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Bildungsroman: Murders in the Sanatorium's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Controls / UI | #29 | 3.470 | 4.250 |
| Sound/Music | #44 | 3.062 | 3.750 |
| Art / Graphics | #51 | 3.062 | 3.750 |
| Overall Fun | #57 | 2.858 | 3.500 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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See I played more of the game and reached the third death.
I don't have much to add to what I already said, beside that I should have taken the warning at the start more seriously.
Disclaimer: I'm not exactly a fan of Umineko, I usually prefer mystery visual novels where the player is more involved, like Ace Atorney or Dangaronpa. I played the game for like 90 minutes, I will see if I have the time to go back to it once I'm done with the other FBQ entries that interested me.
This game gives a big Umineko vibe. In particular the earliest version with those backgrounds looking like photos that have been gimp-filtered and simple character models. The first murder mystery and the characters are interesting, I want to see how the mystery will be solved, I have made my notes for my future readings. I like a lot the presence of the map so the player can feel they have complete control over the space. It seems the game has some meaningful choices, but the only one I encountered was locked away. I've nothing to criticise about the writing so far, but I'm not an English speaker, so don't give too much credits to my advice on that point.
One thing concerning the maps: it feels a bit weird to me that the arrows to switch between maps is grey, but white when there is no map to move towards (basement and 4th floor). The reverse would make more sense.
Like Animamendi24, I noticed some of the bgm not looping seemslessly, so I will encourage you strongly to improve that point, as the music is very important in visual novels.
Thank you for playing the first 90 minutes! Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner.
About the Umineko influence; I think that's just me being more of a reader/writer than a gamer, lol; so the linear-ness of the story is just me prioritizing writing than gameplay, at least for this build of the game so far. Although, if you have any suggestions on how to make the player more involved in the story, that would be really helpful.
The locks for the choices in this build are routes which I haven't gotten around to writing or editing them yet, so the locks should only be there temporarily.
As for the seamless bgm loops not working, I replied to Animamendi24 that there was an issue of the engine which broke the seamless loops. However, just recently, I've also noticed that there are some bgm which could be looped perfectly (if one removes the song ending/intro), yet the royalty free music artists didn't bother to make them into loops. I'm in the process of manually editing those bgm into loops, so that I don't have to call the seamless fade function in the code and instead just play the bgm directly.
Again, I really appreciate you playing, even for a bit! I'm glad you've picked up on that Umineko vibe! And it's awesome you are also taking notes on the mystery as well!
Uminekos aren't exactly known for their player interactions, they are more like crime novels but where the player is intended to try to solve the mysteries by themself. So I don't know what kind of gameplay would be appropriate for such game without feeling out of place.
Renpy support looped BGM with intro, it is as easy as:
play music "intro.ogg" noloop
queue music "loop.ogg"
By the way, a lot of royalty-free musician don't provide distinct intro and loop files, they instead use tags like LOOPSTART and LOOPLENGTH so the bgm will loop in engines that support those like RPG maker. Using Audacity (and a sampling of 44100), you can find back what the original intended loop was and easily create intro and loop files for renpy.
A screenshot with Joseph has some kind of spoiler, I presume... You shouldn't do that...
Parsee Mizuhashi as Twin Nurse is hilarious!
Art... Plain 2D characters barely fit the stylized 3D Backgrounds. In some scenes there is a visible contrast between 2D and 3D. But surely there was no other way to make it.
Music... It fits. It could be even better to have a looping BGM with a seamless loop, though, but however. It fits the game.
Thank you for your comment. I read from a VN marketing blog which suggests that you can use an intriguing spoiler scene to entice readers since most will forget it later on . I think the spoiler is small enough, and I think it's intriguing, but if you think it's too big of a spoiler, I might switch it out with the first cg once that is done.
I realize that a lot of the very first backgrounds I've made aren't as well put together in comparison to the newer backgrounds, since I've been constantly experimenting and improving my gimp skills. I've been thinking of redoing them, but I believe it would be really helpful if I know which specific backgrounds, or at least which scenes, have unsuitable backgrounds that I should re-edit or switch out, or which backgrounds work well to the point that I can use them as either a basis for edits or a template to improve on.
There was an issue with the seamless BGM and sound loops after the recent update of the renpy engine. Before the update, the seamless loop for the BGM and sounds worked as intended. I had to update the engine because for some reason the older engine was reacting to the windows updates and was causing some worse sound issues. Updating the engine fixed all of them but also introduced new ones, that being the seamless loop breaking in certain instances for some reason. I believe there is a work-around to the problem, so I will need to re-write the code for those loops.
I know it's a long demo, so I really appreciate you playing it!