Okay, first of all, thank you so much for giving the game such a thorough analysis. We all love to see the general public's reaction to our work, but, personally, receiving reviews based on a more technical point of view is something that I found extremely rewarding.
And now, without further ado, let's go:
>>> Quote:
"... typos or awkward phrasing. I also wish there was more writing in some places to give the player more explanation about what to do (but more about that in the Gameplay section)."
I'll have to agree. All the three scenarios will be revisited in the future chapters, by the perspective of different characters (AKA: Laura and the dead friend himself), so the plan was to have a lot more dialogues in each map, but at the first visit, I ended up cutting a lot of the talking in order to keep the exploration at a faster pace. Now that I've been receiving feedback, I can see that a few more cutscenes are necessary, especially when the player enters the combat sections.
About the typos and awkward phrasing: I'm trying, aaaaa D=> Being a non-native English speaker makes it a bit harder to get the naturality of the language. I hope to improve on this aspect, since the story is the main element of the game. One thing I can say, is that I'm always reading the dialogues over and over, rearranging words, changing bits here and there, trying to improve them.
>>> Quote:
"Most of the mapping is great. The areas are well-laid out, look nice, and, when it comes to the drawing maps, very creative. The only detractor was the similarity of the drawing maps. You’ll see many of the same elements even though they’re supposed to be different drawings."
Good point. Unfortunately, we couldn't create a different Tileset for each drawing in time, but for the future, we're planning to rebuild the scenarios from scratch. There are two possible options we are testing: new hand drawn Tilesets or actual dioramas, photographed, edited and transformed into a kinda "Parallaxy" thing.
>>> Quote:
"On some screens, it was a little confusing to determine who was talking, so different colors of windows or names would have been helpful."
Got it! I'll probably use Faces for the diorama sections.
>>> Quote:
"If you’re familiar with RPG Maker games, you’ll also notice evidence of other plugins that help the game stand out as unique."
I'll take it as a compliment, since we didn't use any Scripts or Plugins =D (I believe RPG Maker XP doesn't even have Plugin support). In other words, it was all event based ^^
>>> Quote:
"The music that’s in the game sets the mood very well, but most of the game doesn’t have music. Normally, I would say that the lack of music makes a game seem empty, but not in this case. The story is so engaging that I hardly noticed the absence of music. In fact, the silence created the mood just as much as the music did."
Ow man, thanks a lot! We had the goal of creating all of the Game's resources, and since my wife and I are both into drawing and pixelart, the visual aspects of the game were done with ease.
But........... the music, oh boy! Considering the fact that we barely know the notes and scales, it makes me really happy to know that the one song I was able to make ended up contributing to the game's mood, instead of ruining it.
==//==
Once again, thank you so much for the Review. And I'm glad you had a good experience playing the Game.
=)