Very good entry to the jam. The graphics were low poly, but consistent and well presented with volumetric fog and particle effects adding to the atmosphere.
The game started well with a nice title and options screen. The entry voice over was extremely good, so good that I thought AI voiceovers had come along massively with perfect pausing and intonation that wasn't present in the text displayed on screen but when delivered as audio added depth and character that I've never heard before in AI. We then had to see what you'd used and found it was a real voice actor, and a great one at that, so AI still isn't quite there. Good choice here.
The in-game user interface was very nicely presented with the inventory (and background image), compass and special item slots for weapons, hat, etc. We only found one of each during our play but that did give us the anticipation that we would find a hat or helmet and we were satisfied when we could put the fancy hat in its slot. All this looked great, although you might want to remove the background embossed version of the slot item when its filled as it looked strange to see the actual dagger and ghost outline of a sword behind it at a different angle. On one of our machines we got a constant flicker from from the UI when the inventory panel was up. It might have been tooltips being shown for a frame and then hidden again, but it was a bit off-putting.
We loved the gun cartridge and reload animations, again making it really satisfying to reload while also giving you all the information needed to know how many bullets you had left and how many were chambered. You also seemed to have a map on load/save/restart (we think). It appeared but we didn't know what we were looking at and couldn't find key to bring it up in-game.
Combat worked OK. We noticed that once you were in combat you couldn't seem to retreat, which avoids the two-step to evade enemies. The health bars were good, but when we did 3/4 damage we weren't sure what the scale was to understand what that meant in relation to how much they had left. It's interesting to be able to see your weapons on front of you. We liked that but a lot of the more classic games and copies don't show any weapons and might only show a slash graphic when you use them. It was good to see you go the other way. Enemy animations were nice to see and you'd put in enough audio and visual feedback on hits to make them have a satisfying feel.
The font choice seemed nice and appropriate but there were times where there might have been up to four different fonts on the screen at once, all from different font families, which made the UI seem less cohesive and more glued together. For example there were different fonts for:
- The damage/log text on the top left
- The "Young Man..." dialog box
- The compass directions NSEW
- Inventory titles "Derek" and "Paranormal Detective" (maybe these were just SmallCaps/Narrow versions?)
Movement and turning were good for the most part. Free-look would have been nice so you could appreciate your surroundings more, such as the asset for the house, which looked great, with lots of "clutter"/"set dressing". This also added to the feeling of depth and atmosphere in the game. Things like the message in blood on the walls and doors, and the odd cobweb or broken window, were nice touches. The portraits with the dark highlights on the low poly characters looked amazing.
However, parts of the house didn't seem well aligned with the dungeon crawler movement grid, so often you would be a long way away from a wall, but not be able to move as close as you expected to be able to. Or there were doors you couldn't reach, or doors, that you (or enemies) went through, that were off center on the screen which looked a bit janky at times. You did well to try to fit an existing asset into this genre though, all things considered. The fact that the house was different on your return was a great touch too. At first we thought, "nice, the mirror is now broken", and then we realized it was essentially a new level with lots of changes. This worked very well.
The music and sound effects were good and added to the polish of the game a lot. As we've mentioned, we loved the voiceover!
We enjoyed playing Derek Deagle very much. Possibly a few more puzzle type elements, some UI fixes and level layouts, and this would have been a near perfect entry in our opinion. Great job.