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Evergreen Valley Demo

Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 2:41 pm
by DrakeNavarone
With the recent wave of demos hitting these boards lately, I'm sure one more won't hurt anybody. So, here it is... Evergreen Valley!

Brief summary :
Two weeks ago, Noah Hunter moved back into his old house with his sister in the small town of Evergreen Valley, a place he hasn't visited in six long years. In a town where it never stops snowing, he is fatefully reunited with his childhood friend and makes several new acquiantances. The first few days of school pass by innocently, but something lurks in the background.....

Ah, I'm no good at that kinda thing... I'll just suggest you play the demo to get a real feel for the story.

I didn't want to do a text-only release, so I threw in some placeholder graphics. None of the art will be used in the full game (Actually, I'm looking for an artist, if anyone's interested, though it might be too early to ask...). Some of the backgrounds were "borrowed" from some other sources (which you might recognize...).

Feedback is appreciated. Feel free to be brutally honest (don't worry, I got thick skin) so I can hammer out all the kinks in the script. So please, critique, comment, question, and suggest away (you can complement, too, if you want...).

Have fun!

Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 3:47 pm
by Andy
Sounds interesting. Downloading now, edit when played...

EDIT: Nice! I like the intro.

Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 11:56 pm
by PyTom
I played through this, and really got into it. This demo has a really nice feel to it, with a bit of a mystery to it, but not a dark one. I found myself getting really into it, wanting to see what happened.

The intro, with it's use of SnowBlossom and the red moon, drew me in... and then the sort of Kyon-esque narration kept me into it. EVTV was appropriately funny... as was the script itsef ;-).

The way the temp graphics are used makes this an eminently playable demo.

I'm looking forward to where this goes. Keep it up.

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 8:06 am
by monele
Will this be a kinetic novel ? (didn't have time to go through it all)

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 8:18 am
by dizzcity
Quick notes while playing:

- I presume the stylistic choice of lowercase letters over the red moon and the All Words Capitalized in the last sentence of the opening sequence will eventually mean something.

- The switch from the philosophical tone of voice set in the opening sequence to the normal everyday life narration seems a little jarring to me, but this is debatable and probably won't be noticed.

- Is re-acclimate a word?

- Be careful of your tenses. You keep on switching between past and present tense in your narrative, and that gets distracting.

- I loved the strategic desk selection bit. That was great.

- (Dining Hall) Sydney: You believe I'm innocent, don'tcha, Noah? (and repeat for rest of the dontchas in the text... or better yet, just stick to "don't you")

- "The crunch of a thousand footsteps pushing onward in the snow echoes from the school." Golden sentence.

- Overusage of the word "grab" once Noah gets home to Microwave Pizza Things.

- Nice bit of humor with "the greatest tragedy the world has ever known".

- Mackenzie: "There are other reasons to miss school than sickness, you know."

- The text is a bit heavy after the little by-play with Sydney. Three whole paragraph-sized chunks to read. Spread it out a bit.

- Run the script through a spellcheck program. There are a bunch of typos throughout that I can't remember the location of.

- Gah, the walk back with Cadence is just one chunk of text after another. Either shorten it or space it out.

- The build-up to the kiss was quite well done, in my opinion.

- I loved the EVTV episode. Lively but gentle humor. You could see the conversation sparkle between Sydney and Blake.


Overall: Enjoyable.

-Dizzy-

Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 12:00 pm
by DrakeNavarone
Yay, comments! It looks like everyone really liked the intro, which is good. Alright, let's get to work...

PyTom>> I'm glad you liked it. There is a mystery to the whole story, but it shouldn't get too dark. I'm not planning on delving into Higurashi territory. I'm glad you liked EVTV. It was fun to write, but I was afriad it would just come off as lame...

monele>> The demo is kinetic, but the full game won't be.

dizzcity>> Thanks for all the feedback. It really helps (especially the grammar/spelling errors). There's a few things I'm gonna keep though... like "re-acclimate" and "dontcha", regardless of correctness. It's just how the characters talk (granted, re-acclimate is narration, but that's being told by Noah anyway...). I'll spread the text out more in the full version when it's not important (but like at the end, Noah's supposed to be a little panicky and thinking pretty fast, so a lot of description at once seemed appropriate). And I'm really glad you liked the build-up to the kiss... Whenever I read it, I kept wondering if I pulled it off right, but I'm pretty overcritical of my own writing... And another EVTV fan! Awesome! I guess I didn't do such a bad job after all...

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 1:05 pm
by mikey
I liked it so far, very nice atmosphere... even despite the placeholders... so with real graphics, the potential is very good.

Anyway, the only true element, text, was very nice and moody. I liked it, the snow and all, and it was pretty long as well. I don't know how long it took to make this demo, but I hope you can keep it up and we'll see a nice game in the future.

I didn't particularly like EDTV... and I think it was because of the placeholder characters... it was funny - in the kids-funny way. And I wasn't in a kids-funny mood. But this should go away with real graphics.

So I hope you can manage the whole production thing, because this is something I'd really like to see and play. As a player I found it to be very calming, I don't know whether you had the chance to play the Tainted Rose demo, it had a similar approach to atmosphere, and I like such games, with such atmospheres a lot, so well... good luck.

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 3:02 pm
by Watercolorheart
Okay, well, everyone is replying to this thread so I may as well download the demo. I'll get my review back to you later.

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 3:52 am
by ciel
WHOA the characters totally threw me off. Everything was serene and calm and then little cute chibi people...@.@

And intro... they hurt my eyes a little when it blinks from red-> white -> red again -> white..

otherwise... i'm still playing XD seems good so far.

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 9:55 am
by Watercolorheart
I know, me too LOL.

I've only played through the beginning, and the transition from scary red moon to serene (and gorgeous) menu screen with the snow and one lone evergreen jarred me.

BTW, these are some of the nicest filtered backgrounds I've seen in a while.

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:07 pm
by PyTom
One problem is that my eyes became adjusted to the red moon, which meant that when we got to the main menu, I had to pause there for a few minutes to get rid of the green anti-moon I saw.

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:22 pm
by DrakeNavarone
I'm sorry for hurting your eyes, guys... (with all the colors, and the chibi sprites.....) Like I mentioned above, though, they're all placeholders, so hopefully when I get real graphics, it won't hurt so much. And the characters will definetly not be chibi-ish in the real game (I just borrowed the character pack available on the Blade website... I needed something, and there it was, so....)

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:58 pm
by Watercolorheart
Ah, so that's where those are from. :) I was wondering ...

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 4:12 pm
by DaFool
One of the longest demos I have ever played, keep up the good work :D

Um, are you keeping the BGs? I hope you do, they're lovely. Is that where you live?

Posted: Thu Aug 31, 2006 5:00 pm
by DrakeNavarone
I wish that's where I lived... but all the bgs are from somewhere in the internet, except the ones with the blueish tint, they're from Tsukihime... (the source for the red moon is also from Tsukihime). I won't be using the bgs in the final version, unfortanetly. I'm pretty sure all the actual photos are in the public domain, but I don't wanna risk anything for the final release, and would rather see original bgs done. A shame, though, because I really like the title screen with that lone evergreen tree...