In one word: original. Most beginners would usually start with something "standard" or simply similar to what's already available, at least to get some practice, but you went forward and made a story completelly different to everything seen before and, from a general perspective, you did it well.
The story is original and interesting; the visual style matches the mood of the story itself quite well, and the branching makes sense. That's enough to tag a game as, at least, "good"
Anyway, there are some minor issues I would like to point out. Don't take this as some kind of "attack", I'm only trying to let you realize of these problems so you can avoid them on your next project.
The game is short because the story is short; while I personally prefer long games, just being short doesn't make a game bad. However, I'm afraid you don't realize that 25 Mb would translate to a one hour wait for the download on a 56k modem (and yes, there is still some people who use those). I wouldn't mention this too much, but:
* There is an image file in the package that is not used at all by the script (fireplace.jpg) which means 80kb wasted.
* The white.PNG file is not really needed: if you replace the line
Code:
image white = "white.PNG"
in your script with
Code:
image white = Solid(255, 255, 255)
you will get exactly the same result in-game, but need one less image file, saving a few mroe kb with it. With the white_wall.PNG file, you should consider if the texture (hardly noticeable) is worth these extra 325kb (if it isn't, you can go away with Solid(192, 192, 192) or something like that: R=G=B will always lead to gray, the higher the numbers the brighter the color).
Well, these are all just minor tweaks that would make the download slightly less painful for dial-up users, but there is one much bigger:
Hakura0 wrote:
There was some music, but it's what was causing problems, so I took it out for the sake of playability.
Ok, you took the problem out by the root, nothing wrong with this. But do you realize that the package includes 13Mb of mp3 files? This is slightly more than half of the total zip size; or, in other words, 30 minutes of wasted download time for poor dial-up users
I could even notice it myself, despite being on broadband: without them the download would have taken one minute instead of two.
The morale: after building distributions for a game, take a moment to check what's in the package.
Since you've made an overall good game, it's likely you'll do some on the future, probably longer. If so, this issue would scale proportionally; and as soon as a game grows larger, unnedded files could become an issue even for broadband users.
The other point I wanted to mention is that, after the "intro" part of the game, there is a black scene where you have to click several times before anything happens. My first thought was "oh, damn, the chip is over-heating again!"; but finally I tried to click once more and the screen changed. While the "long darkness" effect is interesting, you should be quite carefull with this: if clicking doesn't make anything change on the screen, the user gets the impression that something's going wrong. A nice trick used to avoid this is using placeholder dialogue, like "." followed by ".." and then "...": while the "long" effect is still achieved, the user can see that this is actually part of the game and not some kind of problem. Chronoluminaire had a similar issue with Elven Relations: at a certain point of the story, depending on some previous actions, some choices were selected randomly: this was part of the game, but there was several people reporting it as a bug on these forums.
General suggestion: when the game needs to do something unusual, make sure the player knows, at least, that this is part of the game.
Please note that while the "negative" part of this post has taken far longer than the "positive", the criticism is only about minor issues; my opinion about the game overall is really good. Just wanted to make sure you see the problems of these issues to help you improve your upcomming projects
BTW: I have found 4 endings in total:
doll house, follower, roam, and fairy tale
are these all the endings or am I still missing something?
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