The most frequent piece of feedback that I've gotten so far is that the death moments are too long on second viewing. So even though my original plan was to keep it like that, this is something worth changing. I'll figure out some way to manually speed up the watch if you've already seen the moment before.
The sky, the water around the boat, and the top deck are all completely unfinished. One of the reasons I wanted to get this build out is so I can stop being secret about the core mechanic and start posting more progress posts about how I fill these things out.
Some other feedback:
- Needs a mouse-invert option (will do)
- Needs adjustable mouse sensitivity (will do)
- Hard on the eyes - add less contrasting color options (will do)
- Make a Linux version (will do eventually)
- A way to take pictures or remember faces would be nice (probably not, but thinking...)
Response dump:
[...] It's kinda like ordering someone to remember their own death [...]
I think that may be close to the sense I want. It's funny that Latin is so strict about this kind of thing. Really though, as a phrase, "MEMINI MORTES" may be correct but it doesn't look cool at all. So my inclination would be to change what I want in order to get a cool-looking phrase. Can you give me more descriptions about what "Memento Mors", "Memento Mortis", "Memento Mori", etc mean when translated? Through PM is fine if you'd rather not post it here. In any case, thanks for the help!
[...]I felt myself longing for the player character to cast a shadow[...]
I experimented with a player-cast shadow. It has the same problem as the hand-held lamp did: too much changing stuff as you move around. There's a lot of careful tuning to make this 1-bit low res thing work and I've found that leaving the world view mostly static helps a lot.
The default controls are nice but I found myself wanting to use the mouse buttons to interact with things. RMB for right hand, left click to pull up stop watch seems intuitive to me but maybe you have other plans moving forward.
I'm not locking the mouse right now (Unity issue), so mouse clicks risk losing focus. I'll get it sorted and you'll be able to hit space or and mouse button to use. There'll be just one use function though, no LMB/RMB separation.
[...]The interface for filling in the crew muster is cumbersome[...]
I think the only thing I'll do here is let you page through the book with the left/right arrow keys. Thanks for the detailed comments!
[...]Even if I was a bit disappointed that so far I can't interact with anything but doors on the Obra Dinn. I constantly tried to open cupboards and drawers and stuff but to no avail. Would be great I we could interact more with the ship.[...]
This is intentional (same with the clearly door-breaking axe just lying there at the start). Little bit more about that below.
So far the gameplay feels a bit like 6 degrees of sabotage (great game btw) but with a time travel twist.
Question is, I am (the player) just a agent that has to find the truth of what happened and who has to deduce who killed whom and how? Or will I have any influence of how the story unfolds? I am in any danger?
That's pretty much spot on. I really liked the simple identification mechanics in 6 Degrees of Sabotage. My original plan for Obra Dinn was a lot more involved but would've been impossible production-wise. When I stepped back and considered the situation of boarding a ship full of dead people, the idea that your task would be based strictly on identification made sense. So to answer the question, yes, your tasks is only to deduce the identities and fates of everyone on board. I'm going to try to be very explicit that this is not a horror game, so you're never in any danger. You'll also have no control over the past and no way to affect past events. That limits a lot of what I can do with the game, but the simplicity of it really intrigues me.
I also wondered how my time travel opened the locked door, I have not interacted with the door in any way. So why is it open when I come back? Would have been more logical if I went back in time, walked through the open door and waited for the clock to run out. Kind of Silent Hill style.
Currently, the doors open because I'm gating the player. I've considered an in-world explanation for this. My original vision was to find keys in the past and transfer them to the current time (say, by putting them in the dying guy's pocket). But at some point I realized that's a cure worse than the disease and decided to just open the door in the present if it was open in the past. I have some ideas about how to make this work more naturally though so stay tuned.
Could you make a dedicated animated GIF recorder that ships along with the game? Since you literally only have 1-bit visuals it might be pretty efficient?
That's a cool idea but without YouTube's social ecosystem I'm hesitant to put effort into a custom solution like this. The screenshot key was a last minute addition to the dev build and ended being a great move though so maybe a little 5 second giffer could be worth it.
[...]interesting game play, it took me 3 tries wandering around trying to pick up the bloody ax to fine the case and get with the program ...
It's painful, but this was exactly my plan. I want the player to get the whole "interact with everything!" impulse out of the way right at the start so the rest of the game goes much more smoothly. That first skeleton could've had a knife and you probably wouldn't have expected to use it to open the door. But I thought putting door-breaking axe is the perfect way to get this pill down quickly. All the drawers and cupboards in those two side rooms are for a similar purpose. The basic idea is that literally everything
could be picked up or opened but you should pay attention to the hand when looking for actual interactive stuff. This isn't an "open all the drawers to find the items" or "improvise with this weapon lying here" kind of game and I wanted to establish that quickly since I think it could hang over the player for a long time otherwise.
[...]I'm not sure how close the human models are to your final intent or how much you still plan to experiment with them[...]
I played around with lower poly, more stylized characters a while ago but the visceral connection to the violence just wasn't there. I think I'll probably stick with the current style for the rest of the game.
Two things about the potential crew fates: I'm not a native speaker so maybe that's the reason, but "killed by gravity" comes across as an oddly stilted phrasing to me. And the presence of Europe on the "Alive in..." list seems a bit weird when five separate European countries are also on it.
The fate sentence construction is pretty strict, which results in stuff like this. I may or may not try to fix that up. I'm also considering the possibility of specificity in the fates. So, for example, you can determine that he made it to Europe fairly easily - and fill that in - or you can dig much deeper and find some small clue to see that he actually went to Spain. So while "Europe" is correct, "Spain" is correct
er. Just an early idea though. The rest of the story, including the fates, is completely up in the air right now.
And at the risk of being "that guy" - will there be some type of in-universe explanation for what the watch actually does (or what the character does that's represented by the watch), or will it be a suspension-of-disbelief thing? As it stands the emotional disconnect between being just some officially appointed investigator and being able to "see" past events involving dead people feels a bit strong to me.
There is an in-world explanation for why you have the watch, but lemme just say that you won't find out for a while.
This game has some of the best stair walking I've seen in a game
Thanks :D. I lucked out on this. There's no special handling of the stairs beyond "speed up the headbob when moving up/down on y". The collision is a big ramp with sliding disabled and it plays different footstep sounds.
[...]One bug I encountered was in the frozen death scene levels, the narrow patio outside of the captains quarters isn't solid and you fall through to the bottom of the world.[...]
Whoa I've never seen this. Which part of the balcony was it?