Enjoy! All feedback welcome!
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I love it! One thing I would fix is the title. It’s not centered right with the yellow space.
Great job and keep it up!
Thank you very much! I’ll see what I can do about that title text.
I loved your story! It’s really exciting.
The gameplay felt a little lacking, there were very few decisions to make, only 2 for each path. If you want me to give some super highly detailed feedback gameplay wise I’ll gladly do it but it may sound harsh, so, it’s up to you.
Thanks for playing, Yee! As for that harsh-sounding gameplay feedback, well, I’m not saying bite my head off, but I’m curious about your thoughts. I would like to hear it.
The issue I got is that there are very few decisions to make, I loved the writing and that just added salt to the wound, there were some very exciting moments in which I wasn’t, as a player, part of, like this moment “The pirate captain waits just inside, … , as if waiting for you”, my mind at that particular point was speculating “It’s a trap! Or maybe… the trap is making me believe it is a trap but in reality it isn’t and he’s just waiting for his men to arrive, he’s just buying time, Should I risk my crew?” Then the story continued and I didn’t got to play.
Your writing is fantastic and each slide made me believe that I was going to make a really hard choice but I never did, I just read and what’s worse I got scored for it, it felt like blaming me for something I didn’t do.
I know it’s just a small a project and adding multiple paths is time consuming, but it felt like you got so carried away with your tale that you forgot you were making a game, don’t get me wrong, that’s fine, just, if you don’t want to add more paths, remove the score at the ending and remove this line from the start “you will be called upon to make tough decisions”, with that you are making a promise to the player, you are rising the player’s expectations and with your writing the expectations only get higher and the dissapointment gets even bigger when the player realizes the only two choices to be made were at the start of the game.
I know this game is just something you did to learn but if you take care of this little things right from the start of your learning road you’ll create a habit, a habit that will help you become an amazing game developer.
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I really love everything you just said. Thank you so much! This feedback is congruent with what one or two of my friends on facebook said in their reactions as well. I now consider it a priority to revisit the structure of the game and incorporate much more player choice throughout the story.
That said, I’d like to ask you a few things. See, from my perspective when I was making the game, I sort of approached the logic of the story with the mindset that I should default the Captain’s actions to whatever the best possible reactions were given the choices the player had already made. What I mean by that, for instance, in the example you give, there’s no option for the player to botch the job by losing the fight with the enemy Captain before disabling the pirate ship. There are similar assumptions I made along the way in all the other three story branches as well. My feeling at the time was that I never wanted to give the player a “false choice”, I never wanted to present the reader an option that amounted to a “gotcha”. Does that make any sense?
The question I have is, would a player actually feel better about the experience if I presented them some options that were objectively unfavorable or ill-considered, and then just went ahead and punish them? It would, after all, at least recognize the player’s agency.
Actually, you know what, I think I already see the answer to my questions. I’ll do my best to present more options that at least make sense reactionally, if not practically. If the player chooses to cook their own goose, then so be it.
Once I finish reworking the game, I’ll upload the new version and put a link in these comments. Thanks again! Wow, what a great, encouraging piece of feedback. Outstanding.
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If you want the player to feel like that Game Over screen was his fault put some little hints here and there or make him keep track of things, like in that scenario where the Pirate Captain was waiting, the player should try to remember how many pirates where left from previous battles, if the player fails, remember him in a subtle way what he should be keeping track of: “You and your crew got surrounded by the pirates that where left from that other battle”, for instance.
Another way to do it is by being pretty descriptive with the battles and equipment the crew is carrying, mention at the start that the best shooter only has 20 ammo, in a battle he kills 5 pirates, let the player do the math, and even be more described like he failed some shoots or whatever, or make him scream something like “I’m nearly out of ammo!”.
Probably the first playthrough a lot of people will say things like “How was I supposed to know that my crew had no ammo?” Then they’ll play again and see that the story is actually telling them, they start paying more attention and get super engaged with your game, but also don’t over do it, don’t put too much information, make it feel natural.
For this particular kind of game I highly recommend the Chekhov’s Gun principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov’s_gun
That’s a good point, Chekhov’s Gun is a useful principle here. I’m a big believer in making and keeping promises to the audience. I’ll do my best to take the rest of your advice into account too. So far, I’m about 90% of the way done with the new outline. I’m working in draw.io to build a diagram of the decision tree. This has been really cool, because in some ways I feel like I’m learning a lot about storytelling in general. It’s really causing me to slow down and think, “Maybe I would do a certain thing in this situation, but what might another player choose to do?”
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As it’s been almost a week since my last reply, I thought I’d give a little update. Since last time, I’ve completely finished the outline and diagram of the new version. It follows the same few decisions you have in the beginning of the original, but there are several more points in each branch where the player needs to figure out what to do and give input.
A few simple design decisions quickly led to the amount of slides and text I’ll need to complete increasing about ten-fold. So, instead of plodding along as I did in the original, I decided yesterday to establish the structure of this version first in Unity, using placeholder text for now. Today I completed that process and tested all the story branches to make sure I’d hooked everything up in the code.
In addition to all the changes to the story, I’ve completely redone the look of the game. I have a background image of a blue sky with clouds, and I used dafont.com to find a cool title font and loaded it up in textmeshpro.
I expect the rest of the work for the game to take a moderate amount of time - at least another few days.
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Well. Three months later… Here’s the finished game, hot off the presses. I don’t even know if anyone will see this, but if you do, I’d still welcome any feedback you might offer, BUT, I definitely need to move on from this project now and get back into the course proper, so I want to say up front I probably won’t be putting any more work into this one (unless someone finds a serious bug or something). Cheers, and thanks for coming along with me on this little trip.
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