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[Gene]

As the Village Turns



As the Village Turns is an adventure with a strong emphasis on a philosophical dilemma.

Hi guys, I'm really curious what do you think about our 2nd flash game called "As the Village Turns"?

Desription:
“As the Village Turns” plays in a small Romanian village deep in the mountains, where Mihail lives. He lives amongst friends, but is not able to visit them a lot because of his condition; He cannot spend of a lot of time in the sun which means he has to choose with whom to speak during the day. The biggest choice however, is presented during the night..

The game features a dialogue system with over 1400 lines of text. They have their own story to tell and all react to the player's actions. We hope players find out all the secrets of the village.

Play the game, check out some screenshots and a special "cinematic" trailer over here.

The game was made in about 1,5 weeks. We wanted to try to make something a bit more narrative heavy. It's also kind of a reaction to not having multiple endings (ME3...). 

[Yrgkala]

Thoughts:
* Excellent game (concept, visuals, writing)!
* Bug: the reset is broken; after my first playthrough where I die of sickness, all the villagers are still in the corner of the map where your funeral happened (just an inconvenience, since redowloading the swf resets properly)
* I was very confused about "returning to your home", and thought that I should somehow return when the energy bar is low but not empty (which can apparently done only beginning on day 4?)
* The Simon dialogue with "there are more fish in the sea" is badly aligned

[greenexec]

I like how you are presented with a choice at night without much introduction.  Hey, it's Romania, right?  I got to know the characters a little and wanted to know more.

No spoilers follow, but lots of indirection...

I didn't quite understand entirely the choices at the beginning, and it would be huge if the houses at night had lights indicating who was left----save me a lot of trouble jumping around trying to figure out where I could go.  Likewise, having some indication of who has more to say and who doesn't would save me some time and clicking.  And, when you are out of choices, fast-forwarding to the end would be fine, so I could try again!

One bug:  When I went back to my house and stood directly in front of the door, it didn't give me the option to go to bed, so for a while I thought I couldn't.  Then I realized I had to step back a little.  (ME3 has this problem, too.  )

Finally, the art is neat, but also so, so tiny...

[Savick]

I played for about 5 minutes before getting bored. I don't find the story of the character particularly compelling and I don't feel like I care for him enough. The art is super tiny and while that may be a design choice I could hardly tell where I was on the screen at the start. I had a difficult time understanding which person was talking when they both are in the same box and have the same color text. It feels like they're the same person just talking to themselves or something. I would recommend separate speech boxes or at least slightly different colored text when a different person is speaking. Player clarity should be important, but not overly so to the point where you slap them in the face with 20 hour tutorials. I'm sorry if that came off as harsh, I don't mean to disrespect your choices in game design.

[greenexec]

Oh, yeah, I also got lost in who was speaking.  I second Savick's suggestion that you differentiate who's speaking. Text color, balloons, arrows, offsets, something.

[Hplus]

It's a good idea, and at first I was excited and started to get wrapped up in the different characters, but I think they fall a little flat. I got bored and stopped playing before reaching any end. I get the feeling that what you were trying to do was create a pressing need to talk to whoever you choose to be your close friends, but I found that I just didn't care what the people were saying, because they didn't usually have much interesting to say. Also, after some people started dying, people I talked to started saying the same stuff as each other regarding that death, and that turned me off a bit.

Like I said, I like the concept and think this could be going somewhere. However, I don't think 1.5 weeks was enough time to flesh out the characters and narrative to a satisfying level.

[Gene]

Everybody thank you very much for your feedback!

About making the dialog boxes clearer:
A few of you suggested this. That's a good one. We just didn't take the time to implement it. But it would make the game a lot clearer.

I like how you are presented with a choice at night without much introduction.  Hey, it's Romania, right?

Hahaha!

I didn't quite understand entirely the choices at the beginning, and it would be huge if the houses at night had lights indicating who was left----save me a lot of trouble jumping around trying to figure out where I could go.

That is actually in the game. The lights go out when the corresponding character dies.

Likewise, having some indication of who has more to say and who doesn't would save me some time and clicking.  And, when you are out of choices, fast-forwarding to the end would be fine, so I could try again!

Interesting idea, I'm just afraid it could change the focus of play and thus the total experience.

you slap them in the face with 20 hour tutorials. I'm sorry if that came off as harsh, I don't mean to disrespect your choices in game design.

No, we're asking for feedback, and it wasn't harsch. I see what you're saying. Except that there isn't any tutorial in there at all. But I can see how it might feel that why with all the text.


