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Magno-M-S-Silva224 days ago

When replaying the game or if a player wanted to skip the story altogether and just sample the gameplay (which I think would be very rare).
My personal experience:

I played your game twice. The first time I went as far as the first introduction of the baby. By then the story was taking so long I decided to quit, it didn't hook me to keep investing in it.

The second time I just skipped through dialog (and that's when the skip story would've been extra helpful) so I could actually play the game so I could make a more accurate assessment to rate the game.

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Fortunastreet223 days ago(+1)

Fun fact, the intro is the only part that can be skipped. It however requires to have the first achievement, who is unlocked... after finishing the intro, following the traditional visual novel approach of not allowing the player to skip things they never saw before.

I thought a while ago about adding a skip button, but I lacked the usage cases needed to justify working on that rather than keeping the current skip dialogue + fast forward combo. Verloren is a linear game, it doesn't aim to be highly replayable. It has achievements but there are there mostly there to highlight the game's secrets. The main reason someone would want to replay parts of the game would be to see how the events change following a different player choice, which isn't exactly a situation where a skip would help.

Concerning people wanting to skip through the cutscenes to go straight the gameplay, I'm a bit confused about how such feature will really appeal to that kind of players. Let's imagine the best case scenario with a player who don't care about the story but loves the gameplay. What would keep them motivated to continue playing if they skipped everything about the characters and the previous events? It is a genuine question, I don't have an answer to it, it is pretty hard to me to imagine someone playing like this.

In any case, thanks for your replies. 🧚

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Magno-M-S-Silva222 days ago

The problem is not having a story is having too much all at once. I like what I saw in a game design video that mentioned that games are interactive media so you need player interaction. Maybe you could let the player fight some soldiers by themselves? Explore 1 or 2 rooms in the castle? You don't need nor should give a lot of freedom but just enough so we can get a brake and play for ourselves.

And I think if you start collecting player input and add a skip button you'll see more than a few players skipping the occasional scene especially if it's not something that is hooking them up, if it looks long, slow, and repetitive, if you can get a TLDR version. I'm not saying it's your case, I'm just saying it's nice to have the option.

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