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Thanks for taking the time to play. For context, and this is something I need to make more explicit, this is basically just a tech test to see if I can learn how to use Unreal effectively and what tools I may be missing (and there are quite a lot). So the result sits awkwardly between presenting itself as something that's been polished, especially due to the exceptional work by the creative team, but it's really more like the vibes of a story. I'm focusing on checking if I have the technical skills and resources to hit the big beats of a full project.

That's not to say that your feedback isn't valued though! My style of writing is kinda like every other line has been deleted. But this picks up in Act 2 of an old plot outline, and without act one you don't have enough lines to read between! The feedback consistently says when I reboot this project after getting my feet under me with the tech, a re-write is required. I'm not surprised, but it's good to have consistent feedback for that. Act 1 would've made for an awful way to start a game, but Act 2 is an awful way to start a story.

I think there's still a risk after a rewrite that readers may need to hold too much context in their head. For example. if somebody takes a break and comes back 3 months later, they'll probably be completely lost. For the future I'll rollback the ambiguity across the board.

With regards to jerky motion: I think this is something I need to dig into a lot more because this is an implementation detail with the dialogue sequence code. I need to figure out a way to automate smoothing between poses. Fun fact: Right now, every character's jaws open and shut between every frame because Unreal's physics engine applies gravity to their mouths. I tried to hide that fact, but it's deeply funny when I don't because they look like sharks biting each other. I think there's some intersection between the frame rate of the level sequence and the frame rate of the physics code. But that's Unreal for you. An absolute bear of an engine.

Thanks again for taking the time to read. I'm sure the creative team will be happy to hear this feedback!

Adventure segments (and more, actually) are fully implemented in a local build, but due to a bug in the Unreal engine I wasn't able to get anything to cook correctly until I upgraded it on Sunday. Soooo nothing loads. I'm glad that at the very least the end of the 1st sequence was impactful, as I really wanted to build towards that as a way to show off the tech. I hope in a few weeks I'll be able to look back on Ehrein's terrifying rigging as something to laugh about, but for now it really sucks.

I agree that the character introductions are weak. They're close, but too subtextual at the moment. Ideally the drop into the adventure segment would've allowed us to move past setting the tone and relationships into contextualizing the story, but as it stands I think I pushed exposition out too far and there's not enough balance.

With regards to the dialogue feeling clipped, I think I need to find a better balance between prose and leveraging the cinematic tech I have at my fingertips with Unreal. The path forward should be to use the cinematics to fill in those blanks. I think what's here is a good start, but it lacks the cinematic glue to hold it together.

I'll be periodically dropping fixes and more features, with a major release including all the cut features by the end of next week.

Thanks for hearing me out, it's very embarrassing to release something in such a broken state, so I've been jumpy at explaining it. I'll be mindful of how I can improve the clarity of the story in upcoming releases. I do think Ehrein's very faithful slenderman impression obfuscates the story... a lot. But the way the characters are introduced isn't pulling through, I agree.

We had major, major issues cooking the build. Literally the last 5 days of the jam were spent trying to get basically anything to build at all. The control rigging uses an experimental feature that Unreal required an entire engine version upgrade. Today I basically started over to try and get this rolling again, and at the very least the rigging is broadly working. We'll get there, hope you can come back in a few days as I work these things out.