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KV_Kingdom4 years ago (1 edit)

Overall, this game was alright. Nothing that blew my mind, but nothing broken or bad. If there was one thing I would improve about this game, it's the dialog. I like that there are choices, but I think there was too much dialog in general - I lost interest and started looking for ways to skip the dialog shortly after Sakura's introduction. I also don't like text that automatically advances; I'd rather be allowed to take my time and advance it when I'm ready. Otherwise, this is a solid game jam game. Good job!

P.S. The Mac version doesn't work 😥

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XCVG4 years ago

Thanks for playing! I'm glad you, um, didn't hate it?

I certainly understand why you found the dialogue excessive. I think I needed to have that much to tell the story I wanted to tell, but for the length of the game it's very dialogue-heavy. I knew I was making a short game but I was kind of shocked at how short the main gameplay segment turned out when I playtested the whole thing for the first time. By that point I was pretty tired and didn't have any good ideas on how to extend it so I just left it, even though I might have had time. So in the end it ended up with a much higher proportion of dialogue to gameplay than I had expected or planned.

In retrospect I should have left room in the plan to extend things if I had time, which is one of the bigger lessons I've taken away from this project.

I'm a bit confused about what you mean about text automatically advancing. Are you talking about the subtitle text or full dialogues? The former are usually on a skippable timer. The reason I did this rather than leaving it entirely manual is because in that past I've found some people didn't realize that text could be skipped and got stuck. Still, it did end up awkward in places. In the full dialogues, they don't really have a concept of text advance, only pagination. I call this a visual novel but the dialogue system is really much more Western RPG than Visual Novel- very much like The Outer Worlds or Fallout games prior to 4.

How did the Mac version break? Did it launch and crash or fail to launch entirely? I don't have a Mac (well, not an Intel Mac) so I can't really test the Mac platform builds.

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KV_Kingdom4 years ago

This is the contents of the Mac folder and the nested "Suckerpunch" folder.


I get this error when I double-click the "Suckerpunch" app.

So the Mac version doesn't work at all. 😥

The auto-advancing text can be found in the intro dialog and when you're looking at the posters. I was able to read everything in most cases, but there was one poster that advanced too quickly for me to read the whole thing (the one with the lady in the black dress, I don't remember the name because I'm a poor excuse for a metalhead). RPG's usually show a moving triangle somewhere on the dialog box to indicate interactivity. Maybe you could try implementing something like that in your dialog boxes? Another cleaver idea I saw another dev in this jam use (the June Mejos game) is adding a "press <button>" cue to the dialog box.

I've been playing Mass Effect, and after reading your postmortem I saw the connection. I would have loved to play your version of the guns 'n' magic RPG in space. Maybe you could do that in a future jam, or maybe as a full game?

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XCVG4 years ago

You can try some of the solutions here if you still need them. It looks like the first issue, which I thought I had fixed but apparently not. Apple has made some changes in recent years which have broken things and it's difficult to keep up sometimes. I'm in a really awkward position in regards to Mac support; I know some of potential audience is on Mac but it's really hard to support a platform without being able to test on it.

The posters are one of the awkward parts I alluded to. Those are super hacked together using a system designed for subtitles and just waiting for the usual interact key. In retrospect it was probably too much to just throw up on screen like that without some sort of better system. The reason I didn't use full dialogs for those is because I felt it would break flow too much, but it would have been much easier to read. Early on I had ambitions of having voice acting, which would have helped a lot, but that was never all that realistic a proposition.

Unfortunately I don't think The Last Magical Girl is ever going to happen. It's definitely not going to be a jam game; the scope is just way too big for that and that's why I abandoned it this time. If I have a brilliant idea on how to do something simpler along the same lines it might happen. But as it stands the huge scope of it is honestly really daunting and I'd much rather do something smaller.

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