We think the game isn't for everybody. That might sound like a lame excuse, but some people just like to be immersed in lots of dialogs, and some don't.

[Rumrusher]

* Bug: the reset is broken; after my first playthrough where I die of sickness, all the villagers are still in the corner of the map where your funeral happened (just an inconvenience, since redowloading the swf resets properly)

Villagers: We knew this poor man even though he kinda didn't talk to some of us during those days. We will miss him.
Mihail:Wait I'm not dead.
Villagers:


So the town is cursed to repeat this sickness event. Going through the don't eat folks route will cause Mihail to "die" on final night and they feast for 3 more years and when time loops back to day one every one still remembers Mihail deeds and group over to the graveyard and celebrates.
"As the Village turns year 4... time will reset back. all changes fixed but not their minds."
Though now thinking on it that might explain why the mayor or the guard talk about mihale actions when I didn't go to them. I guess Mihale talk to them in a different cycle and they remember it. So is there some hidden boss where you use your umbrella to beat up a time lord of the night?

[Gene]

So is there some hidden boss where you use your umbrella to beat up a time lord of the night?

Haha. Maybe there is...  

We just updated the game with adjustments according to some or your feedback:

• We added color to when Mihail speaks
• We fixed the bug where the characters stayed in the corner of the village when restarting the game
• Some other small fixes

Thank you a 1000 times for all your feedback up till now!

[Garthy]

It looks like the sort of thing I might enjoy, but I was unable to play it due to the controls responding strangely. The option to hit space to continue tended to take a long time to appear, and it tended not to notice some presses of the space bar. Moving around was almost impossible. Sometimes pressing one of the arrow keys moved you a little, sometimes you moved on the spot, and sometimes suddenly jumped across to the next person in line. Sometimes not. I've got no idea how the controls are supposed to behave, but they aren't behaving on my system at all. I'm sorry to say that it's completely unplayable on my system.

I tried these two configurations:

Firefox 7.0.1, Flash 11.1 r102, Debian Linux 6.0.
AND
Firefox 12.0, Flash 11.2 r202, Debian Linux 6.0.

The second set is the latest available as of today.

[Gene]

I'm sorry to say that it's completely unplayable on my system.

That sucks. We haven't encountered any problems regarding controls so far (except an IE issue with scrolling of a window when pressing up/down).
We don't use linux, so I'm afraid we can't test on it. I'm afraid that's the problem.   

[Garthy]

I'm sorry to say that it's completely unplayable on my system.

That sucks. We haven't encountered any problems regarding controls so far (except an IE issue with scrolling of a window when pressing up/down).
We don't use linux, so I'm afraid we can't test on it. I'm afraid that's the problem.   

Hey, thanks for letting me know. I always end up feeling like the bad guy when all I can offer as feedback is basically "doesn't work for me". The game does look very interesting though.

[Gene]

Hey, thanks for letting me know. I always end up feeling like the bad guy when all I can offer as feedback is basically "doesn't work for me". The game does look very interesting though.

You're not a bad guy Garthy, you just use an OS we can't test on. 

[Garthy]

Okay, I finally got a chance to try it out on a Windows system. I was using roughly the same version of Firefox and Flash, but on a Windows box. I could properly control my character this time.

What an interesting game.

One suggestion I'd like to make is with respect to how quickly the main character moves. Whilst it's probably realistic that it takes a few minutes to fully walk through the village, it's very tedious to actually do this. The most interesting and fun part of the game- the dialogue- is only accessible by slowly walking around the village. The process of walking to your destination (or worse, trying to find a specific person) is actually incredibly dull. I often found myself thinking "too far" when playing, and just picking the next closest person to talk to.

Whilst I really want to play it again and experiment with talking to different people to see the results, the prospect of having to spend so much time walking around is sufficiently offputting to make me not want to do so.

As a suggestion, would it be possible to give the option at least of moving a bit more quickly through the village?

On another note, am I right in saying that you can't go home early on the first two days? It's a bit confusing when you first play, and are told not to stay out too long, but you have no way to return home early. When the day ends automatically it makes you wonder if you've lost health for not getting inside in time. If the player shouldn't go to bed early, I imagine it would be better if still could visit their house, but get a message saying why they can't, or that they've still got time.

I hope my feedback is useful.

[Tifu]

Oh this was awesome :D
I saw three endings I would kind of like to know how many endings there are, like a "you have seen 3/X endings" kind of thing, maybe only showing up after your first playthrough?