Arowana wrote:I love classic detective mysteries, so you have me hooked from the start! Coincidentally, I’m also making a mystery game that starts on a cruise ship, so I was instantly drawn towards the story.
Ahahaha, now that's an interesting coincidence! I've taken a look at your site and your game seems quite promising, so I'll be following your site and looking forward to your demo!
Characters
I love your character designs – everyone has such a distinct look! I’m really impressed you put together such a large and varied cast! It kind of reminds me of Umineko no Naku Koro ni, actually, both in terms of sprite art and cast size.
The titular Detective Butler was hilarious. Though his attitude rubbed me the wrong way at first, I grew quite fond of his quirkiness over the course of the demo. I think he will make a great iconic detective for the series.
The MC, Gilligan, intrigues me – he obviously has some issues he’s not revealing quite yet. I don’t quite understand his constant negativity (his dad seems like a likable guy so far – I don’t get the impression he’s as strict as Gilligan says), but I’m guessing more light will be shed on his backstory later on.
I don’t have much of a read on the supporting characters yet. Can’t wait until I get to uncover all their dark secrets haha.
Thanks. This game was pretty much inspired straight from Umineko, so I'm glad it gave you that feeling.
I'm also glad that Butler turned out to be a likeable character. And yes, more light will be shed on everyone else later on. No need to rush things, I think.
Visuals
Cool animation on the title screen. I assume the ship image is just a placeholder?
I like the sleek notebook-style textbox, though the margins around the name text are a bit small.
The huge car/door backgrounds look a bit jarring when they are placed behind sprites. If you can’t find other photos, maybe you could use side sprites for those scenes instead?
The frequent transitions and background changes (e.g. the city streets, skyscraper, clouds) during Gilligan’s thoughts were a bit distracting to me. Perhaps you could just leave the sprites/current background up instead?
Quite so, the ship's just a placeholder.
We were thinking about changing the textbox to make it look nicer. I'm not sure if we will, but I'll probably change the name box around anyway.
Yes, lots of people have told me about the car background looking weird, ahahaha... Not sure how I'll get around that but it'll be changed.
I see, well I was thinking it'd get boring to just have the same background, but maybe multiple ones are too distracting.
Music
I find the music quite catchy, though some tracks (e.g. the choral-sounding piece) seemed a bit too epic for the more mundane conversations. Also, the music cuts off quite abruptly when it stops – is it possible to fade it out more gradually?
Yeah, I admit some tracks don't really fit. We'll just have to compose more music that DOES fit! But anyway, as for the fade-outs, some intentionally stopped abruptly while others slowly faded out. I coded a system where the bgm would fade out gradually, so I can always extend it to make the fade-out time longer, if that was the problem.
Other
Is there rollback? The readme file says that H/left goes back one page. However, those keys don’t seem to do anything when I try them.
I don’t think the repetition of the company’s miracle story in both chapters is necessary – you could probably make the first reference vaguer, or shorten the second one.
I assume the info about the ship will be important for solving the mystery? I thought the exposition during the tour was a bit heavy since it came all at once – maybe Gilligan could explore the ship after he gets the “mystery challenge” from Butler and gather info then? Then he’d be able to record any pertinent info in his notepad as well.
I've been working on the backlog feature for a while. I'm just as confused as you are as to why the left arrow isn't working, but I've made some progress in the right-click menu. All I need to do is figure out how to get the text to appear and it should be working, but that's proving harder than I thought in ONScripter.
I might be too repetitive sometimes. I think it comes with trying to imitate Umineko's writing~ But I guess I can change it if necessary.
Well, I thought it'd be nice for the reader to know about the general locations of things on the ship before anything else. Your idea is good, but I think timing-wise it'd be best just to get it out of the way in the start. Again, Umineko had quite a boring intro, but after all that was out of the way it could get right into the more interesting things. The mystery immediately picks up after Chapter 2 -- conveniently the end of the demo (lol), although the real reason for doing that is because the Journal feature (similar to Umineko's Tips) isn't finished. So that was why I chose to dump all that info right at the beginning.
All-in-all, I thought the demo premise and characters were very intriguing and look forward to seeing the final version! Good luck with everything!
Thanks again for the feedback, it's always helpful! I hope you enjoy the full version!