Post by SugarMint in Malevolent Planet 2D Demo - September Public Build comments

Malevolent Planet 2D Demo - September Public Build » Comments

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Hello. Thank you very much for reporting this issue, I didn't know the game is forced to run in full screen.

I apologize for having to go through all that (the command line arguments), I checked right now and if `Fullscreen` is unchecked here

Then the game will run windowed, but it won't be possible to select this while the demo popup shows up indeed.

It's strange that Unity doesn't handle this by itself, by creating a letterbox effect on ultrawide.

Do you see the game UI entirely stretched to the edges of the monitor? Or how was the "Next" button hidden?

trazyn300095 days ago

Thanks for the quick reply, and sorry if I came across as harsh last night. I was a little grouchy.

It looks like it's zooming until the screen is filled horizontally, cutting off the top and bottom of what's displayed:

Weirdly, my messing with command line arguments last night must've gotten the game's settings (stored in AppData?) into a more usable state. I had deleted the game last night, but when I extracted it from the zip file again this morning to get the screenshot it kicked into a 2560x1440 window despite the fullscreen checkbox being checked. Toggling the checkbox put it into fullscreen but still at 2560x1440. I had to explicitly choose 3440x1440 to show what I was seeing last night.

SugarMint95 days ago

I think that might be because I'm making the game run by default at the highest resolution when you start it for the first time, because many players weren't picking the highest resolution and were seeing a low quality/pixelated version of the game.

And no worries, you didn't seem grouchy and I appreciate the bug report because my goal is to have a very polished game in anticipation for the next year's Steam release.

I can try to check on first startup if the user has an ultrawide screen, or at least instead of defaulting to the absolute highest resolution to instead default to the highest resolution that's not ultrawide (16:9 ideally, because the UI is designed for that) 🤔

Cpt Obvious199484 days ago

Amazing that you can address this comment, but not my comment about how much you gutted the demo version, and in particular how in the past you said, "I'd try in the future to make it possible to import/export saves in WebGL," and that somehow turned into removing the ability to save entirely.

SugarMint82 days ago(-1)

Gutted the demo version? The demo version wasn't meant to be "here, you can play 90% of the content for free!" It was supposed to hint at the content available in the full content builds which it's still doing by showing some post-ISA content as well, but not in a linear way that would remove any kind of reason to even consider supporting the game because most people aren't going to pay for something that offers the same thing they can get for free.

There'll be a full 1.0 release next year on Steam, so people who don't want to deal with monthly subscriptions on Patreon will be able to buy the game once. Anyone who supported me enough to pay for the base price of the game will also be able to request a key, so I'm not sure if what you're complaining about is maybe not being able to play the full game for free?

Cpt Obvious199482 days ago

I didn't say anything about playing the full game for free. All I pointed out is that the demo used to only be limited by being one update behind the paid version. Now, it's also limited by removing a whole lot of content, including a basic feature like saving. A feature that you originally said you were going to make better, until you apparently decided to not do that and just removed it instead. I understand that the "one update behind" model isn't very sustainable when you get close to full release, but there are better ways to limit a demo besides removing a bunch of content.

I fully understand not wanting the demo to be equal to the paid version, and I never said it should be. However, the way the demo is now, it's not going to be able to fulfill its purpose very well. Most people coming to this game will be here for the sex, and if most of that is removed and/or censored, they won't be able to properly form an opinion on said content. Also, with no saving, players are forced to try to play as much as they can in a single sitting, and they might not be able to make much progress, which will also prevent them from forming an accurate opinion.

The better way would be to do what most video game demos do: have a cutoff point where you can't play any further, but have all the content that's available in the playable part. For example, if a game has 10 chapters, the demo might let players play through the first 2 chapters in their entirety. This provides the best way for players to properly judge what the content of the game is like and decide if they want to see the rest or not.

SugarMint82 days ago

Thank you for giving your reasonable thoughts on this. The issue with your approach is that there's a diverse range of content and if the players can only see what was available in the ISA, they wouldn't know that there's alien content as well.

The demo is however meant to be short, taking the player from NSFW scene to NSFW scene. I think there are about 7-8 NSFW scenes available right now in the demo, and each of them is supposed to hint to the player what they can actually expect in terms of NSFW content, which wouldn't be possible if only one chapter or two chapters as you say was/were available.

No NSFW scene should really be censored in the demo as it is, so I'm not sure what you mean by this. There are descriptions in-between memories as to what might have happened so the player gets an idea of what other scenes there could be.

Most people coming to this game will be here for the sex, and if most of that is removed and/or censored, they won't be able to properly form an opinion on said content.

The saving being locked, that's inspired from a demo of a very successful game, but it's not just a "personal choice", it's also a technical need because the save the player could make when they're teleported across the game to see different scenes would likely have bugs when loaded in the full build for example.

I'll think about it, maybe the demo for the Steam build will be different. If you're a solo dev and you try to provide an incentive for people to support you in getting anywhere near completion of the project, you have to try different ways because as it was the public builds weren't really doing anything at all, because people could just wait.

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