Real - FIXED

[Hakura0]

The first thing I want to say, is that this is just me sticking my toe into the world of VNs. It's rather short I think, but I tried to at least have a few choices and some different endings along the way. The graphics are a bit different from the norm, but I like them, and in future cases if they aren't hated I can work on more sprites for the characters.
I finished my play-testing, and had no issues, but if you run into any, let me know. Also, since I'm curious, could you let me know how long a playthrough took you?
Thanks.

Windows link for download: http://rapidshare.com/files/90573732/real.zip.html
Linux link for download: http://rapidshare.com/files/90573733/re ... r.bz2.html
Mac link for download: http://rapidshare.com/files/90573734/real-mac.zip.html

Now with 100% less stowaway music files!

[Deji]

Got this after the "everything fades to black.."

Code: Select all

I'm sorry, but an exception occured while executing your Ren'Py
script.

NameError: name 'fluidscape' is not defined

While running game code:
 - script at line 67 of C:\Documents and Settings\Main\Desktop\renpy-6.5.0\doll/game/script.rpy
 - python at line 67 of C:\Documents and Settings\Main\Desktop\renpy-6.5.0\doll/game/script.rpy.

-- Full Traceback ------------------------------------------------------------

  File "D:\real\renpy\bootstrap.py", line 210, in bootstrap
  File "D:\real\renpy\main.py", line 300, in main
  File "D:\real\renpy\main.py", line 92, in run
  File "D:\real\renpy\execution.py", line 194, in run
  File "D:\real\renpy\ast.py", line 534, in execute
  File "D:\real\renpy\python.py", line 863, in py_exec_bytecode
  File "C:\Documents and Settings\Main\Desktop\renpy-6.5.0\doll/game/script.rpy", line 67, in <module>
NameError: name 'fluidscape' is not defined

While running game code:

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 6.5.0e

[Hakura0]

Fixed windows up. Feel free to smack me.

[sake-bento]

That was pretty creepy. @.@ I think that was the point, though. The word imagery in the beginning was especially interesting. It caught my attention right away and made me curious about the main character.

I like the idea with the character images. It was pretty interesting, and it lent a lot more to the atmosphere than if they had been normal drawings. The concept was really fascinating, and I wish there was a little more about how it happened (then again, I only played twice...Dollhouse and Follower endings...a couple minutes for each one), so there's probably a lot that I missed.

I think music and sfx might have helped the mood, especially something really haunting for the endings. But that's just a personal opinion. Good work on finishing your first VN. ^-^

[Hakura0]

That was pretty creepy. @.@ I think that was the point, though. The word imagery in the beginning was especially interesting. It caught my attention right away and made me curious about the main character.

I like the idea with the character images. It was pretty interesting, and it lent a lot more to the atmosphere than if they had been normal drawings. The concept was really fascinating, and I wish there was a little more about how it happened (then again, I only played twice...Dollhouse and Follower endings...a couple minutes for each one), so there's probably a lot that I missed.

I think music and sfx might have helped the mood, especially something really haunting for the endings. But that's just a personal opinion. Good work on finishing your first VN. ^-^

Thanks, I'm glad you liked it! There was some music, but it's what was causing problems, so I took it out for the sake of playability.

I think you did get two of the creepier endings. To get the whole of the story, I think you have to get all the endings.

Have you talked to the Demon? She might be able to clear up the backstory a bit for you.

[herenvardo]

In one word: original. Most beginners would usually start with something "standard" or simply similar to what's already available, at least to get some practice, but you went forward and made a story completelly different to everything seen before and, from a general perspective, you did it well.
The story is original and interesting; the visual style matches the mood of the story itself quite well, and the branching makes sense. That's enough to tag a game as, at least, "good"

Anyway, there are some minor issues I would like to point out. Don't take this as some kind of "attack", I'm only trying to let you realize of these problems so you can avoid them on your next project.
The game is short because the story is short; while I personally prefer long games, just being short doesn't make a game bad. However, I'm afraid you don't realize that 25 Mb would translate to a one hour wait for the download on a 56k modem (and yes, there is still some people who use those). I wouldn't mention this too much, but:
* There is an image file in the package that is not used at all by the script (fireplace.jpg) which means 80kb wasted.
* The white.PNG file is not really needed: if you replace the line

