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[bloomengine]

Hello Everyone,

My first time here, I'm from bloomengine.com. I made "Vicious Cycles", a browser-based text game with a minimalist, point-and-click interface.

It was featured on indiegames.com and a few other places, but I'd love to get some more specific feedback on how to improve it, or what people think of the story.

It's about an agent sent from the future to stop the bombing of a commuter train. You die many times and gather more information each time until you can perform a perfect series of actions to stop the bombing.

http://bloomengine.com/cycles

I'm interested in IF reaching audiences who don't play very much parser-based interactive fiction, so let me know what you think of the hyperlink system of the game too.

It's a remix of an older game with the same name I wrote in 2001. You can read more in the "about" link at the bottom.

Hints are also at the bottom if you get stuck.

thanks

[george]

hi, I've played through a few times now (though I haven't finished yet -- got a little too frustrated ).

Overall I like it a lot. The writing has lots of evocative details and has perfect pitch for the story's setting and theme.

The presentation looks quite good. However I think the basic concept of the paging hypertext is not so good. I admit I do play a lot of parser IF, so maybe I'm not your target audience, but I play a lot of other games too and just like to read in general, so I think I have a decent feel for this -- stick with a scrolling page, like Undum uses for example, or perhaps, columns that read left to right (for an example of this see http://scoutshonour.com/shortshorts.php#1,570).

Also I feel the inventory window and such could be moved to a smaller pane maybe on the side. On my resolution (small laptop with 768 vertical) things didn't quite fit. I did like the thoughts inventory, that was a nice touch.

There are some other finicky things I think don't work well, like having to examine things first to use their contents later. Part of this is due to the cyclic nature of the story so maybe it can't be helped -- as eventually you have so much prior knowledge. It's both a blessing and a curse I guess.

Anyway I'm enjoying it so thanks for the link. 

[bloomengine]

Thanks for the feedback.

I might try putting the inventory in the side for my next game.

Before you mentioned it, I was also thinking about how to implement undum-style page scrolling with a transcript, but technically it's a bit tricky because of the hyperlink / page based system of the game. All the game-state variables are passed via the URL, so I'm still working on how to record every move so you can scroll back on a page refresh.

I was considering doing this game with Undum, but it didn't seem to have the feature set needed, and it's a bit over my head to modify it to do what I want.

[Rob Lach]

The concept is pretty minimalist but it works so I wouldn't change much from that end.

I do see some interface work. It would be nice if the layout was more width oriented to better match the majority of displays.

[Fyren]

I agree with george.  I enjoyed it but disliked the interface.  Loading pages was kind of annoying because of the delay and flicker while the next one renders.  If you wanted to stay away from a standalone application or something like Java/Flash, maybe Javascript would work out.

Also, about the ending: is there more than one?  I spent a bunch of time trying to get both the notebook and a pen at the same time but couldn't do it.  Between the flashbacks and the option to think about the savior, I figured I'm missing something.

[JarMustard]

Interesting concept.

Although the groundhog's day concept was a little frustrating, I felt it was well written at least. 

My frustration may stem from a not so great internet connection from China, there was a second delay between pages which got tiresome after multiple jumps.


Having memories evoked between jumps took some of the edge off the repetition, but they were too few during my playthrough.

Personally I enjoyed a lot of the setting descriptions more than the puzzle solving.  Definitely try and incorporate a lot of atmosphere in your future projects. 


Thanks, I enjoyed it but I'll try and finish it tomorrow.

[bloomengine]

Yeah, I know it's a bit slow with the page refreshes. I'll see what I can do about a javascript version.


How do you black out text for spoilers? I'll just do this:


***spoiler***

@fyren:


There is basically only one ending. You can use the "savior" thought with the terrorist.

The notebook is very important, but you don't do anything with it, other than look at it. There is a clue earlier (other than the memories) about what it means. If you think about how it got there, it's a major hint about the second layer of story.

But I'll leave it up to you to decide what it means. I'll probably make another game in the future fleshing out the story more.

thanks for checking it out.

***end spoiler***

[Fyren]

How do you black out text for spoilers? I'll just do this:

Use the "glow" option in the edit toolbar thing, then change red to black in the tag it adds.