K*A*O*R*I

[mikey]

PyTom>> yes, roughly about a thousand lines (that's not all that much though

Tyler>> On the plus count, I still remember River Trap's password #9 wkjgv

eclipse>> Now I'm really a little afraid to announce anything, because this secret kind of working style has proven to be effective for me.
I plan the next project to be released in summer 2005.

[PyTom]

yes, roughly about a thousand lines

How does that compare with your other games? Each playthrough of River Trap was (IIRC) much longer, but there was quite a bit of common text in RT, while K* didn't have much in the way of text shared between paths.

[mikey]

Whoa, you got me there, I'll check that and post it later, but you're right, RT had a just a few different lines in the first choice and then all the paths were the same text (except for the endings then). K* had no shared text at all. Still, I would think RT in fact is bigger, but while I'm at it, I'll check BP as well. Some nice stats may come out.

[mikey]

Well, the results are here.

Character count (with/without spaces)
1. River Trap = 71 700 (62 700)
2. Kaori = 53 700 (44 300)
3. Black Pencil = 34 200 (28 800)

Word and line count - one line equals one screen, so the number of lines also means the number of clicks.
1. River Trap = 13 500 words, 2800 lines
2. Kaori = 10 500 words, 1400 lines
3. Black Pencil = 6 600 words, 1400 lines

What surprised me was that Kaori was longer than Black Pencil, and that River Trap is not all that bigger than Kaori. I thought River Trap was endless, but this made me realize that the difference is indeed the presentation and development time - by choosing a simple approach with Kaori, it dramatically lowered the production time. Interesting, interesting...

[RedSlash]

Maybe you just got good at it!

[Tyler]

Tyler>> On the plus count, I still remember River Trap's password #9 wkjgv

Thank you!

Don't worry, already had the pw my first one I think,

[Blue Lemma]

Well, I never promised not to play Kaori until I finished another game, so I gave it a go. I'm really impressed with your writing, mikey! Your trio does a good job of creating a certain atmosphere. I got all the endings, I think, but I was confused on one part: If you ask Kaori to give you the red pills, she gives you the right ones, but the player's thoughts say that she gave the wrong ones...? Maybe I just didn't read that part closely enough ^_^;
Knowing you, you probably have another one almost done but I won't let you outdo me for long!
*engage friendly rivalry mode*

[chronoluminaire]

Yes, it took me a while to play K*A*O*R*I, but I'm glad I did. Here are some of my thoughts. There may be spoilers in the comments below, for those who've not played the game.
* To start with, nice atmospheric narration as ever. You do have a good writing style, mikey.
* I really like the system of endings, passwords, and then "further" omake endings. Good stuff - although it does "strongly encourage" the player to play through every path, which kinda restricts you to never having the storyline recombine after a branch.
* It really needs some music, even be it only MIDI.
* Recognising left and right arrows is an absolute godsend: at last we can hold down the key to skip bits read before. Finally I can play a mikey game without aggravating my RSI to agonizing levels!
* It's a bit noticeable that all the images are just costumes on the same character, even down to the expression. She's cute, but it's noticeable when the text says "She smiles" and I find myself glancing at the image, hoping to see a new expression, but it's the same inscrutable straight face as ever.
* I really like the theme of discovering hidden messages. But the consistency critic in me points out that the game seems to be set in Japan, with the Japanese names and the kids calling their teacher "sensei"... but the word games down certain paths use English letters not hiragana or katakana In particular (big spoilers) the initials "K. I.", if written in kana, couldn't be the start of both Kaori and a name starting Ko; and most ways of saying "I am Kaori" in Japanese wouldn't take eight kana... Sorry, that's really pedantic, I know. I'm just bothered by things like that ^^;;;;

[mikey]

More players!

Chronoluminaire>>

The game plays in a sort of a world of its own, with JPN names, but latin script. Naturally, it would be impossible to do such word games with Japanese letters (I don't really know any Japanese writing).

And thank you for the comments, very to the point. BTW, the whole game was shot (the BGs) in London, so whenever you have a way around, it's near the Deutsche Bank if you go towards the Gherkin.


BlueLemma>>

Hey, thanks for playing! It's nice to see the concept work and people have fun. Yes, and FINALLY you broke your gaming detox, good good. Just give Town Heat a go and you know... get inspired. It helps a lot.
*engages constructive competition mode*
And I will try to do more and more... (notice the word *try*)

To answer the question If you ask Kaori to give you the red pills, she gives you the right ones, but the player's thoughts say that she gave the wrong ones...? - this is true in one instance, which is the wrong path. I wanted to mislead the less-thinking player into the seemingly logical conclusion Kaori (Inami in fact) was color blind. If you read closely (which you did), you'd know it was in fact wrong and she gave you the right ones. So I guess,.. congratulations! People DO read the written

[PyTom]

One other thing about the various ATP games is that there seems to be quite a bit of aliasing of the edges of the characters, where each pixel is either fully transparent or fully opaque. Are the images saved as GIFs somewhere in the process, or using color keying? It may make sense to use a format like png, which has a 256 level alpha channel.

Of course, if the effect is intentional, then this message can be easily disregarded.

[Guest]

The images are GIFs, not using color keying. An interesting thing with the PNGs, we'll try to make something from it. Thanks for the tip.

[mikey]

The images are GIFs, not using color keying. An interesting thing with the PNGs, we'll try to make something from it. Thanks for the tip.

[Guest]

i get errors when i try to click on the decisions. any ideas? i dled all three parts

[Realistic]

So do i, i specifically get this error:
Cannot find C:\\windows\desktop\KAORI\data\k.mbd

[mikey]

So do i, i specifically get this error:
Cannot find C:\\windows\desktop\KAORI\data\k.mbd

Perhaps you had an error while unpacking it... Sometimes this happens when the download is terminated just before completion. It doesn't bother WinRAR, it will unpack the files, but with errors. Try to re-download it and watch the unpacking of the files. You shouldn't get an error though, wait...

I just d/loaded it and the game had no errors. k.mbd worked perfectly.
K.mbd has precisely 277 606 bytes dated 15.11.2004 23:36
Do you have the same file?

Also, try to re-unpack the files in a different place, for instance C:\games.
Hope that helps.