Hi NLAigis,
Thanks so much for recording your playthrough, I watched it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's really awesome to watch people playing something you've worked so hard on for such a long time. And thank you for all your feedback, it's much appreciated!
This is the very first game I've made, so for this project I used Adventure Game Studio, a brilliant free, easy to use engine made by Chris Jones and his team.
Unfortunately you're right in your assessment of the frame rate, it tops out at about 42 and occasionally dips lower. However, one of the guys on the forums has found that setting the games gfx driver to DirectDraw improved the frame rate when he ran into problems, so this is definitely worth a shot. This can be done by running the winsetup.exe file which is included with the download. If you go the advanced settings, you can also run the game in windowed mode (as you wanted to).
I also found that the menus can be a little unresponsive sometimes, but unfortunately at this early stage in my game making career improving these finer technical aspects is beyond me. I will submit all feedback to the AGS team though so that they can work on improving the engine whilst I consider what game to make next :-).
I'm really glad you liked the story and the game overall, and was really pleased that you got invested in it! If you recieve a 5 star rating (no deaths, find all three secrets, complete the optional puzzle strand as you did) then you will see a very short cutscene which hints at the true meaning of the world. I didn't want to give too much away, because ultimately I've always found games that don't spell things out too explicitly and leave aspects of the story open to interpretation much more compelling (such as Limbo, one of the key influences for my game). What you can conjure up in your mind is more compelling than anything I can show you on screen. There are also numerous hints in the world that point towards a deeper meaning. I would love to know what you think of it once you've played it through at a 5 star rating.
If you want a hint as to the secrets in the game, they can be found on the neat fire games facebook page as of this evening, or at the very end of the walkthrough pdf. I haven't heard back from anyone who has found all three yet, but someone must have by now!
Thanks again for your video, I really appreciate it and all your feedback. I had a peruse through your YouTube channel, some interesting looking stuff on there that I'll be checking out!
Cheers