I won't lie, my first reaction to seeing "many of these comments seem negative" and a long subsequent post was to consider my retirement. Then again, I was just so amazed that someone actually played it to throw my hand in this early. I can't thank you enough for not only taking the time to play it, but to leave feedback.
There was a lot that I wanted to institute and will be fixing/adding in the follow-on. (Unlockable art gallery, jukebox, voice acting if I could swing it, a couple mini-games and interactivity) The problem is that I'm currently working as a one man show with a 60+ hr day job. >.> I'm very slooooooooooowly getting things to the level I want.
PyTom wrote:Seeing a screenshot of the dark uniforms made me thing there was a funeral going on - but once I was actually playing the game, I began to see them as uniforms. Still, it might make sense to add a logo badge or something. like that.
You could say this was a major point where there was a lot of debate over the years on uniform design. In the end we decided that a more traditional, business-esque style would be better, forgoing the previous standard of the shield on the right arm. Some days I wonder what could have been... Either way, the only person who will be sticking with their uniform after Episode One will be Syl. Who wears a uniform on vacation?
PyTom wrote:The game ended quite early, without any sort of conflict or character development - it's great for an introduction, but if the next episode doesn't have an arc to it, I might wait until there are enough episodes to form proper arcs.
Official answer: The pilot was just solely the introduction to see if readers would warm up to the characters. Off-the-record answer: We ran out of time and pushed it. Expect Episode One to have the beginning of the actual plot. Just need to actually figure out WHAT the plot is first. >.>;;
PyTom wrote:Anton's backstory could use some explanation - perhaps dole it out slowly. Apparently, he's from 600 years ago - how one goes from there to leader of a planet seems to be worth mentioning. (This isn't Idiocracy, I hope.) The character also seems to be a jack of all trades - I'm reminded of Lazarus Long a little. Not like I'm complaining about that.
There is an explanation. It's called Katajion's Dream, Morterous Theorem, and Luck and Chance. I'm seriously hurting trying to figure out a way to do recalls of AV's text predecessors without dumping exposition on the reader at the very beginning. Anton's remark that he has done this too many times was a bit of an inside joke about it. I'm thinking of increasing the exposition at the beginning slightly and sticking to my plan of the occasional flashback and story.
PyTom wrote:I have a bunch of minor quibbles with the presentation:
* The font is non-standard enough to be hard to read, since letter like 't' have very odd forms. While you can probably get away with something like that in menus, it makes it tough to read the text of the game.
* The text seems overly small compared to the window frame. With the usual game, when I'm reading text, the characters' faces are in my peripheral vision. In Anton's vacation, I have to look away from the text to see the sprite's heads. I think a bigger font might make this less of an issue.
* The centered text jumps around, making it hard to find the start of a line when you click. Just one of those things that makes reading more difficult than it need be.
Eh...heh...heh... Actually, all three of those brought back a flashback of several days, roughly 18 hours worth of time between them, of me tinkering and toying with it, unable to get it to do what I wanted, until I yelled "Screw this!", put it down, and decided to tackle it before the episode one release. Side images were the worst idea I ever had because they ruined an otherwise cool textbox design. I'm going to be spending another 18 hours to fix it, but I agree, it is utter crap in its current state.