Segmentation_Fault[NaNo2016][Cyberpunk?]

[Nylan]

Segmentation_Fault - NaNoRenO 2016 Entry

itch.io

Synopsis:
In the near future, virtual reality is king. The Segmentation Initiative (SI) was set up to create virtual copies of different periods and locations of the real world so that they could be preserved for posterity. Segment selection involves a complex cerebral algorithm that picks the best fellow visitors for you to spend your time with when you visit.

Paul's boss has sent him on a mandatory vacation to a "Segment", leaving the destination up to SI's Operators. The people he meets are...uh...worrisome, to say the least.

Maybe there was a bug in the selection program?

Characters:
You\Paul
You are Paul, but you are also you. Paul is you?

Jane

Introverted yet fiery....is she trying to catch a fish with her bare hands?


Aurora

Studious. Sophisticated. Scared. Always cold.


Valentine

Completely lacking in social grace. Friendly. Too friendly.

Details:
-9,516 words
-Music by ysid
-Branching paths
-Mystery with Lovecraftian and Cyberpunk themes
-A study in "what is real?", compassion, and depression

Developer Notes:
This is my first VN. That said, please be honest with your critique. I used NaNoRenO as a chance to not only finish a project, but to give my skill level a quantum leap.

Let's keep this thread for comments and critique on the game itself, so please PM me bugs directly. I'll patch them up ASAP, but if I didn't submit this now I wasn't going to do it at all.

I make no promises that this won't do bad things to your PC.

This was a blast


Questions:
1) Do you think you will play this? Why/why not?
2) What ending did you get first?
3) What stood out to you the most about this VN?
4) Do you have any feedback for me?

[ysid]

Can't wait to check it out once I get home.

[Ayano]

1) I played it because it is my duty as a programmer (and I actually get SEG faults, "new" and "delete" is pure evil)
2) The earliest ending where I meet Aurora and follow her. Then the one with Valentine ending the game.
3) The characters are too bland and their introductions are too quick. Its random in a bad way, not the FLCL way sadly. Its overall RAW!!
4)
Congratz on completing it but..

Its RAW, its so under-cooked!

Writing:
Why.. Why on earth are you using wikipedia to explain the plot of your VN? Thats mental.
You should tell me what a segment fault is because you know what it is don't you? Not wikipedia. This isn't your grade school assignment so stop using the wiki or at best quote a famous scientist.
Or even better try and make one yourself it isn't that hard, that is if you programmed anything that compiles, once you do that you will get a little more insight on how to push that into your story.

And what on earth does this mean?!
"But which smart when they are touched"
What?! Maybe I am just too thick to understand it but it sure is some abstract art to me.

Oh and there is an ALSO in the first few sentences... twice!
"The man besides us also"
What do you mean also... was there a man before? The meaning of the sentence is edited into oblivion! And its the first sentence..

For the love of god please don't use the User name of the PC as your mc's name unless you want them to read
"moms-pc-kitchen2000/Paul"

Sound:

It was painful to listen to, not only did it not fit the theme very well but it made my ears bleed a little, perhaps tone down a little on the piano otherwise most will probably just turn it off.

It didn't fit the cyberpunk style at all if thats what you were going for.

This is what cyberpunk sounds like:
https://youtu.be/u0ow4tGgZWk

Graphics:
First off why did you take Linux mint of all distros.. It doesn't even look that cool. You had the chance to design the look of your own operating system but u went with the most windows like linux ever that most newbies use.. and instead of giving a cool vibe you made me chuckle a little bit.

I found that Jane's skin looked more like burnt bits of wood that you find at the end of a long winter in a wooden cabin, maybe make it look more human and brown rather than charcoal black.


User experience:
Terminal pop ups are always scary but some people don't have a mic/cam and so on so unless you don't care about immersion you should really address this.
The terminal just disappears without letting me read any text.. type something out and grab a buffer while you are at it:

[The extension exe has been deactivated and can no longer be displayed.]

Your CPU has elements of german in it.. those who won the war might not appreciate this.


colors are way off.
Why is the unselected GREEN but selected GRAY.

Final thoughts:
Not only that it's RAW! It has an inconsistent style, the backgrounds don't match the character sprites and the music doesn't match what the story is trying to say!

I didn't get the cyberpunk vibes either it sounds more like a sloppy sudo-romance series with unrelatable characters. But of-course thats what I got from two bad ends and I probably didn't see the "Good" parts of the game.

However I didn't want to. Why? Because once I made my choices I felt that the other choices where not representative of Me and so I felt that the writer is forcing me to chose things he wants me to do removing my choice entirely and removing me from the equation.

After note
It was quite rough and you probably feel down right now but don't MIA now. Quality comes from the Quantity mainly because of experience. This is your first game and quite frankly its shit but thats okay you will get better the more you do but if you stop now u will be shit forever.

