AxemRed wrote: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.
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.
!