Lemma Soft Forums

Hey guys!

I've just joined the forum, and this is my first submission. This is a project I've been working on and off for the past 2 years now. I've developed the game and the engine on my own - however, all art, sounds, and music are not mine, and were taken from various places from the internet. The character art is most notably from Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Credit goes to their respective creators!

It is a visual short story / adventure game, about an on-the-side writer trying to overcome a writer's block - and what has essentially turned into a "life block" of sorts.

I've spent so much time programming it - writing the engine, graphics, sounds, events, camera, dialogue, choices, and all of that. I'm also really new to story telling and writing, and have spent far less time writing the scenario that takes place in this demo. I'm unsure if the story and the atmosphere comes across the way I'd intended it to, as I really cannot judge it objectively.

There's a lot I could possibly fix with the dialogue, but I'm happy to submit what I have, after what has felt like such a long sprint... I'm glad I've finished it before the new year!



LINK:
http://www.mediafire.com/?or92v1rgz25ei1s
Size: ~110mb
Estimated play time roughly ~35 mins (if you witness most dialogues)
Resolution: 1280 x 720 (press alt + Enter to play in windowed mode)
Developed in XNA (so it'll only work on Windows :3 )

I really don't know how to categorise the story. I'm really not sure how I feel about it. It is what it is, I guess. Your thoughts and opinions would be great. Be nice - like many, I'm new to this

Thank you for reading.

I'm interested in seeing what you're trying to say with your story, Dechorus. It sounds abstract, but I'm hopeful. Downloaded the file, will start reading tomorrow.

I think it's more meta than it is abstract. I think when all is said and done, some viewers may get different things from what it is my story is trying to say. But for the most part, I've tried to write it as plainly as possible, and there's a lot of writing. It's hard for me to personally tell if I communicate the story well enough for its message to be clear, but I too am hopeful.

Just finished it. Impressive graphical effects, they give the game a very cinematic feel.

You don't really get to know who Hadrian and Hope are, and what kind of world they live in. Fleshing out the characters and world a bit more would give some flavor to the story.

Technical whining:

• Why is the app called tetris?
• Autostarting a fullscreen app after installation is bad form.
  I was doing something with my computer, don't randomly take over my screen!
• You need a loading screen, some load times are too long to simply leave the screen black.
  Especially during first startup, the first 10-15 seconds after startup are a black screen with no audio.
• The opening zoom needs a higher res background image. It's way too blurry fully zoomed in.
• In windowed mode, my cursor disappears when I move it over the game window.
• The game window takes mouse unput even when unfocused.
• There's an awkward 1 second pause between an item description and the "this is taking a long time" message in the first scene.

Game design:

• The characters are very far off to the left. Is there a reason for that?
• The textbox is too wide to comfortably read. Too many characters per line.
• I'd like to be able to use a keyboard to show the next screen of dialogue instead of mouse-only.
• Escape instantly kills the game. It should ask for confirmation first.
• Showing only one character at a time causes a lot of sprites blinking back and forth during dialogue.
• The pauses at comma's in the text are annoying.
• I'd like to be able to increase the text speed.

Decorus Carcer / Beautiful Prison reviewed at VNR4. Congratulations on successfully finishing your visual short story.

Thank you for the insightful criticism. I shall try to address each point in future iterations of the demo.

In saying that, I would like to sadly point over two big mistakes I've made. That is, the game is lacking polish as I so eagerly rushed to get it up where others could simply play and experience the story. As a piece of software it lacks a lot of obvious, and some expected functionality. The fullscreen, escape key, and what somebody else found as the enter key starting the ending sequence (this was a debug feature which I completely forgot to remove!), saving, loading, options, and so on.
The second mistake is I've placed this in the completed games section - when really, it isn't. It's a complete sequence, and a self contained short story... but it's far from a complete game. In my mind I always intended for this to be a 'teaser demo', but I suppose the self contained chapter compelled me to place it in the "completed games" section rather than the "games in progress" one.

To clarify the "tetris" thing:
The visual studio project was first named 'tetris'. I was pulling my hair out coding an adventure game and decided to do what all programmers do, and start with either one of tetris, pong, pacman, etc...
Shortly after, I immediately regained motivation to soldier on with my adventure game, and so it became the demo that you played.
I hadn't changed the project name in fear of possibly messing up any path names and what not. Surely there's a way for me to do so, and I really should have before submitting it.

The characters on the left was a sort of homage to other similar rpg style games that do that, many on the Nintendo DS being a good example.

I may perhaps make a thread in the "games in progress" section that walks through the development of the game at large. There are many features I'd like to implement which I wish not to crowd this thread with, but would still love to detail.



I was taken by surprise by this review. Thank you so much for taking the time to both play my game and write such a detailed review. I'm glad you were able to see the story for what it was. In response to the technical shortcomings, I will do my best to address each point as I continue development on it. I can only point to my above response for the time being.

I've played through your game and the visual effects were really fun to look at! They especially worked well in the beginning, which gave off a really cinematic feeling - the centered text worked well too in that part.

Furthermore, you've got an awesome attitude towards critique which will get you far, keep it up !

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