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Which songs are your submission based on?
Closer - Amigo the Devil,
Lonely Woman - Ornette Coleman,
i'm in love with a german film star - the passions
Content Warning
implied depression, implied gore, suicide/loss of identity, debt slavery
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Comments
Ooh, I like this. The dreamlike atmosphere fits really well with the songs. Feels like the game itself is collapsing as you play it. I think it's missing something, but I couldn't quite say what? Maybe just a little bit more cohesion - or a little bit more fleshed-out (even just more things to look at) - to bring it all together, though I wouldn't want to lose that ambiguity.
Thanks!
Yeah, it probably could do with more cohesion and being more fleshed out—there's a smattering of a bit more details on the board and the defaced designs in the prologue, but otherwise there's not much decorative details on objects, for example.
I found this really interesting, even as sketchy as the sections are. It's really linear, which may have benefited using something link-based, rather than parser?
Keeping it limited to three songs really helped focus and give structure to the three sections, even if the scene changes are disjointed. I did really like the unmoored feeling between the first and second sections -- it made sense to wake up from a dream with that loss of identity. In listening to the song, the epilogue makes a lot more sense.
(I did use Gargoyle and it looks like the first screen didn't render right, but the rest of it worked fine)
Thanks! I'd originally intended for Sequence I to be a bit less linear—the VR conversation was originally supposed to be an actual NPC conversation instead of just a cut scene, the airlock door was supposed to be actually openable instead of a prop, the door opening was supposed to be puzzle with a computer connector and grease necessary to get the capability to unlock it, the terminal was supposed to have news reports represented as menus, the door opening and hacking was supposed to be done by menus as well—but I decided to simplify aggressively in order to get something finished for the jam. That, and I had multiple sequences planned out too—some of the stuff in the prologue is a hint at what one of those would have contained. The epilogue was supposed to be linear, as that was the feeling I got from the song. Every sequence was supposed to have the final item mentioned in the ending show up in the first puzzle of the next one; this is probably less clear when there's only three.
But enough about how I wanted it turn out, and more about how it actually did. I guess it could've benefitted from being link-based, but I didn't want the headache of having to essentially build my own world model. The disjointedness was sort of deliberate? I was going for a sort of "reading a short story anthology from cover to cover" type feel than a singular cohesive narrative.
ETA: Linearity was probably also influenced by my decision to use ActorState objects to model where the PC is in the narrative.
something that's just occurred to me is, when you say "(I did use Gargoyle and it looks like the first screen didn't render right, but the rest of it worked fine)", do you mean that Gargoyle mangled the first epigraph but not the others, or that it mangled the first one and didn't display the rest?
It didn't display the text on the first one, but the other two looked readable.
There isn't supposed to be text on that one, as Lonely Woman is an instrumental.
ah-ha! then all good on that front!