platformer-elements, shooting and evading enemies, chasing cars... that kind of stuff. As I already said and as most of you already know this can be an awkward and not always appropriate approach but remember games like... Super Metroid. Even though some scenes (including the ending) have a massive emotional impact on the player and there is a very strong atmosphere all around the thing that players actually do 90% of the time is chasing through mazes, shooting and evading enemies and jumping on platforms. Other examples are Half-Life or... Portal! Imagine how portal might have felt without all the... well... plain puzzle solving and platforming.
Having tried initially to add allot of "Way A" into the game, it didn't really work from the standpoint of making a game a few minutes long and becomes convoluted with allot of extra junk that just feels tacked on, again this lends itself better to bigger games, and all your example reference games reflect this. For a game that is 5 minutes long, there is little point "padding it out", the players attention should last 5 minutes without needing:
platformer-elements, shooting and evading enemies, chasing cars... that kind of stuff.
"Way b" is also somewhat out of the limits of what a person can do with a competition entry, I think there's room to expand here beyond the competition but I probably won't since the game conveys the message pretty well judging from the discussion, ive got better things to do basically.
How this might've been applied on Edmund: What about: The basic scene would just have been the one with the Taxi, the Driver, the Rapist, the Bus Stop, the Woman, the Gun, the Appartment. And once the player took his choices and "constructed" a basic plot the game could present a number of slides (or maybe even animations) of how different parts of the world could've reacted to what happened: e.g.: the victim's mother (being a widow, having lost her only child, becoming a lonely, old woman etc.), the newspapers (bringing an article about what happened with some true facts, some missing things, some overexaggerated stuff etc.; an ad fitting to what happened? (e.g. for COCOP in case the woman wasn't killed but raped, pepper spray in case the woman died))
This would of course require a lot of additional work... but no additional AI or platforming-mechanics/level design.
Yea that basically sums up the sort of shit I would add to it, but again, the work is a bit much for a competition game, had to trim a few endings due to time also, if it was AI/platforming-mechanics/level design or straight art makes no difference when im doing it all either way. I don't want to come across as blunt, but I think its kind of weak that all your criticisms boil down to "Add more".
Sometimes less is more. Though I do think some more minor details would have been great, I was squeezing minor shit in right upto the deadline, such as reflections in the interior windows etc, but works okay as is.
You leave some traces on the ground. (blood e.g.) In the second scene you have to play the taxi-driver and walk through the same complex maze.
"A man who was previously in the vietnam war and raped the wife of a killed soldier there took the Taxi to stalk a woman. Then he beat her. Then he made her have sexual intercourse with him. Then the taxi driver shot him."
spoiler :You know they are the same person right? Edmund and Michael, same person, just so we are on the same page, I don't know if I could make it more obvious, there is a vertical fuckton of hints in there already.
I think anyone who questions what a game should be, should be kicked multiple times in the shins by someone wearing steel toed boots.
video game –noun
1. any of various games played using a microcomputer with a keyboard and often joysticks to manipulate changes or respond to the action or questions on the screen.
Basicly yea.
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