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 Hey guys.
In the last five days we’ve been working to remake most of the game systems we had, looking into making them solid and flexible enough to build on top of them.

Even though we expressed our concern about the demo’s lack of content, the direction we want to walk on is one of quality over quantity, so these first steps are important in this long trip.

And that’s the reason we’re sending to you guys this little, small, tiny TECH demo:https://mega.nz/#!J1siSYiT!CQopuHtzROK7L5N637fI_Iu8ya9Db2NPdh0RqqTmGMU

Now, don’t get excited please! This is little more than a walking simulator at this stage, ok? :-D

 It’s main and only purpose is that you could see HOW we’ve implemented the following game systems:
- Point & Click movement
- Walk and (multiple track) Idle animations
- Scenery parallax effect
- Scene transitions
- Music & ambient sounds
- Full screen conversations (try with ship)
- Independent Talking & Eye Blink animations
- Esc Menu

Controls are:
- Left Click: Movement / Use-Talk action
- Right Click: Examine action

 In short: you can briefly talk with your ship and walk around examining everything that has a hotspot area.

Please be fair when giving feedback as I’m serious about this prototype being made in some days. There’s a lot to be implemented in the next weeks but from that point on we’ll focus on writing dialogues, events and adding game mechanics.  As always, thank you for your support. 

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Comments

Anonymous

Alright, there's not much here, so this will probably be mostly about stuff that needs to be addressed. The first thing I noticed is that the ship cuts off a bit far from the edge of the screen if you run it windowed, which led me to discover that the area transitions are the same. It also would be great if we could hold left-click to continue moving; the way it is now, Krystal just stops at the point you initially clicked. Third, I'd like it if we could go through the dialogue at our own pace. I'm a fast reader myself, so going back and forth with the ship took entirely too long to progress to the next bit of dialogue. Now for the stuff I liked: Krystal's model is gorgeous, as expected, and the animations (both walking and idle) are well done. That being said, I'm not an expert on 3d animation, so take it for what it's worth. I did notice that the kneepad and ankle strap textures on whichever leg is furthest from the camera seem to disappear periodically during the idle animations. Overall it looks good, apart from the minor issues I mentioned. Keep up the good work!

KodiakMight

Perhaps allowing the dialogue to wait to progress until you click an arrow might be useful. First, some people, such as myself, aren't fast readers. Secondly, it seems a waste of all the work you folks put into the facial animations during dialogue if our attention is always up at the top to try and keep up with the text. Other than that, the only minor issue I saw was the ship cutting off at the transition point. Otherwise, things looked great. Animation was marvelous, music was gorgeous, and the art was amazing. The save system seems to be working, and dialogue interface is functional and elegant. I'm looking forward to seeing what else you guys can achieve. Keep being awesome!

adrian

It's very good, keep up the good work, I can not wait to see more of your excellent work.

Anonymous

it looks really good, works smoothly, just maybe put the walk speed a bit up, thats all :3

Abelius

Hi there! Wow, you have a great eyesight! :-D Thank you so much for reporting that issue. I've fixed it in my development build. Btw, the graphics are not in 3D so if you’ve had that impression, then we must be doing things well. ^_^ About the scenery cut, the game is designed to run on a 16:9 aspect ratio, so I’ve had an enforcing mechanism in place. The fact that is not working like it should in all cases (windowed, 4:3 or 16:10 screens…), makes me think I’ll need to use another method to ensure you don’t get to see ‘behind the scenes’. Thank you again for reporting. About the dialogue skipping… yup, it was at the top of my priority list even before releasing the thing. But I was curious to see how much did it bothered you guys. Call me a sadist. :-D So yes, I’ll implement dialogue skipping as default. Now, that ‘hold to walk’ system you mentioned… well, that’s not something I’ve thought of, as this is an adventure-like game. But I admit it would be useful in long scenes like these in the forest. You’ll need to wait for a more mature version though, because I suspect it won’t be trivial for me to add it to the current character controller. Again, thank you for your valuable feedback.

