This is going to be a little more brief than last time; I just wanted to provide feedback on some of the major changes in version 1.1. Since I'm not that interested in King Cobra, I'll be waiting for more content with Dr. Faustus (or someone else) before doing a full playthrough/critique of the game again.
By the way, I think you may have missed my last response. ;3
Background Music
It's quite good, and is at a good default volume to truly be called background music. Well done! I look forward to more tracks; one thing I regret quite a bit is listening to songs I liked in a never-ending loop! ;)
An interesting idea I'm sure you've already considered: giving characters their own, unique themes during scripted interactions would definitely help frame the player's first (and subsequent) interactions with each character.
Depending on how ambitious you want to get with your audio engineering for this game, it might also be interesting to eventually incorporate layered audio tracks (especially during or between scripted scenes) in order to punctuate the specific mood of each interaction with a character. That's firmly in the realm of "polish," though, and probably isn't a top priority right now.
Dialogue / Voiceover
The pseudo-voiceover is a good starting point, but it could definitely use some work. :3
It seems like the audio snippet is just sampled in a loop while text is being printed; the current approach feels a bit weird. In my experience, many games will sample the audio snippet for every character printed. That said, you may have tested that approach and found it a little too frenetic and distracting; I could definitely understand that.
You can get a lot more impact by inserting pauses between sentences; for example, that semicolon and comma I just inserted would be great places for noticeable (but short) breaks. In addition, sentences spoken very deliberately or with much haste could be printed at different speeds and with a more forceful (or otherwise modified) variant of the usual snippet.
Playing with text formatting, print speed, and the voice snippet can really help add personality to dialogue! Little details like that are quite satisfying, and help indicate the extra time and effort the developer put into the game to make the experience that much better!
By the way: depending on the tools you're using, you might be able to write helper functions (something like
speakWithVoice(faustusVoice, "The first part of my dialogue,", speed=fastSpeed)
) to help make scripting lots of dialogue less tedious.
Other Thoughts
- It's a bit too easy to accidentally skip text; if you click while text is printing, it should skip to the end of the text, not proceed to the next message.
- I've noticed the game will shrink and no longer fills the entire screen if my monitor goes to sleep while it's open. (That happened while writing this comment, heh.)