A Great Game

[link removed -thanks for all critiques]
I am now working on the second revision... stay tuned.

Windows build, best enjoyed with headphones and lights off. This is the makings of an A title indie horror game, well the beginning of one anyway, with great care taken into concept sound, visuals animations and gameplay (although basic) with a bit more time and effort I truly believe it is possible of a AA standard. Everything from animation,code, sound was undertaken by myself. I tried to create an atmosphere of foreboding and unease as the player gradually descends into madness.

Please give me feedback on how to improve thanks.

 

60 views and no reviews yet

 

I would add some screen shots and a description. Most people don't randomly click a link without any idea what it is. You have to sell people on your game so they will want to download it

 

Or even better make a Browser build of your game so that we can play it without starting Exe-Files on our PC.

I don't download zip files from people I don't know.

 

Description
The game is a high quality psychological game with a few adeptly placed puzzles which explores the darker side of human nature, guaranteed to leave you playing it and wanting more.

Rest assured you can trust the files as they were built using unity and I am a community member with just under 500 posts -so there is nothing to worry about. Not quite sure what else to say, the game is best played native.

Looking forward to your reviews.

 

This.
If it's hosted on a web portal or as a web build I'd play it.
Also provide some screen shots. Some people might give it more consideration if they can see the visuals.

 

Thank you, but the game is better of played native, I don't have the resources to host it anywhere and it is not suited to be played online.

Here is another screenshot. Should there really be this much fuss over getting a review for a game. How else can it possibly be done. Scan with your AV. I can assure you I built the game using only unity.

 

Some people just don't feel comfortable with downloading potentially harmful content, however I'd stick with your build - as you say - you built for a specific experience to be played on a specific platform, so I back your position not to deploy to another platform.

Now regarding fuss over getting a review of your game - consider the fuss involved in presenting something that could be appealing to an audience, to get people interested in checking out your game.

See this LINK for a recent effort to present a game demo to be reviewed. Compare the title of the page, and the 'fuss' they made just to get feedback on there demo.

 

Thanks honestly, I'm not sure what else to do, the game is just a level on a corridor as shown in the wireframe.


I can't build for webgl, file way too big and probably buggy, unity player prompts the user to download another version and needs a specific web browser. The technology is soon to be deprecated anyway.

How else am I to get a simple review. Should I build a linux version for people who are scared to run it? I don't see how it could be an issue, I used the unity build option to x86 option. And I tried it on windows and it worked fine. If you have any other further suggestions please keep them coming as I'm learning this for the first time here, being my first semi-completed game.

 

I have thousands and people are justifiably worried about me.

 

Maybe that's because you post images of hippos chasing naked men You're a big softie anyway. Would a linux build be a better option?

 

AFAIK there's only 10 people with linux in the world or something, so screenshots or vid would help

 

OK I'll try and put something together without ruining the game and may build a linux version, but have to wait till start of April as my parents have a capped internet usage which renews every month and I can't upload another build yet.

If anyone in the mean time gets a chance to download and review I would be most grateful.

 

Honestly its not about the build - well - for some it is,
What it's really about is "presentation!"

This thread is titled 'game'
one screen shot of the controls in the original thread
Seriously - compare this to the link provided above. See how presentation can positively and negatively effect people checking out your content - even for feedback on a demo build.

When presenting to the world - to the public - present it to them as if your presenting them something special. That's how you get attention to your stuff.
You think the other link has had feedback on there game? I'd put money on it.
Pictures, trailers, descriptions - they are selling it. And it's just a demo build - same as this - a PC demo zip file.

 

Thanks bro, I changed the title and description a bit to try and get people to download. Will post some more screenshots but at the minute on my ubuntu laptop.

Here is a picture of my gun untextured (see above) which I pawned from my WIP thread, not the greatest modelling skills I know haha.

I have no idea, I see no feedback as of yet, but there's a S*** tonne of effort gone into that game, almost like a small studio, mine is nothing close to being that comprehensive, I'll concede to that.

