itch.io

Thank you so much for your feedback!  I've gotten so little, but thankfully, all of it's been good, including yours.  Sorry, I didn't respond sooner.  I haven't paid attention.

I agree with most of your points.  I WOULD agree with all of them under ordinary circumstances but in the case of this particular IGMC, I have to disagree with the notion that I shouldn't explain anything (and please don't take this personally.  I understand the criticism.  I know you're right, but there are extraneous circumstances I simply had to take into account.).  In this IGMC, it's not a full game we're supposed to be presenting, but "the next big thing".  When I realized I had overextended myself setting up the health system (and while it's mostly hooked up, it's still not entirely done), I realized I wasn't going to finish anything remotely resembling a near complete game or even a near complete level.   I probably could have explained better and streamlined the text, but at the time I realized I was going to have to explain some stuff, I was already in the 11th hour.  My goal became to demonstrate the technical aspects of the game, and to explain what it was going to be used for.  This game isn't just survival.  There are deeper aspects in the story.  The game is just there to tell the story.  The story is where this started.  I didn't create the story for the game.  I created the game for the story (and from the beginning, I always intended to make this story into a game).  The game was made for these two ladies who have to survive on their own.  So, while I would ordinarily agree with you, in this particular instance, I have to essentially rebut that this game not only needs to be a prototype, but needs to be a functional sales pitch.  I just wasn't able to present in the prototype enough to really explain what the game was about.  It's about survival.  You have to install antennae.  You meet an alien.  And?  It's a sci-fi with procedural elements.  Hardly unique, and there's not nearly enough there to show the game's intent.  I thought I could get that health system going in two weeks.  It took three.  No showers or shaving.  Two days of mapping.  Mapping in the process of hooking up the health system.  The rest of the time spent racing to add anything I could that showed what the game was going to consist of.  Again, ordinarily, I would not disagree with you, but the specific requirements of this specific event puts me in a different mind.  Yes, it is jarring, but without it, there's very little indication of what the game's actually about.  The text is mostly put in loading screens.  Those screens were going to be there anyway.  May as well put something useful there.  Ultimately, a big drain on my time was making sure to polish what I made as much as possible.  I wasn't going to put something ugly there, and there was no way I was going to make a game this important to me without first establishing the framework (which is what led to me overextending myself on the UI and health systems, but now they're up and they were definitely the hardest part.  Seriously: animating, mapping, even setting up text and the antennae installation; it was all a cakewalk compared to that health system.  The only other thing I think is going to be as hard, if not harder is setting up save functionality.).

I'm honestly not happy with the music.  I wrote three pieces.  One of them I like.  One of them I think needs to be reworked, and I just don't think the piano piece fits.  The credits music and the title music I nabbed from some of my older projects.  The title music had been written in a hurry for a previous game when I couldn't find a piece that fit the mood I wanted to convey.  It actually conveys the mood here very nicely and I will probably keep it.  The Credits music is one of my earliest pieces I wrote for children's fantasy game.  Definitely didn't fit, but wasn't horribly out of place.  That will get replaced.  That was literally added last minute to just to give you something to listen to in the credits screen.  I also wish I could have done transitions.  Turns out they're actually kind of complicated.  Just fading out and in takes stupid amounts of code to pull off.  That probably would have eaten a whole day...all to get it to fade out and back in when she goes to sleep.

Finally, I wish I could have done this RPG Maker VX Ace or MV (preference being VX Ace, which is a bit more conducive to directly scripting).  I actually spent a bit of time trying, but it turns out it that those engines just weren't ideal to this game.  My big reason for giving up on RM and switching to Unity is because I know C# and I do NOT know Javascript or Ruby.   It turned out to be a good choice.  However little progress I made, I ended up making three times as much as I had in either of those two engines.