Abelius

Yup, as I've mentioned in the previous comment, these are my top priorities now. Thank you so much for taking the time to give me feedback. Keep it coming, please!

Abelius

Thanks! Walking speed being like that is intended as we're planning on making a 'jog' animation in the future, for quicker movement and happy-boob-shake-party. :-D

Anonymous

Almost everything I wanted to complain about has already been pointed out by others, so I suppose I'll skip directly to showering you with praise. First thing I have to give huge props for is the sound. Not only is the music great, the general ambience like the birds chirping really adds a lot. We've seen most of the animations in the last tech demo so I'm not going to talk a lot about them, but I love the fact that Krys actually walks out of the screen during transitions instead of just teleporting to another level. She also actually talks instead of just standing there with a poker face, so that's nice. The UI is good, but I'd change one thing about it: Right now you can only pick a dialogue option when you mouse over the sentence itself. It'd be nice if we could also use the corresponding parts of the dialogue wheel for that. It's nothing important, but I instinctively tried to click the little trapezoids, and had to correct myself each time. Apart from that, the demo's great and I can't wait for the actual content one!

Abelius

Hi Aestral! Thanks for commenting and I'm glad you liked it overall. About not being able to mouse over wheel ‘slices’ to select their corresponding dialogue options, yeah I’m with you on that being counterintuitive. I tried to make them selectable at first because that is what you’d expect from a Mass Effect style UI, but for technical reasons I needed to refrain from that and put the issue in my list of ‘low priority things to fix’. But don’t worry, I’ll take a look when I have time. This is something I want to address. ;-) Thank you!

Abelius

Hey guys. I’ve addressed both the main issues you pointed out…: - Conversation dialogue lines are now permanent. You skip to the next by clicking anywhere on the screen. - Now you should be able to play in any aspect ratio or windowed mode. Keep in mind though that the game is still designed for 16:9 screens. I may, however, enhance support for exotic ratios in the future if people ask. If you want to take a look at the changes and more importantly, check if they really are working properly in your case, this is the new link until Kuja logs in, and changes the one in the OP: <a href="https://mega.nz/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://mega.nz/</a>#!48VEjRTA!kbG4ycbxIUU80Vj6ycoO0IrWCgQTsGWT_J1vQ5MxvCg Thanks again for your feedback. ;-)

KodiakMight

First off, love the change to the dialogue. There were animations I didn't even realize were there, such as the subtle posture changes, so I'm happy about that! Noticed something weird with the save system. I deleted all of the old tech demo files from my hard drive before installing the new one, and yet it remembered my saves and sound options. Not sure what that means from a tech standpoint, as I'm not very computer savvy. I did encounter a bug during one save file load, where only Krystal, the background, and the music loaded. The ship did not, and Krystal immediately became frozen in the first step of her walk cycle animation. Trying to reload the file did not work, but restarting the game resolved the issue. It only happened the one time, and did not recur after about 20 attempts to duplicate the issue. Otherwise things look great!

Anonymous

I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement, but one thing you could try would be to detect if the left mouse button is held down, and just auto-fire the input for as long as that is the case

Anonymous

This looks and sounds amazing great job :)

Abelius

Yeah, that would work no doubt. Thank you. ;-) My only reservation is about how the pathfinding method will react to so many requests per second, so I'll try to add some logic to either limit them to one per frame or do something more sophisticated to avoid selecting something you don't want by accident.

Abelius

Thank you for your efforts Kodiak! Thing is, I'm using a plethora of plugins that don't necessarily get along very well between them. And the one responsible for saving the game right now could miss some variables from the others. In other words, I'll make sure it works as it should when I have something a little more solid than this tech demo. Thanks!

Anonymous

Looks really great can't wait to see more !

Anonymous

hi i just wanted to ask does it work only on windows because i'm using a mac and i couldn't access the demo after downloading it

Abelius

Hi there. We don't expect being able to compile (supported) Mac builds, as I'm using a lot of plugins that make very difficult for them all to work properly when outside their zone of comfort. :-P