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[fucrate]

I agree, the impact you get by playing to the end is so much more powerful than just quitting in frustration.  In fact, I still feel the emotional jarring when I play through it, even though I've played it more than anybody else. 

I think the monotony is really important for creating that moment, though.  A lot of games are all about repetitive actions done over and over again, slowly gaining competence until by the end of the game the player completes complex actions without really thinking about it, it's a core part of what drives people to play games.  We have the same type of progression in Gray, but at the critical moment, everything kind of goes to shit and they player is totally lost.  It's hard to say you would get a similar impact if you only had to do half as much in the first few parts, you might not get enough time to get into the right head-space.

[Alec S.]

I think the later parts could be made a bit longer to compensate.  I also think there needs to be at least some visual difference between the phases so that the player doesn't think the game is in an infinite loop.  After the second phase, a lot of players are going to assume they've seen all the game has to offer.

[JLJac]

I finished it. Very interesting

[agj]

I loved this! Aesthetically perfect, and a message well conveyed. I would have made it go back and forth fewer times, but that's a minor complaint. The first time it happened was a real 'oh fuck' moment. I also like what you did with the logo.

[tafty]

I think the graphic and sound design is brilliant but I have to admit to being an impatient fool who is glad of the spoilers posted here.  It's a very clever message and concept but wasted on those of us who were searching for the water cannon to disperse the crowd of protesters 

[Zaratustra]

Problem: It's not immediately obvious that the game has an end, and without further information, it looks just like an endless repeating game with a boring mechanic.

A possibility would have been to make it an Ikaruga-like game: First you're a white ship shooting black enemies to turn them white, then a black ship turning white enemies black, then you figure the rest. That'd keep players interested until the climax.

[thomasmahler]

Problem: It's not immediately obvious that the game has an end, and without further information, it looks just like an endless repeating game with a boring mechanic.

A possibility would have been to make it an Ikaruga-like game: First you're a white ship shooting black enemies to turn them white, then a black ship turning white enemies black, then you figure the rest. That'd keep players interested until the climax.

Quoted for agreement.

I love the games premise, but making the player repeat the same freaking mechanic 5 times until you get to the point is just a tease. You're lucky if people actually get til the end - I would have quit after my second or third (at best) attempt someone wouldn't have told me that it has a nice ending.

I like what you wanted to say with the game, but the mechanic in itself isn't too interesting to keep me focused.

[Zaratustra]

I get this increasing feeling that the TIG community is moving, as a whole, into "games" that have no gameplay per se and are just a short theater scene that makes a very blunt statement.

BUT I AM JUST A GRAY DUDE SHOUTING IN A SEA OF WHITES AND BLACKS

[godatplay]

Hahah, nice quote there.

I think the community is just getting more comfortable with experimenting, and as a result, the variety of things being created is increasing.  There are still plenty of developers doing retro/nostalgic games and games that present new ideas that are still all about gameplay.

It's a pretty awesome time to be a part of the TIGSource community.

[Zaratustra]

[Scypher]

I'm totally copy-pasting some of the things I just said about this game at Intuition's own forums, but give it look.

• I like the art. It's simple, distinguishable, and definitely reminds me of Bauhaus graphic design. I wonder if there's something behind that? Bauhaus' 1920's Germany was no stranger to mob mentality, after all: that led to the Nazi party gaining power, and that led to the shutting down of Bauhaus. A game about conflict set to a nigh-WW2 art style, hmm? Intentional or not, that's a cool connection that didn't occur to me until now.
• I really like that diplomacy via argument is achieved by literally reaching the middle ground -- argue too heavily or too lightly and neither party gets anything out of it. A pretty ingenious design, I'd say. I'm also glad that the sides switched quicker each time so it didn't get too tedious. (That said, I think the first phase would benefit from being 2 or 3 arguments shorter)
• I also like how this mechanic is subverted in the last section: the middle ground is now worthless. As a player, you can't tell at first if you're just doing it wrong, or if it really is impossible to succeed. Even with the emotionless graphics, I felt just as lost as my little gray guy. Thanks for not dragging this portion out, too - it could have become frustrating to fail too often, but it didn't.
• I don't like the flatness of the ambient noise. I feel like the scenario was portraying more energy and action than the sounds gave credit to. Also, I really would have liked a change in background sound over the course of the game's phases, even if slight. The white and black mobs could each have their own distinct tone or pattern and the game's sounds would inevitably rock back and forth; or the single overall tone could change the farther the player progresses, culminating in either an extremely flat or extremely chaotic sound when you're Gray. Instead, the sound just stays th same. And that's pretty drab with so much else going on.

Good stuff. What I think this game really achieves is that it says something in a way that's open-ended yet not opaque. What's happening to the characters is very clear; the rest is just a matter of how you interpret that. I really appreciate that this game went out on a limb to accomplish that.

[HybridMind]

Had a chance to try this out.  I enjoyed the aural and visual aspects very much.  There was a fun effect to be amongst the throngs of little people trying to spot those to talk to. I enjoyed the mechanic of the talking speech balloon.  I thought it was a great touch to see the crowd color and momentum build as you convince people to your side.  The static overlay was cool looking.

I found the game went on way longer then was probably necessary to both make it's points and reached into tedium unfortunately for me.  Message or not I definitely got fairly bored after a few back and forths of the changes and found my interest waned.  I did read here in the comments that there is actually an ending and that surprised me as it seemed one message it was portraying was that arguing back and forth is sort of pointless in the overall scheme of things as a side swings back and forth.

[mkapolka]

I have to say, I was pretty blown away by this game. 

The visuals great- a little utilitarian, but I think it was better to go for symbolic and nail it than try to dress it up more and screw it up. The film grain effect was a nice touch that made it look significantly better.  The title has a really clever concept, but to be perfectly frank, it looks pretty bad.  I think you can make it prettier without sacrificing the idea of it.

The mechanics supported the message (as I understood it) very well, and I can't think of any suggestions in terms of the mechanics themselves at the moment, but when I first played it I had NO IDEA how to convert people.  I had to figure it out by tooling around with it, and it wasn't until the second time I played it that I saw the little bubble in the lower right.  Teaching the player how to play the game is tough in such a small amount of time, but it's better, I think, to shove a one sentence tutorial in someone's face than to have them be completely stumped. 

Also, like other people have said, I didn't realize that the game would reach any sort of conclusion after the first wave, so I stopped playing after that. Increasing the difficulty of the convertable people was a bit too subtle of a hint for me (although it did make the game more compelling- I don't think "entertaining" and "meaningful" need to be necessarily mutually exclusive). Once I read that there was a conclusion I thought it was just about the right length.