Code: Select all

    image white = "white.PNG"

in your script with

Code: Select all

    image white = Solid(255, 255, 255)

you will get exactly the same result in-game, but need one less image file, saving a few mroe kb with it. With the white_wall.PNG file, you should consider if the texture (hardly noticeable) is worth these extra 325kb (if it isn't, you can go away with Solid(192, 192, 192) or something like that: R=G=B will always lead to gray, the higher the numbers the brighter the color).
Well, these are all just minor tweaks that would make the download slightly less painful for dial-up users, but there is one much bigger:

There was some music, but it's what was causing problems, so I took it out for the sake of playability.

Ok, you took the problem out by the root, nothing wrong with this. But do you realize that the package includes 13Mb of mp3 files? This is slightly more than half of the total zip size; or, in other words, 30 minutes of wasted download time for poor dial-up users I could even notice it myself, despite being on broadband: without them the download would have taken one minute instead of two.
The morale: after building distributions for a game, take a moment to check what's in the package.
Since you've made an overall good game, it's likely you'll do some on the future, probably longer. If so, this issue would scale proportionally; and as soon as a game grows larger, unnedded files could become an issue even for broadband users.
The other point I wanted to mention is that, after the "intro" part of the game, there is a black scene where you have to click several times before anything happens. My first thought was "oh, damn, the chip is over-heating again!"; but finally I tried to click once more and the screen changed. While the "long darkness" effect is interesting, you should be quite carefull with this: if clicking doesn't make anything change on the screen, the user gets the impression that something's going wrong. A nice trick used to avoid this is using placeholder dialogue, like "." followed by ".." and then "...": while the "long" effect is still achieved, the user can see that this is actually part of the game and not some kind of problem. Chronoluminaire had a similar issue with Elven Relations: at a certain point of the story, depending on some previous actions, some choices were selected randomly: this was part of the game, but there was several people reporting it as a bug on these forums.
General suggestion: when the game needs to do something unusual, make sure the player knows, at least, that this is part of the game.

Please note that while the "negative" part of this post has taken far longer than the "positive", the criticism is only about minor issues; my opinion about the game overall is really good. Just wanted to make sure you see the problems of these issues to help you improve your upcomming projects

BTW: I have found 4 endings in total:

doll house, follower, roam, and fairy tale

are these all the endings or am I still missing something?

[Hakura0]

Herenvardo:
Thank you for the tips, and letting me know my mind had slipped and I forgot to take the music out. For those already with it, you could play them in the background I guess? I'll put up a version without the cumbersome files.

That bit of code with the white doesn't seem to work for me.

You're missing one ending, to get it don't follow the advice I gave Sake-Bento. It's something to a hidden ending. In the future I'll put an ellipse in with long empty spaces, I'll let this one be for now and go on warned though. Thanks again!

[mikey]

If this is the final version, and if you give permission, it would be nice to have Real in the RAA (http://www.renai.us). Thank you!

EDIT: And it's mirrored!

[Hakura0]

If this is the final version, and if you give permission, it would be nice to have Real in the RAA (http://www.renai.us). Thank you!

Yeah, I'm pretty sure everything's now fixed, so go ahead!

[herenvardo]

That bit of code with the white doesn't seem to work for me.

My apologies, acording to the reference manual I made two mistakes on the code I posted. The first one is that when given the RGB values separatelly, the Solid function requires also an alpha (opacity) value. The second is more about syntax: the function doesn't take a separate argument for each channel, but a single-tuple with the separate fields. Alternativelly, the function can take a hex string with an HTML-style color, so the code should be something like:

Code: Select all

image white = Solid ((255, 255, 255, 255)) # the inner parentesis encloses the tuple, the outer enclose the single argument to the function.

or

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image white = Solid("#ffffff")

Anyway, I guess the 3kb taken by the white.png file won't be as significative as the mp3 files; so don't worry too much about this. Just remember that when you need a solid background, you don't even need to create an image file for it.

[vnr4]

Real reviewed at VNR4.