Your Life? The World?

justcamh 2018-12-03 09:58

A very impressive show of graphics and mood! The opening cut-scene did an outstanding job of setting up an atmosphere, and on my first playthrough, I was pumped for a deep, moody experience. Then I died. I was excited to get back in, but I found that I had to go through the entire cut scene again. Long story short, please make the cut scene optional, I want to get back in without delay! When I did get back in though, I found the game falling for classical horror tropes / cliches, particularly pitch blackness. The light spell provided almost no aid, and seemed to only detriment the player, as the light failed to really illuminate anything. I also think that the gameplay music is a bit off the horror mark, and would have been best substituted for the main menu music. Speaking of the menu, I loved the UI in this game. The 3D, rotated typewriter text in the moody environment really set the scene for an awesome game. The fact that you could make all of this in two days is really impressive, but ultimately the lack of visibility hindered gameplay, to the point that it felt almost unplayable. With some minor tweaks, I believe that this game could achieve huge potential. Keep up the great content!

owen-davies 2018-12-03 14:20

@justcamh thanks for the suggestions, I will take it into consideration for future development, yeah I saw that the light didn't help, I just need to work on it for later versions.

figglewatts 2018-12-03 15:58

Great entry! This has the best mood of any game I've seen so far. Really liked the horror aspect, not enough entries do horror well!

wfmg 2018-12-03 16:30

I played the Web build, and I rate this 3.5/5. It's a good game.

Quite spooky, indeed, and the monsters do look a lot cooler in this lighting than in the Blender screenshots you sent on the LD server. Very cool. The audio adds to the mood, and the game is very artistically and creatively cohesive.

The gameplay, however, is a bit confusing and flawed. It's good, at the very least as good as my game, but it's a bit opaque. While the controls were easy to gather, I could not figure out how to make either of the spells affect the monsters, nor could I figure out exactly what the objective/win state is. I didn't find avoid the monsters that hard, so I ran up to them with the spells, but I got killed.

Something that kept me from playing any further is the opening cutscene. I wish you could skip it. It's really annoying to sit through every time.

owen-davies 2018-12-03 16:30

@figglewatts thanks, I wanted to try something new and different for me, so horror plus 3d = winning combo!

owen-davies 2018-12-03 16:33

@wfmg yeah, the spells were meant to slow the monsters down rather than attack, I can see that now. I do think that I should've added a skip option into the cutscene, it is quite long and after the first time repetitive, welp, good to know for the future!

franfox 2018-12-05 15:38

I like the mood and the acting, specially the spell cast voice. Otherwise I think you should skip the intro in the second run because is a bit frustrating to walk again the same corridor when you die. Anyway I think it's a cool game, congratulations.

PS: I like the monster model too

owen-davies 2018-12-05 15:40

@franfox thanks, yeah skippable cutscenes seem to be the most common improvement suggestion

gamebuilder 2018-12-05 16:47

I wish there was some way of conquering or at least temporarily disabling the evil spirit. As others have mentioned, the spells didn't have much of an effect against it. Perhaps a spell that would paralyze it for a few seconds (like Time Stop in D&D), or one that would give the player invisibility.

I also had a bit of difficulty moving around quickly (at first I used only WASD, not realizing the mouse needs to be used as well). The audio, lighting, and mood are the strong points of this game. With some adjustments it could be turned into a solid game. Nice work.

owen-davies 2018-12-06 08:13

@gamebuilder Yeah, I am now noticing a bug where the sleep spell, (essentially time stop) didn't end up working, so yeah that's a bug

tiar 2018-12-09 23:40

I guess my comment got lost; well, I'll try to replicate this. The first time I played it I got eaten by the evil spirit because I tried to stand in the corridor and spell at it. Well, it didn't work out. I honestly thought it is some kind of a "game-movie", that is that the experience was exactly that: you go through the dark corridor, you meet the spirit, you try to fight, but it is just laughing in your face at your poor attempts. But after reading the description again and even some comments, I realized I should be running away from it (and I figured that if it were a movie you would make the eating part a much more enjoyable to look at). So I made some progress, but... eventually I just got lost in those empty rooms and stopped playing.

Details I like:

- you can see the evil spirit while it can't see you

- the intro

Details I don't like:

- every room looks the same

- there is too dark sometimes to distinguish between new dark room and a black wall (#truestory)

I guess the things I don't like are just a thing in this genre of games and I'm not the right audience. But still, I think it can pretty easily get from scary to boring if you're not careful. (Although the moment when I was hiding in a corner and the evil spirit walked in the distance make my heart skip a beat, for sure).

owen-davies 2018-12-10 09:10

@tiar yeah, there was meant to be some better level design for the worlds, but I "wasted" a lot of time on attempting procedural generation. The spells were meant to work, I also should have made it more clear in the description though.

morg 2018-12-10 10:20

I found the game really spooky, and also enjoyed it a lot. Really great work with the voice acting and sound design. It's a bit unfortunate that you cannot skip the intro but it's not a big deal. I feel like the theme mechanics and the spells could've been fleshed out a bit more, but overall it's a nice game.

toulou 2018-12-10 12:16

Even with its very simples graphics the game has a very distinct feeling to it, it's very interesting how the general mood is achieved with simples elements like voice acting and the use of light. The gameplay has some interesting ideas but I kept dying because I couldn't see where the ennemies were, and I had to watch all over again the unskippable cutscene at the beggining. Also, subtitles would have been nice. But it's still an interesting game, I'd love to see a more developped version of it. Good job overall.

mza 2018-12-20 15:22

There is very good atmosphere-building going on here. The use of colors, lighting. At times, I thought there should be a bit more light in certain places. The opening explanation and tone of voice is great - a bit of added background creepy music at the begining would make it more interesting. Plus, do make the cutscene skipable.

owen-davies 2018-12-26 19:59

Yeah thanks for the feedback @mza