in Verloren jam comments

I liked the introduction/prelude storyline, with Helen abducting the baby that you end up naming and playing. However, from there it was disjointed to the start of the game, where now you're playing the baby (grown into a young woman) in a magic school, with a dad?

I suspect that eventually the story will make sense, but the disjointedness was a bit odd. One possibility is to have more bits of the prelude lead into the magic school, or have Helen and the dad's relationship shown (maybe she passes the baby to him, maybe she's his wife?). Another possibility is to skip the prelude and start in the magical school, and the player learns about the backstory later on. I think the prelude is really cool though, and I'd be sad if it disappeared till later in the game.

The school itself is huge! 8 floors! I liked the teleportation system, which made it much easier to go from place to place without wondering which floor the gym is, for example.

The scope of the game also feels huge, and kind of overwhelming from the start of the game. Perhaps it's possible to start with a smaller bit of the school, like a single class, and slowly introduce different parts of the school till everything is unlocked.

Another minor issue I noticed is not being able to tell when a cutscene is over. There was places where I lost control of the character for a cutscene, and after the cutscene was done, I didn't realize it and waited for more. Perhaps something like black horizontal lines on the top and bottom, or some other visual signal would be great.

Overall, the backstory is really interesting, the jump to the start of the game was jarring, but I'd be very curious to learn how the backstory and the magic school is linked.

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Fortunastreet257 days ago(+1)

Thanks for playing! 🧚🧚🧚

As you pointed out, the game never tell you explicitly about certain scenario elements (like what's the link between Helen and David) for quite a while, leaving the players to use their imagination and the few more or less subtle clues to fill the blank.

I also had the impression you were a bit intimidated by the game's scope, which is fair, free time is a precious ressource and this game is hungry for it. If I had to make the same game today, I would probably choose a smaller scope for the starting area, as such a big playing field is long to make both for me and for the player. But now that it is there, I will probably keep it as it is for now.

I will keep in mind the end of cutscene thing somewhere. At first, I used a fade out/fade in to mark the end of most cutscenes, but there were many situation where nothing changed between the fades, so I removed them to respect the player's time. But may be a discrete quick animation like I said during the stream would be a nice alternative to just nothing.

Also, now that I have reviewed the stream, I should probably decide myself if I should qualify both male and female soldiers as either "Soldier" or "Male/Female Soldier" instead of mixing both.

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Atas Fun257 days ago

Yes, I was indeed intimidated by the scope of the game :) I think there are plenty of people who love games with large scopes though.

Thanks for updating the soldiers, I appreciate that!

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