Thank you for playing and for your feedback.
The demo takes place a little bit into the game, after the introduction and tutorial areas. Perhaps I should make that clearer in the welcome text. In the full game the player will understand what the story is about and why Trevor is doing the things he's doing. In the demo he is trying to collect flour, and this whole area is dedicated to just that. In the full game there are other areas with other items he needs. The full game isn't about the cake club, and Trevor never wanted to join when he got up that morning. He just seems to finds himself in weird situations with weird people! I hope that in the full game players will be surprised by the various daft and unpredictable things that happen.
The demo area is all about contrast. You have this bright and sunny spring morning, where Trevor is mostly outside. He explores and finds clues. Then in the bunker it's quiet and has a completely different mood. The stairs seem to go on too long - what is this place?! And then the cheerful and brightly lit chamber with the daft characters, like some kind of weird home ec class. The first part of the demo has 6 scenes. 5 of them have either a clue or the NPC, so I hope people won't think it's empty or too big. I think I got the size right: not much backtracking and plenty to see in a fairly small space with the weird (and rather rude!) security guy right in the middle of it all.
There are 81 possible combinations for the passphrase. Almost all of them have a unique reply...
In terms of audience, I am inspired by games that look friendly and simple but have layers to their dialogue and humour and perhaps have spooky and mysterious elements. It's the sort of game I think a child would enjoy, but an adult would see things in the writing and humour that a child might not. I play lots of games that look cute - for want of a better word - but are surprisingly dark. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about targeting a specific audience, but I am deliberately making the game generally friendly for all ages and those who like cosy, whimsical, relaxing games that surprise.
In the stairs leading down to the cake club there is dust (or icing sugar!) in the air. The pipes don't have a texture. I have two layers of dust that move at slightly different speeds as well as parallax movement, to give the impression of the air being layered and thick. The dust is meant to be in front of the pipes. The pipes are blurry one-colour foreground silhouettes, which is something I do elsewhere in the full game, and not meant to have much detail. I will see if anyone else mentions the dust/pipes. Perhaps making the dust move a little quicker might avoid any confusion about it being a static texture on things. I'll experiment with that (I'm working on a version 0.2.0 which will have button prompts for all interactions for keyboard, xbox and ps).
A few people have mentioned the bees! They were a late addition and I'm glad people like them. I want all scenes in the game to have movement and things to look at. Thank you again for playing and for taking the time to write detailed feedback.
