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[Paul Eres]

there are actually two different artists (the large creature object was done by komera). she was purposefully emulating orchard-l's purple shading though.

and yes, i talked about the dark purple idea with him; he said he'd think about it and decide later, because it'd mean re-working a lot of the graphics that have been done for the game already (and the time may be better spent creating new stuff than improving old stuff). but perhaps at the end of development when we have more free time

[Eclipse]

very cool it's also the first time that i find someone replying this way to a costructive criticism, most of the time people ignore them or they even act a bit pissed off, like if they posted only to receive positive comments in every bit of their work.

I'm talking about games in development, on the pixel art\mockup threads everyone accepts hints and paintovers better, possibly because those are mostly only ideas or wip material, and because receiving a criticism over something that looks completed is a bit harder to digest.

I agree that doing new stuff is a lot more important now, as the game already looks very polished anyway

[Paul Eres]

thanks, i think not getting offended is probably just a matter of experience and age. orchard and i have been making games for about 10-15 years now, so after that time you lose some of the fragile ego stuff -- most of the people who make indie games are a lot younger

as an aside, for updates on progress as to what i'm doing each day on it: http://rinku.livejournal.com/tag/saturated+dreamers -- that's the real devlog, this is just sort of a place to get feedback on things to a larger audience than those who read my lj

[Paul Eres]

new screens:


save slot system (9 save slots, each is auto-saved so you'd never have need to (and cannot) save a single game to multiple slots)


enter your name screen (lots of special characters for those who need them to type in their name, plus you can control it like a console game if you like)

[Paul Eres]

video of the intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9VUUY6Grak

[increpare]

the intro doesn't seem to flow to well to my eyes just yet (partly because you were flicking through the text faster than I could sometimes read it), but I do really like how it's shaping up generally.

[Paul Eres]

a few other people have commented on the text too -- i thought i was a slow reader, but i guess if you read something already it's easier to read the 100th time than the 1st. next trailer/video will have slower text.

[ChevyRay]

I'd really like a little more to break up the text, personally. It appears letter-by-letter, which is nice, and it does it at a good pace. But how about putting invisible "pause" characters in there as well, which you can use to sort of pause the text progression briefly between sentences. It's actually a good way to communicate your character more through text as well. A shy character might take more pauses, speaking slower; an energetic person might just spew all their words out at once, etc. Also, if you use things such as ellipses ["..."] you can make them appear slowly, emphasizing the pause. I usually use a spare character such as "~" or "`" as my invisible char, have the object that types out the text read for these characters and pause when it finds them, but just not render them.

A good example would be text such as the following:

   "What! Are you sure?"

Instead of the whole thing appearing in just one go, first "What!" would appear, and the following pause would help emphasize the exclamation before "Are you sure?" followed.

I find that it's a good way to make text-heavy games (which this may or may not be, but I'm leaning towards a yes on this one) more readable and easier to digest. Other games, such as Superstar Saga, use colored text or words that bounce around or shake to emphasize them and make the text more interesting. Your game seems a bit too serious for that, but I'm sure my point is clear.

Actually, using colored text to highlight certain words or important phrases is often used, but it is effective and does its job quite well. But it's sort of a pain to implement in an easy-to-use manner.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

a few other people have commented on the text too -- i thought i was a slow reader, but i guess if you read something already it's easier to read the 100th time than the 1st. next trailer/video will have slower text.

I don't think it's really a problem for a trailer, but you could consider say, putting the video on a flash file and having keypresses advance the video if its really a problem

[Paul Eres]

pause characters are a good idea. or even an auto-pause on commas and periods and other punctuation would be nice to try.

and the game isn't too text-heavy -- this is just the intro. the story is nonlinear after this point.

when i make a proper trailer i'd focus less on the story and more on the gameplay -- will try and make a real trailer when i finish v0.5 (this was done cause i just finished v0.4).

re-uploaded video w/ a music track fix (had used the wrong music track for the boss battle): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGzrS5qKLgo

[Eclipse]

Looks good! I'm for the pause in texts too

Oh btw, I just bought Immortal Defense, i had to say that I never thought to buy ANY tower defence games, but your one is just on another level

[Paul Eres]

thanks-thanks

grid defense is also a pretty good td game -- that's the only one i've bought

[Paul Eres]

i set up a kickstarter page for SD as an experiment:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rinkuhero/saturated-dreamers-igf-fee-and-misceallenous-deve-0

it's a site where people can try to fund projects -- there you can donate to us to help pay for the IGF contest fee for SD, the FMOD library license fee, and if it goes past the target goal any other costs we may have. in return you can preorder SD and get access to beta testing it when it goes into beta testing (which i am guessing is going to be january of 2010)

i intentionally chose a low target goal ($195) because if it doesn't reach its target goal nothing is paid and people's credit cards aren't charged, and i figured a low goal would be more likely to be reached than a high one.

so please help it along if you have any extra money!

[ElijahKatz]

I'm gonna try to donate but I don't have a credit card (my paypal is connected to my bank account) and all amazon wants are credit cards 

[Paul Eres]

yep, that's one thing i don't like about kickstarter, no paypal

if you like, anyone who doesn't have a cc but has paypal can paypal me an amount (at [email protected]), and i'll use my debit card to put the money into the kickstarter page project (and will keep in mind the person who donated through paypal when it's time to hand out the rewards for the different amounts donated)