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[saguaro]

Would someone please murder the Locked-In demo?

Take no prisoners.

[Hijiri]

Would someone be kind enough to massacre the demo for Death Rule: The First Rule Prefereably my Episode (Death Rule)

[AxemRed]

Code: Select all

Locked-in
- Needs sound on the title screen.
- Car horn sound in the beginning hurts my ears.
- Clock: hour hand disappears before minute hand, minute hand has jittery motion
- Not enough contrast between q.save etc. button foreground and outline colors.
  Those buttons also randomly disappear sometimes?
- Gears jitter as well.
- Cool graphical effect, but sometimes too hectic compared to the dialogue.
- Portrait bouncy effect looks awful and out of place.
- It's hard to match sprites to names, especially considering we don't know if
  the main character is supposed to be on-screen or not.

Code: Select all

Death Rule:
- The .rar contains a folder inside another folder.
- Font is terrible.
- Background horizon is at waist height, makes me feel like a midget.
- Where was Tinasa shot?
- Desperately needs an overview screen that matches all the characters with
  their numbers and objectives. This is just too much to remember while still
  trying to read the story.
- Current demo is just an info dump

[Anna]

Only played Locked-in so far, so I'm going to mention some stuff AxemRed didn't yet, including what you did right (in my opinion).

So, in order as I played:

- I don't get the animation we see when the first scene starts (the one where they ask her questions), maybe it's just me but... what does it represent? It also makes reading annoying for me.
- the first background blinded me a little, because you went from very black to very white.
+ I like the fading in of photo's over the background when something occurred combined with a sound effect. It made the action instantly clear.
+ cool visual effects in general (the room, animations etc)
- I don't understand why we see the clock striking four twice in a row after each scene. Does time not move forward? Is it another day? Why show us?
+ I liked the music which starts when she first starts thinking back about what happened. It has a very fitting mood.
- After Kimber comes in, there is a key-like background with a busy pattern on the blue... lace thingy? I understand it symbolizes the people you know, but it's kind of busy as a background, especially because the text is written over it.
- I find the blue of the sky outside the windows in the office background to be a bit too bright compared to the other colours.
+ I loved the whiskey glass scene, awesome mood setter and it added to the text; what wasn't spoken could already be seen. my only point is to maybe adjust the ice cubes a little (the image) because they seem to have this grey blot over them, making them look weird, and they're not very shiny-looking.
+ Interesting story, I really liked the mystery and how each character (including the main character) had distinct personalities. The only thing which comes to mind is the question the main character asks herself in the end; getting help with what? Recovering from her condition? Why does she believe she need help with that and how would they help her?

[Hijiri]

Code: Select all

Death Rule:
- The .rar contains a folder inside another folder.
- Font is terrible.
- Background horizon is at waist height, makes me feel like a midget.
- Where was Tinasa shot?
- Desperately needs an overview screen that matches all the characters with
  their numbers and objectives. This is just too much to remember while still
  trying to read the story.
- Current demo is just an info dump

-Merely unzipped the original release and then archived it, so thus why it did that. Should correct it soon.
-Correcting that too somewhat. Adding a setting to let people choose the font.
-Cant do much about that. I've only got royalty free photos to work with.
-I'll go clear that up now...
-Done, but names ommitted for plot purposes.
-Can't exactly have much action when one of the rules more-or-less forbids confrontation for most of the first day.

Thanks for giving it a look.

[saguaro]

- Needs sound on the title screen.
- Car horn sound in the beginning hurts my ears.
- Clock: hour hand disappears before minute hand, minute hand has jittery motion
- Not enough contrast between q.save etc. button foreground and outline colors.
Those buttons also randomly disappear sometimes?
- Gears jitter as well.
- Cool graphical effect, but sometimes too hectic compared to the dialogue.
- Portrait bouncy effect looks awful and out of place.
- It's hard to match sprites to names, especially considering we don't know if
the main character is supposed to be on-screen or not.[/code]

Thank you for that. Some of the things you mentioned (music on title screen) will be fixed by the final release. (I got really tried of hearing the title music while I was testing the game so I turned it off.) I think you pointed out a lot of things that need improvement though, and I will try to think about what to do with the say_labels and the portrait bounce, also. Thanks for taking the time to play.

- I don't get the animation we see when the first scene starts (the one where they ask her questions), maybe it's just me but... what does it represent? It also makes reading annoying for me.

That is supposed to be the hospital hallway lights as she is rolled by in a gurney. I found a good sound effect for this, where it obviously sounds like a gurney being pushed by running people, but the visual should be more clear too.

- I don't understand why we see the clock striking four twice in a row after each scene. Does time not move forward? Is it another day? Why show us?

I intended to have each clock transition start at a different time animation-wise but I made some image changes and didn't check to see if it still worked. As for the sound, four chimes just happens to be as long as the animation lasts. I need to replace that with a different sound.

- After Kimber comes in, there is a key-like background with a busy pattern on the blue... lace thingy? I understand it symbolizes the people you know, but it's kind of busy as a background, especially because the text is written over it.
- I find the blue of the sky outside the windows in the office background to be a bit too bright compared to the other colours.
+ I loved the whiskey glass scene, awesome mood setter and it added to the text; what wasn't spoken could already be seen. my only point is to maybe adjust the ice cubes a little (the image) because they seem to have this grey blot over them, making them look weird, and they're not very shiny-looking.

Good stuff, I will make changes to all of these things.

+ Interesting story, I really liked the mystery and how each character (including the main character) had distinct personalities. The only thing which comes to mind is the question the main character asks herself in the end; getting help with what? Recovering from her condition? Why does she believe she need help with that and how would they help her?

The main character wants to reveal that she is "awake" and isn't sure who she can trust--she believes one of these people is probably a murderer, and the murderer might have intended to kill her as well. This should definitely be more clear. Thank you for playing, too.

You both gave me some good stuff to work on and you picked up things that I didn't notice (been looking at it too long).

[Obscura]

Susan (and others)...this a request for a brutal review of my game. (Link in the sig.). My thanks in advance. Rip it to shreds...