Hey all,
First of all, thanks a lot for the feedback. It was REALLY helpful and encouraging. And it's so exciting to finally receive external comments after months of silence
We released this demo out of nowhere on purpose because we wanted to see how you guys would react with the minimum of context.
So in case some of you are interested, here is more context!
1) About the roughness of the exposition, and the inconsistencies:The demo is a slice of the full game that we have in mind. We didn't want to make a demo with the "first chapter" because the "first chapter" will probably be more about exposition and it might misrepresent the game flow. This is why we decided to showcase "chapter three".
Once the walkthrough of the demo was done, we realized it was lacking narrative context. Players had no idea what the story was about. So we decided to add the little introduction that most of you guys seem to find confusing
2) The demo actually represents what we call a "chapter":It seems to take around 10-15 min to finish the demo. For the final game we're aiming for 10 chapters. That's roughly 2h to complete the game. We think we could sell it at a very low price, but we don't know how much yet. Then if this episode works, we could release sequels... Any opinion or advice on this model is welcomed!
3) About the game mechanics: What we are trying to achieve is a mix between the old school adventure genre we enjoyed so much in our youth, where you get deeply connected with the story, and the more recent Hidden Objects / Escape The Room games our moms enjoy so much on their phones. So the game is purposely linear and simple.
We're constantly struggling with ourselves not to add let's say an inventory system, or the ability to navigate freely between scenes, because this is what we as players would like to. But we're afraid it would become too "gamy" for non-gamers. We might be wrong. It's not easy to find the right balance so once again your feedback is more than welcomed. You can also let your non-gamer relatives play and let us know
4) The game flow:Basically we have 2 game mechanics for now: "collecting clues in the journal" aka "Collecting" and "linking journal clues with the scene" aka "Solving". The game is linear so the flow would look like this:
Chapter 1:Scene 1: Collecting Clues #1 #2 #3
Scene 2: Collecting Clues #4 #5 #6 #7
Scene 3: Solving Clues #2 #4 #6
Chapter 2:Scene 4: Collecting Clues #8 #9 #10
Scene 5: Collecting Clues #11 #12 #13 #14
Scene 6: Collecting Clues #15 #16
Scene 7: Solving Clues #1 #5 #8 #11 #15
Chapter 3:Scene 8: Collecting Clues #17 #18 #19
...etc. until the end of the game
So you "collect" and "solve" clues as you progress through the game, but you don't solve as many clues as you have collected. So the more you progress though the game, the more unsolved clues are scattered through your journal and the more difficult it becomes... And as RichSG suggested, we'd like to add variety to the "Collecting" mechanic with straight-forward simple puzzles or mini-games.
5) About the art:Nagual and I kidnapped this guy and we've tied him inside our basement to work on Saint Kilda (be reassured, his hands are free):
https://www.artstation.com/artist/LudoAnd that's all I have in mind for now. Any comments/thoughts/advice?