[Nylan]

Thanks for the honest feedback, Ayano, and thanks for playing. I'm making a note of your points and will keep them in mind for future endeavors.

Too bad I managed to put you off. I like some of the other endings better.

[Lodratio]

I saw your post in the nano2016 thread, and figured I might as well give your game a try.

I won't go as in depth as the other guy, but here's my thoughts after playing a couple routes: The idea of using your programming skills for interactive spooks is pretty good. You sure got me when you locked my pc... though I was kind of scared of starting another scenario after that because I wasn't sure if you might actually lock me out of my computer for good for lulz (hey, you never know with random people on the internet). The concepts you used the vr setting to explore also have potential. A crippled girl escaping into vr and an AI yandere... that's some pretty good stuff. The problem, as far as I see it, lies with the lack of world building and the way the character interactions are executed. You need more time to introduce your setting and characters to make the reader feel like they know them, before you pull off their masks and reveal them for what they really are. For example: With the AI, you could have us meet her in a seemingly chance encounter, written in such a way that it's clear in retrospect that it was actually carefully planned out by her, and meeting her again one or two more times until she tries to start a relationship with you, with a few hints about something being 'off' about her scattered in there. Then, once you're locked into her route you could have the protagonist slowly catching on, and turn the fact that he's dating an AI into a powerful revelation, rather than it coming completely out of left field. It's all about pacing and knowing how to use setup and payoff.

Again, Your ideas are good, so don't let yourself get discouraged just because you aren't there yet in other areas. To paraphrase something I read somewhere, for the first couple years of writing, your work is not going to be good, but it'll still have potential, it'll be -trying- to be good. Most people quit during that time because they get discouraged at not being able to get their vision across, but if you keep at it you will get there.

[Nylan]

Thanks for the thoughtful response and the encouragement. I can definitely see what you mean about the world building and character development needing some more love (it's the stereotypical over-ambitious first project!). Perhaps after another few games of experience under my belt, I'll return and give these characters the longer-form treatment they deserve.

And I'm glad the interactive spooks were fun

[paradigmshifty]

Yeah this was really cool!

I will send a PM as well as I did notice a couple of things that you may consider fixing.

I think the first ending I got was the Jane ending. I'm the kind of player that doesn't really like playing multiple routes to get the full story, I like to play through once to the credits screen and consider that to be my playthrough (I think I'm in the minority with that hehe), unless I get a bad end and feel like regoing from the last choice I made! But with this I did try to get more of the endings as it was fast-paced that was easy enough to do and I'm glad I explored more of the game.

What stood out most I think was the intro

before entering the segmentation. It was really interesting, especially the whole "webcam", "microphone", bit followed by the command prompt! I was like Wow! hehe.

And also the mystery in the story that some of the characters kept alluding to! I felt like continuing to play different ends to see what was really going on with those

As for feedback, I think the audio could have been a bit smoother, like some better transitions and sound effects would have added to the presentation of the game a lot in my opinion. Oh, I'll put the rest in a spoiler tag!

When I first unzipped the game, before running it I decided to open random.txt, the second I did my wifi disconnected! It was a windows update messing with my wifi I'm pretty sure haha, but it didn't come back until I'd played 5 mins of the game (after the command prompt bit in the intro) - It was really powerful and set a really cool sinister cyberpunk vibe. I think the fast-pace of the story and amount of story content in a short space was a little overambitious - the content was all good, but didn't have enough 'screen time' to really get me invested (don't worry too much it's incredibly difficult haha especially considering that you did so much solo and only had a month!) I have the exact same issue when it comes to writing and I'm sure with experience this can be overcome and I hope you do make a remake of this one day, it would be cool. Did you make all the photo BGs yourself? I wonder if they were photos you'd taken with the game in mind or CC things from the internet!? Another thing I really liked and shocked me a bit was seeing my name before /Paul in the textbox! Things like this are really effective and unexpected!! especially that computer lock out!! haha. You have some programming skills for sure! I did have a peek at the script file and say some commented out lines which referenced random.txt - what was it going to do?? hehe.

Whoops sorry for rambling a bit. But yeah - very cool concept - it reminded me of some of my favourite anime - (though it did get through approx 6-12eps worth of story in about 25mins!! - I do think a lot of anime and VNs are a bit too slowly paced, so I tend to be more interested to check out things that don't drag on too long. So I'm not saying this should have been 10 hours long or anything!)

Very impressed that this is your first released game! I'll be checking out your future work.

[Nylan]

Hey, thanks for the feedback (and PM)! Glad you liked it.

I wanted to try a little more interactivity - to help immerse the player a bit more. The protagonist is stepping away from reality into a fantasy world, and so is the player by playing the game, but that doesn't mean there aren't very tangible effects in the real world.

[Nylan]

I've uploaded a new build with a number of bug fixes, including a fix for the preferences screen issue (thanks paradigmshifty). Please PM with anything else.