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[deathtotheweird]

http://alllen.tumblr.com/post/10624728933/the-rudest-fucking-party-guest

this is a game I made for the recent EGP



don't play the kongregate version unless you want less music in the billiards room. but aside from the cut music it's the same game.

[RichMakeGame!]

Really intriguing, and creepy.. I'm not sure I understood what happened at the end..
spoiler text:
I saw the creepy guy checking rooms then he went to the clock, i got the knife (left and tried to stab some other people ) then I went back to him and clicked. He turned around and the screen went black- was that how it's meant to end? anyway I love the whole vibe. Kinda reminded me of gravity bone in a way, which is one of my favourites

[deathtotheweird]

the game was inspired by "the masque of the red death" by edgar allan poe. you can wiki it real quick or read it, I suggest the latter since it's quite short and really good.

I wish I had conveyed the ending better so those who had not read the short story would know what had happened. I just barely made the game in 6 and a half days and it didn't occur to me until the next day after release that to some players the ending would be quite confusing. Oh well, I learned a lot from that so my next game will be better for it.

and yeah I'm not an artist, and when thinking of how to do characters was a struggle for me and since I was so fond of Gravity Bone I made my characters like that. I actually used the models for an earlier game of mine and just re-used them for this game but gave them random colors for their shirts/pants/dresses and hair/faces.

[Gainsworthy]

I think the "Gravity Bone" approach was best. There's a lot to be said for abstraction. I picked up it was Masque of the Red Death as soon as I saw the red room at the far end of the hall. Still gave me the creeps though.

Well done! One of my favourite stories by Poe. Although, Perhaps you should only draw the knife once you enter the red room with the Red Masque? Or after a final tolling of the clock? Seemed a little incongruous drawing it with no prompt.

[deathtotheweird]

yeah, I think that was odd too. I ninja-updated the window and browser version of the game with your feedback.

the player only draws the dagger when he enters the room with the red death and I added a dagger drop and body fall sound at the end black screen to make it clear the player falls. not sure I like the latter change but hopefully it's less vague than simply a black screen?

the kongregate version will remain as the original 7 day version I guess. don't feel like updating it.

[JMickle]

i got the masque of red death instantly. the whole locked door and coloured rooms thing. and i'm sure i was about 12 when i read that. Excellent work I really enjoyed it!

[increpare]

Tried it out there.  Didn't know the story.  Got some "talking to people fatigue" in spite of finding things intriguing.  Was disappointed when nothing really seemed to happen in the last room, though when I left the bell rang, so I went and talked to more people, but they didn't seem to be saying much different to what they said before, then the bell rang again and at I saw the red-head dude walking through.  At some point after following him into the last room a knife appeared in my hands.  I clicked on him and the screen suddenly went black.

[ink.inc]

downloading, will provide feedback later

[jkd]

Interesting experience. Creepy.

I really liked the music in the billiards room. What is it?

My only criticism is the mouse sensitivity was way too high. Not sure if this is tied into OS mouse settings or? Is there any way to configure it via Unity?

[Spooner]

I felt that the retrofication of the game was sort of confused. It is usual to have 2D pixelation post-processing OR boxy objects and flat textures, but not both at once, so the game felt as though it was over-produced. I'd leave the pixelation post-processing effect entirely out of this game since it didn't add anything.

In particular, the pixelation made reading text extremely difficult and I often had to move forward or backward to get the text into "focus" so I could read it. This, along with the fact that the text didn't change size meant I had to talk to people at a very exact distance which felt very cumbersome. I was playing the version directly from dropbox in a browser window, so the small size of the game window might have exacerbated this effect.

SPOILERS: Technical issues aside, the game seemed to be very interesting, but the abrupt ending needs not to appear as though the game crashed/froze. The change in people's conversations as event unfolded was reasonable, but the fact they didn't actually stop what they were doing sort of removed any sense that they were really affected (most were fine since they weren't really active, but the dancers kept dancing while also apparently being terrified, for example). Overall, I think the game just needs a bit more polish/tweaking and it will work quite well.

[MattG]

the cubist stripper fucking the pole is great

[ink.inc]

look dont touch

haha
________________________


Not being a Poe buff, I wasn't sure what the hell was going on throughout the game. You walk around various rooms, and people hint at something (terrible?) going on outside. Other than that, there doesn't seem to be much to it. It's cryptic, to be sure.

All in all, it was an interesting 3 minutes. Not something remarkably life changing, but I'd rather I had played it than hadn't.

PS: Your nerd boner for 2001: A Space Odyssey is enormous.

[kamac]

All in all, it was an interesting 3 minutes. Not something remarkably life changing, but I'd rather I had played it than hadn't.

This.


Actually, i rushed onto that red guy, and he turned to me when i was looking at his chest, so i didn't look on his face  .

But he was scary when walking throught and looking at the rooms...
The red room was scary too. Couldn't sit a sec in here 

[deathtotheweird]

My only criticism is the mouse sensitivity was way too high. Not sure if this is tied into OS mouse settings or? Is there any way to configure it via Unity?

yeah Unity doesn't provide an interface for mouse sensitivity but it would be insanely easy to include +/- key commands to lower/higher the sensitivity. I'll do that for any future games I do if they're first person.

the songs were  "The Billiards Player Song" by Shellac, "Look A Ghost" by Unwound, "Green Glass" by Jawbox, "On the Sacred Side" by Black Eyes. I think in that order, in the Kong version only the Shellac song is playing.

@Spooner, the game looked a bit too flat without the pixel effect, and I agree at lower resolutions it looks kinda ugly. In hindsight I should have made the pixel size dependent on the resolution to avoid how bad it looks on lower resolutions. Sorry for that, I never played the game at a resolution below 1024x768. And that resolution is quite unreasonable for browser, I adjusted it to 1024x720 on the dropbox web version in hopes of alleviating that problem. But the game was meant to be played full-screen for the intended look to work as I had preferred. Ah well.

and I must remind you the game was made in 6 and a half days for EGP, and was meant to be an experiment in story-telling. I kind of wanted the player to make up their own story from what little I gave them, regarding the red death and the mini-stories such as the missing pool player or the lonely girl in the dance room or the self-conscious woman in the sauna room. I wonder if I failed in that regard? I believe I did for the most part, at least for others. For me, I had a wonderful time making up stories and filling in the blanks myself.

@increpare re:"talking to people fatigue". One of my favorite things in Deus Ex was talking to people, every one had something to say. They never really had much interesting to say, most of the time highly irrelevant to anything. Sometimes they would say something that would make no sense, or repeat what they just said. This was my kind of homage to that. This goes back to my wanting the player to fill in the blanks bit.

thanks for all the feedback guys, you have all been extremely helpful.

[Greg]

I really enjoyed talking to people and found that they said some rather insightful things, like "I wonder if he sees me blushing?" That stuff is great.  Like, what are people really thinking and not saying?  Love it.  The world needs more of this in movies, tv, books, games, whatever.  and oh yeah, Shellac, Fuck Yeah!