 

That is because it is one of the worst sales pitches you could have written. It is a valuable lesson in "making people care", which is one of the hardest things to achieve as a solo indie and also probably the most important one if you want making games to be more than just a hobby for you.

These are things I suggest to avoid:
- generic thread title
- calling your own game great (note how in the Atomic Butcher thread linked above the only mention of "great" is within the quote from someone else who said it)
- any mention of "AAA"
- saying "it's totally not a virus" (I'm paraphrasing)

These are things you should have:
- descriptive threadtitle
- meaningful screenshots that make people think "trying this out could be enjoyable to me"
- concise description of genre, scope and approximate playtime
- short list of things you want feedback on and those that you know are still so unfinished that feedback on them would be kind of pointless
- CRC checksum and virustotal.com link with a "clean bill of health"

While I do trust you not to be willingly uploading virus-infected stuff, I am cautious sometimes. I uploaded the .exe on virustotal.com and was quite surprised to get a message that a file with the same checksum has been uploaded before:

http://www.keinebilder.de/temp/virustotal-result-for-great-game.jpg
http://www.keinebilder.de/temp/virustotal-result-for-great-game2.jpg
http://www.keinebilder.de/temp/virustotal-result-for-great-game3.jpg

Do Unity .exe files really have so little unique stuff in them that such checksum collisions happen regularly? My understanding of such checksums always was that they are so unique that collisions between files of several megabytes in size have a lottery-win kind of rareness. Was I wrong? Is this a Unity quirk that there is actually little content unique to the project in the compiled .exe files?

I am willing to discard the 1 alert by some antivirus software, which I have never heard of, as a false positive, so here is what I think:

Spoiler

Normally I wouldn't have tried this, and if I did I wouldn't have given feedback. But since you asked me by private message, and I assume you know by now that I don't hold punches and I'm the wrong person to ask when looking for pats on the back and encouragement, here is my feedback:

- Are you allowed to just use the pegi logo without them actually having rated your game? I don't know, but I'd be surprised. To me it feels a bit pretentious to be honest. It gives such a vibe of "I've seen the big boys use it, and I'm just as hardcore" but I don't remember seeing anything that would stand in the way of a pegi 12 rating.

- Clearly communicating the control scheme upfront is a very good idea.

- I liked the sounddesign of the intro. It created a compelling atmosphere going into the experience.

- The camera FOV and effects are nauseating.

- The laggy smoothed mouselook makes it worse by orders of magnitude. When I gave up playing I had to step away from the PC and catch some fresh air, because the game made me feel sick. For reference: I played fullscreen 1920x1200 on a 22" screen positioned exactly at arms length from me.

- I noticed one out of place invisible wall when the door opens. I consider that bad practice.

- I think calling this a game already is either overly generous or I failed to reach or understand the actual gameplay. What I experienced was a straight corridor with a door at the end that sometimes would let me pass through into what seemed to be the same but differently looking corridor again, and sometimes it just didn't open. When I quit playing, none of the doors would open anymore and I was stuck. If there was a puzzle I think it is a bad one, because it failed to communicate to me that there is a puzzle at all. I'm not making decisions, I see no way to either win or lose, it doesn't qualify for me as a game yet, or I'm missing something really important, which also would be a bad sign.

- The text size doesn't properly scale with the screen resolution. For me it was much too small. I launched again in the lowest resolution and windowed mode, there the text was much bigger.

- I think the usage of text was out of context and kind of "weird". It may or may not work better as proper voiceover, but in any case I think context is important for your narrative. I suggest to not show such big chunks of text at once, either pace it like subtitles if play is supposed to continue in parellel or put it into a non-play context like the typical reading a notice you find in a game.

