Errant Heart - Kickstarter update

[Voight-Kampff]

So, this is an official beta for Errant Heart. You should be able to find some background info here.

A general overview of completeness:

Most exterior BGs are complete
All interior BGs are temp place holders
All sprites are in various stages of completion (none finished)
Some characters still just have one sprite sketch
All musical tracks are temp place holders
Almost no event CGs - there's just a couple of quickie sketches at the beginning of the story
Effectively no attention paid to customized menus (just enough to get rid of the round-rect look on the title screen)
Current size for all builds is hovering around 130MB

At this point, we're looking for any and all types of feedback. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, logic flaws, bugs, critiques on the sprites, BGs, etc., story pacing, character behavior, direction and so on. We'd really like to get a lot of feedback, no matter how insignificant you may think it is. We're more likely to act on criticisms that appear from more than one person.

Play time is...well, it's pretty long. I'm making a rough estimate of somewhere around 8-10 hours. And in this version, the game is quasi-kinetic. Yes, there are choices. But there's only one complete path. There are just a handful of "stubs" that the player can reach for other characters, in addition to only one "bad end".

PC Version

Mac Version

Linux Version

[LVUER]

How about the RP? Will it be ever continued T_T

Oh, is this also inspired by the RP (or the other way around)?

[Voight-Kampff]

How about the RP? Will it be ever continued T_T

Oh, is this also inspired by the RP (or the other way around)?

Hmm? Oh, this has nothing to do with the RP that we had running on our forum.

[Voight-Kampff]

Hmm. I didn't put much fanfare into the original post. I imagine it provides precious little information upon which one can make a quick-and-dirty decision as to whether or not one wants to invest the time in downloading a 150MB demo. So, as a reminder, here's an...artist's conception of what the game looks like.

[Voight-Kampff]

So, here's some expression charts for a couple of the characters. These are the only two that have pretty much their whole range of expressions done, which is why they were chosen:





And below are a handful of samples of our exterior BGs:







So, anyone have any thoughts? Critiques? Any comments of any sort? Even of the most minor and insignificant manor? I'm not above begging, I'll have you know...

[jack_norton]

The art is surely great, and the BG in particular are very good, some of the best I've seen in a VN so far. Downloading the game now

[luminarious]

These backgrounds are really awesome! Or as Mr.Anderson so succinctly put: "Whoa!".

[platonicheart]

Thoughts? Critiques? You ask those kind of things about the bg??? All I can say is "WOW!" (jaw dropping!!!) It's so detailed and and... no more comment. Flaws? as for me, I can't find myself to see any

[Voight-Kampff]

Heh heh.

Yeah...we figured BGs are on display to the reader for a greater amount of time than even the sprites. So we better do everything we can to make those BGs as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

Which is why we brought a hired-gun on board to do them for us. I honestly can't say enough good things about his work - talented, fast and most importantly, passionate.

[konaa]

Seeing as the music is all place holders, I'd love to do a soundtrack.

[Aetheria]

Discovered a bug:

Code: Select all

I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred.

IOError: Couldn't find file 'sprites/sp_salima_earnest_zwee.png'.

While running game code:
 - script at line 12894 of C:\renpy-6.10.1\Errant Heart/game/scenes.rpy
 - python at line 441 of renpy-6.12.0-mainline/common/00statements.rpy.

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

  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\bootstrap.py", line 279, in bootstrap
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\main.py", line 320, in main
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\main.py", line 93, in run
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\execution.py", line 259, in run
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\ast.py", line 1354, in execute
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\ast.py", line 1368, in call
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\statements.py", line 92, in call
  File "renpy-6.12.0-mainline/common/00statements.rpy", line 441, in execute_pause
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\exports.py", line 812, in with_statement
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 1434, in do_with
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 1627, in interact
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 1846, in interact_core
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\predict.py", line 52, in displayable
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 244, in visit_all
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 244, in visit_all
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 244, in visit_all
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 244, in visit_all
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\core.py", line 246, in visit_all
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\predict.py", line 52, in <lambda>
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\im.py", line 436, in predict_one
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\im.py", line 190, in get
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\display\im.py", line 468, in load
  File "C:\Users\Julia\Documents\Games\Errant Heart Beta 1.0-win32\renpy\loader.py", line 338, in load
IOError: Couldn't find file 'sprites/sp_salima_earnest_zwee.png'.

While running game code:
 - script at line 12894 of C:\renpy-6.10.1\Errant Heart/game/scenes.rpy
 - python at line 441 of renpy-6.12.0-mainline/common/00statements.rpy.

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 6.12.0e

Other than that - I played the game for a couple of hours, and found it rather slow for my taste. I think this is mostly just because I'm not that into slice-of-life stories, and have never been able to watch that genre of anime without falling asleep. The BG art and the sprites, even unfinished, are very lovely, but after a while they didn't help me get through the long scenes of Lira just wandering around the city - reading the descriptions of different places doesn't make much impression when they all go with the same BG. I felt like the two or three hours I spent playing could have been profitably condensed into about one. But again, I think other players might not have the same expectations as I did.

That said, I'm still quite interested to see how this project develops - the art is really pretty and although I really hope the story picks up pace later, I do want to find out what happens with

Salima and the time control stuff.

[Ghurdrich]

Downloading now. I'll definitely be playing this, and I'll give as much feedback as possible. It's the least I can do for borrowing your forums for that time Think of it as karma xD

[Voight-Kampff]

Downloading now. I'll definitely be playing this, and I'll give as much feedback as possible. It's the least I can do for borrowing your forums for that time Think of it as karma xD

Thanks. But you'll probably want to hold off for a bit. The error that Aetheria pointed out, while simple to fix, is a show-stopper.

No sense in downloading 150MB worth of broken game.

We're gonna try cleaning up some of the graphics and bring the size down as much as possible before posting a correction.

[Voight-Kampff]

Other than that - I played the game for a couple of hours, and found it rather slow for my taste. I think this is mostly just because I'm not that into slice-of-life stories, and have never been able to watch that genre of anime without falling asleep. The BG art and the sprites, even unfinished, are very lovely, but after a while they didn't help me get through the long scenes of Lira just wandering around the city - reading the descriptions of different places doesn't make much impression when they all go with the same BG. I felt like the two or three hours I spent playing could have been profitably condensed into about one. But again, I think other players might not have the same expectations as I did.

This is precisely what we're looking for in feedback. And I thank you dearly for it.

I could very easily have cut out large swaths of the game before posting this version. But would the very act of doing that destroy its charm? I don't know. I'm too close to the story. That's why we'd like to get a lot of feedback from as many people as possible.

That said, I'm still quite interested to see how this project develops - the art is really pretty and although I really hope the story picks up pace later...

Ironically, I would say the spot where the bug cropped up is actually where it completely transitions out of the slower parts, and the reader starts to get a payoff in the form of a developing relationship b/w Lira and Salima. And after that, it's all plot, plot, plot.

[Aetheria]

It seems to me that since this is, after all, a visual novel, you should be able to rely on the visual elements to convey some of the charm - and the whole look of the game certainly is very charming. The long descriptions of various places around the city and of random actions (like Lira watching wasps buzzing or going shopping for paint) have what I might call diminishing marginal value: they seem to be intended to convey a certain atmosphere or feeling, but since the art and the writing actually do a very good job of establishing that atmosphere early on in the game, more writing about it starts to seem like rambling.