"Exchange Program" Demo

[Kris Schnee]

When technology and dreams collide, what keeps the world alive?

I've got a playable demo of "Exchange Program" up, if people would like to try it. The "art" consists of a few photos from Morguefile.com (and one of mine) distorted, plus one piece of character art from "Star Ocean 2" and one original piece done for me and badly GIFed by me. I was focusing on the story!

Comments and criticism appreciated -- though "Get better graphics!" is obvious. Two known bugs are that the first reference to "Youth Brigade" somehow doesn't work as a definition link, and that the "punch.wav" sound effect doesn't play.

[monele]

Try not to forget the Windows .exe next time ^^;...

The one Youth Brigade link I saw doesn't work because it's also a choice (which in itself, is a link). I guess it was not meant to be this way ^^;

The punch sound played a few times during the game. Not sure what's making it fail on your computer.

About the game in itself hm... I have mixed feelings about it. The main bad feeling is "confusion". I had a hard time understanding the context. And since you refer to "weird" things, we need to know what's supposed to be normal ^^;. The other one is that a lot of things feel... disconnected. I think there's a lack of story transitions between parts. It has to do with the way you deal with convos (which isn't bad in itself and is actually quite rare) and makes things sudden (I talk about you, boom let's run on the beach, boom let's make a horn joke, boom... etc...).

The good points to me where mostly gameplay-wise. The use of more complex conversation trees and the fact you memorize what's known to the Akki and other things. I couldn't see the effects in-game but if it impacts on the rest of the story, it's a nice thing.

[Kris Schnee]

The EXE? I need to read the docs again, I think. I deleted the "run_game" file on the assumption that it'd only work for the "game" directory, and didn't like the icon. Could probably have just renamed the directory, huh?

Re: the broken link, The two references are:

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"Not really. I'm in one of the {a=define_youth_brigade}Youth Brigades{/a}..."
"My {a=define_youth_brigade}Youth Brigade{/a} is assigned..."

Why is it that only one works when I click it? I tried putting the "s" in the first one outside the link, but that didn't seem to help. ...Oh, I see, you can't put a link inside a (dialogue) choice?

Re: the story transitions, I don't understand this problem. Is it that I'm relying too heavily on the text to say "then they went over there and did this?" If I had real graphics it'd probably help if, for instance, I had a shot of the hut for when you went there. Your comments suggest I should start with a different scene, in "Hiro"'s world. Maybe a separate screen for "let's sit and talk" would be helpful, or a fade to black between scenes?

The memorization is subtle so far. Certain comments only get made if you've been friendly, or if you've talked about "home" first.

[Adorya]

The run_game exe is essential in running the game, the script.rpy is the one that can be deleted. After running one last time the game before packaging, it generate a script.rpyc file file. This is the one that can replace script.rpy