- You need to trap the mousecursor inside the window and hide the mousecursor. If it wasn't a straight corridor it wouldn't have been playable for me on my tripple screen setup. I think those are the two:
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Screen-lockCursor.html
http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Cursor-visible.html

- My suggestion would be to scope a lot smaller and focus on gameplay. Camera issues aside, it looks and sounds a lot more professional than most Unity beginner games I've seen! But it doesn't play better. So I suggest to focus on pure gameplay, do a cube prototype with a different game concept that doesn't rely on sound or visuals to be fun. And once you have that, make it look and sound good on top of it already being fun to play. I don't think the first person horror genre can be properly pulled off by solo indies. There is insane market saturation in that segment and even what I consider the lowest production value games that I still did play, were made by small teams.

 

I would definitely take Martin's advice. Its pretty common sense. Its more constructive than critical too (
I know it can sting though, I'm with you there). I would have said mostly the same things about the way you advertised your game.

 

Can't you just give a screenshot of the actual game? If you think it'll give away too much of the gameplay, you don't have any game to play. Please. Just show some screenshots of the game.

 

@Martin_H thanks for your comments, I guess the last clue was too difficult, but you need get to level 7... keep searching the walls...

I'll address the other points later. Thank you for the feedback.

 

This is a very interesting point. I'm not sure what that rogue file is, it would be interesting to submit a vanilla unity build and see if it flags up the same error. All I can say is I built it on a mac os for windows.

Great points on sales pitching, I must admit I don't have a clue how to do this, but I'm working on a small teaser video, but it takes so long to put together and build tension. I'm just downloading soundflower for mac and video editing in blender which is really quite good. I've edited the beginning post a bit to follow some of your points.

Not sure, there is potential for it to be 18 rated as it gets dark, much darker.

Thanks

Now this is where I'm slightly confused, perhaps it might be the mouse controls on testing with a mac is different with windows, using a magic mouse I noticed the sensitivity is very different, I'm using the vanilla FPS controller. In regards to the vortex effect, yes this is definitely nauseating, partly by design, you are made to feel claustrophobic and slightly sick, too much is probably bad.

Again not sure where this is, I was careful to check the clipping view so nothing is revealed too early by accident. If it works of different screen resolutions, again not sure.

There was... one more level although, the clue is ridiculously difficult compared to the beginning where you just walk through. Perhaps a light flickering near it will prompt the user to check it out, much like how resident evil had a key shining so it draws your attention.

Yes this was another, scratching my head point, in that I couldn't figure a way to present the clues whilst, drawing the attention of the player yet remaining unobtrusive. I should have broken up the text to maximum 2 lines long, perhaps increased the text size a bit... Or go to a cut scene, where you're reading the clues like on a bit of note paper or something... Voice overs might be a good idea, but really shoddy as I'd probably recording my own voice... I couldn't scare a mouse LOL.

This is great, I've already set about implementing a mouse lock and cursor visible state.

Thank you it is a great compliment, to call my game 'looks and sounds professional' and I do agree with a little more attention spent on gameplay it could be a lot more better, more immersive and builds a good story with tension surprise and fright scares. I'm considering more of a level design to give a bit more variety and the protagonist's daughter appearing at different stages during the game.

What I learned is a lot of thought and design needs to go into creating the clues, hell even, triggering the door to creak open in level 3 took a lot of effort.

Looking forward to any other reviews, the next iteration will be better.

 

Feedback.

Project name - project needs a name. Currently its name is "untitled".

pegi.info: I believe that to put that kind of emblem into the game, the game needs to be reviewed first, by pegi. Might be wrong about it.

There's something very wrong with "What we can see.." phrase, but I can't put my finger on it. It feels as if it is either misspelled or incorrectly constructed. Try using some citation instead.

After showing pegi emblem and "press enter" screen, you don't have a menu. I do understand that you're trying to mimic opening sequence of bigger-budget titles, but if there's no menu, you could just skip the half of the intro screens.

"Press enter to continue" is not a good idea. I should be able to close the screen with any key, or at least using a left click.

