A story-rich adventure through an alternate dream-like world · By
You are welcome to leave feedback on the game's demo here! Let me know what you thought, if there's anything you think should be changed, or if there's anything you really liked. You can also let me know of any bugs you found here as well.
I have a strawpoll setup for some simple anonymous feedback or if you don't have an account here on itch.io and want to give some input, you can find it here: http://strawpoll.me/6172714
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
If you don't mind, what in particular about the mechanics was odd (so I can hopefully clarify things so they make more sense)? I am currently working on getting keyboard control setup, hopefully it won't be much longer but I'm having some issues as, luck would have it. The game should play much more nicely after that though since the scenes were designed to be navigated with the keyboard.
Hello! I'm liking the demo. I think you nailed down a really nice ambiance with the music and art so far, and the hints of story have me hooked. A few suggestions:
The menu buttons were a bit confusing. It seems like "Bonus" and "Gallery" are yet to be unlocked, but it was hard to distinguish those buttons from the clickable "Start Demo" and "Continue" buttons. Maybe give the locked buttons some sort of lock icon type deal over them, or give the unlocked buttons more of a highlight.
At the beginning as you're walking up the path toward the house, if you walk beyond the top of the screen to the next scene the dialog will cut off before finishing. Either have the dialog continue or ensure the player can't make it there before the dialog ends.
Pausing didn't seem to have any effect beyond not letting me move around or interact. I paused during the chase scene and ended up dying. (Speaking of the chase scene, I loved the perspective on the hallways. It gave a nice claustrophobic and tense feeling.)
I've played through a number of times now, and it looks like my inventory persists across continues. I'm not sure if that's intentional. When I continue I start from right before choosing between the two Pendulums, and I have a Pendulum and a flower in my inventory already. It's also not clear weather the choice here is important. There doesn't seem to be any indication that anything changes between a playthrough with one Pendulum or the other. Although it is just a demo and it's impossible for me to say what is purposefully made unclear and what is just glossed over for brevity or mystery, I feel like if the Pendulum is part of the core gameplay there should be some indication of its effects.
It's a bit unclear what F and C do. I started to pick it up after a couple restarts, but it's not immediately obvious. Some more feedback to the player would be nice. For example, when teleporting, the glow around the feet is great, but I'd like to see some indication of what the power does before using it. Maybe a corresponding glow where the player teleports to? Maybe a sort of afterglow/shadow trail pulling the player to their destination? Teleporting seems like it will be part of the core puzzle mechanic, so letting the player know what to expect would be nice, especially since it doesn't look like you can teleport back.
I'm a bit confused about F being attack and teleport. It's a bit difficult for me to articulate why I don't like this. I think maybe it comes back to my last point about contextualizing your actions and giving the player confidence about what they are doing when they hit a key.
The animation when using F as an attack could be more indicative of what it's doing. It behaves like an attack, but the purple swirl doesn't quite have the punch that makes it obvious. I wasn't sure what I was actually doing to the door with the switch. I assume I'm breaking it down, but maybe I'm holding it open with magic? Objects should react to the magic. Maybe the door can glow purple before opening? Maybe the shadows can dissolve in purple light? Sorry I don't have a definite answer there.
I'm sort of obsessed with UX design, so that's kind of what I had the most feedback on: the little things that help immerse the player or take them out of the design. I hope I've made all my suggestions clear, but feel free to ask me any questions! I'm super interesting in where the story goes, so I'll be following your work.
Thank you so much for all of the feedback!
Looks like the buttons are still bugged, I will look into getting them fixed. There was originally a pretty clear differentiation between active and inactive buttons, I have no idea what happened, but I'll add that to the bug list.
Due to the way the engine works I unfortunately can't make the dialogue continue, but I'll mess with the timing to see if I can get everything to fit! That was a silly oversight on my part, I had everything timed properly but did something to set it off.
I'll be working on a separate pause menu to replace the current one as well, one that will actually pause the game. That's another thing I forgot to add to my to do list, so thank you for pointing it out! The way pausing the game works in the new engine I'm using is different from the old one.
The inventory is not supposed to persist, I'll add that to the bug list as well. I thought I had that sorted out, it's really strange because the game autosaves before you even pick up anything, and that autosave is the return point when clicking "continue". I'll see what I can do to fix it!
I'll work on adding some proper indicators for what the powers do, thank you for pointing that out! I have a question for you, did you choose the same pendulum both times? I have a feeling the persisting inventory may have caused an issue, each pendulum does do something different, and there are different ways to traverse the puzzle room depending on which one you have. Purple is the only one that allows teleportation, and you shouldn't have been able to get through the door if you had the purple one. From what you said, it sounds like you were able to get through the door with it?
I believe I chose the right pendulum (I can't remember the color off the top of my head) on my first run and was able to open the door. Second run I chose left and teleported. After that I alternated between each pendulum a couple times and from what I can tell I could do either. I would see the teleport glow and then go through the door, for example. I used continue each time, so it probably is related to the inventory persistence bug.
One last thing I just remembered. The two ghosts weren't able to hurt me after the second run (I'm not sure if they could before that since I was too spooked to do anything but mash F and C).
Ok interesting, I'm pretty sure I fixed the inventory persistence bug. The problem was I had used buttons for the icons and set active/inactive images, and apparently those states don't get stored in saves. But the actual value that is checked to see which pendulum the player has was unaffected, it reverted back to 0 (no pendulum) like it should have when the autosave is loaded. So it seems like this is a different issue, I'll see if I can replicate what you are describing tonight and hopefully get it fixed.