Game does not hide mouse cursor in fullscreen. See Cursor.visible.

It should be possible to disable mouse smoothing. Controls don't feel "right" for a first person perspective (or first-person shooter).

In 1920x1080 the text at the bottom is tiny.

Do you have permission for using music and art (in pictures)?

Missing comma in second text ("Alex, my baby"). It is hard to take "Noooo" seriously.

Gun's line of fire is not aligned with camera center. Gun shots land in the top left part of the screen. To fix the issue either shoot bullets from center of the screen, or find location at which you're gonna fire using raycast. No particle system on impact either, and no bullet trail.

Gun decals do not appear to be interacting with light properly.

Consider adding random rotations to gun decals.

I suspect that number of decals is infinite. If that's true AND gun decals are gameobject's it is most likely possible to crash the game by firing at the wall for enough time (probably half an hour).

Sound effect for the closed doors doesn't sound right. It sounds as if the door is "open". See Silent Hill 2 for example (in the game it sounds as if the door is closed and someone tries to shake it).

Gun sound is way too loud and hurts ears in headphones. Also, gun sound effect doesn't properly overlap with itself (I bet you've attached sound emitter to the gun, and use its Play method, instead of PlayClipAtPoint), so if you hold left trigger, you'll get firing sfx for 1 bullet out of the two.

Firing particle system doesn't look right.

I have infinite ammo?

I'm not sure what kind of clue I was supposed to look for in "level 6", but I didn't find it.

Corridors felt sorta narrow.

At the level where you're opening door, I bumped into invisible door long before door started opening. So I could run at the spot for 15 seconds or so, while the door was opening and closing. I see what you tried to do there, but with this kind of movement speed, you might want to look for some other way to draw player's attention.
----
Advice:

You got decent atmosphere (for survival horror) in the room with water and music.
However, your "weak spot" appears to be text, which destroys the impression ("Nooooooo", for example).
Screen distortion effect quickly gets annoying, it would've been better if distortions were bigger, or if geometry was being distorted (that would be harder to do, though, especially in unity).

It might work better if you either drop the text and let the player attempt to guess what's going on, or find a scriptwriter.
When there's no explanation, but lots of clues, people can imagine something way more awesome compared to what you actually wanted in the game. Short text, less text - either would work better.

Rooms are completely identical (layout) and because of that they're sorta boring. Take a look at Spooky's House of Jump Scares, for example. If you're using realtime gi, you could prepare several room layouts, and adjust their lighting/materials at runtime. Additionally I highly recommend to play Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. Those games were great at portraying creepy and otherwordly atmosphere, which seems to be what you're after.

-----

That's all I had to say about it. Response is not necessary, because this is a feedback.

 

Wow thanks for the detailed feedback, much appreciated.

First it's clear the last clue is not well placed at all, it's right near the end door with the neon sign, if you wanna give it another try, and you need the flashlight to see it, it's not obvious what to do but intuitively you have only one logical option - here it is difficult to gauge how difficult clues are for the gamer to decipher.

I'll look into having an option to disable mouse smoothing, I never realised it was such a problem when play testing, but this is exactly the feedback I need that I couldn't get by myself. Yes the clues and the script I really need to work on so I'm going to spend a bit more time over the weekend to look what I can do.

I may have to remove the winnie the pooh wallpaper, and pegi 18 or just put some other thing there instead. Once again thanks for taking the time out to play test and over good advice.

 

Wooow, way to misquote me. This is what I wrote:

I don't know what you thought you'd get out of something like this, but it sure isn't helping in motivating me to continue giving you useful feedback. Had I seen this before I just answered your private message I'd have saved myself that half an hour and played a game instead. I am disappointed and kindly ask to never misquote or out-of-context quote me again. If you seriously don't understand the difference between what I said and what you claim I said, then... all hope is lost anyway.

 

Thanks I re-edited my original thread to include the last bit. Did you get my other PM thanks for all the feedback thus far.