Whew, did it!

We have both Windows and Mac versions ready for the IGF! (and fresh demos up on our website) The only problem is, their automated entry system bugged-up on us and we don't have a folder to upload our files!!! They're 'working' on it... I'm sure it'll be just fine, but I'm glad we didn't wait until the last minute.

We'll be testing the game more, and fixing more bugs, but we have a stable version for the judges. Entrants can update their files anytime during the competition. But you will never know if the judges actually update to new files.

However, if you're picked as a finalist, then be sure to upload an updated version of the game! All the judges will be seeing your game.

Thank you Jwaap, for that Ed Wood moment. (sniff)

After that much man-ipulation, you can then spread the mayo.

Thanks to everyone who participated! The download links and the app have now expired.

Any last thoughts?

I live in Emeryville. It's a burb on the east end of the bay bridge. Rent here is almost half that of the city. BART is close and so is Berkeley, when you don't want to cross the bay for a good time.

There are at least four game companies in Emeryville, not including Pixar.

[@Musenik:]

@Musenik:

The font is not bitmap, but we had a lot of trouble getting the font not looking ugly with sdl_ttf on the Mac, while it worked perfectly in Windows.

My own games use sdl_ttf on Mac and PC, and we found out that it was very font sensitive. A lot of free/shareware fonts looked crappy, but more professional ones tended to work pretty well.

Ran it on a PPC MacMini. 1.4MHz The game runs pretty smoothly. The primary text font looked messy, as if it were scaled from a bit map font. Gameplay is well designed. Not my kind of game, but decent graphics and music.

thanks,

Thank you Guert,

I doubt I'll be able to address all of your concerns, but I greatly appreciate your feedback! You make many compelling cases for change.

The location descriptions are meant to be supplementary. Therefore we kept them from demanding attention. I'd rather remove them then require the player to read them.

We chose the scrolling pace to give a sense of exploration. Once explored, it may seem slow, but it should also feel controlled. This is not an action game. Compared to huge areas in games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter nights, our small maps are quickly traversed.

Yes, the mini-game start out very easy. They do become more challenging. If a low glamor girl fibs against a high savvy, the odds are extremely difficult. Taunts can turn on a few missing retorts - be sure to collect them all! Expose become quite difficult when more complex grammatical structures and more obscure words are used, in addition to very long secrets. Gambit, like Fib, is greatly influenced by the strength of the participant's talents. Pump them up!

I like your suggestion for improving Taunt. It's pretty interesting, but we probably won't implement it. It's too hard to describe to casual gamers, and the current system is fairly popular.

Flirting has a random component, but if you decipher the boy's pattern, you won't have to spend as many flirts guessing.

In Expose, the words 'a' and 'I' do not cost anything to reveal. (The reason was, they made poor text buttons in the guess box).

This early part of the game is meant to be very easy, to build confidence in less sophisticated players. I know we may lose some serious gamers, but we're hoping the story will draw many to find the tougher challenges later. Good luck assembling the appeals tribunal and stacking their votes!

I will be looking into more ways we can be consistent about revealing and dismissing text. Thanks.

The 'school closed' pawns are there to let you advance time to the next day. They're all over the place, because we didn't want players to miss their usefulness. Same is true for the truant officer over the weekend. They are tools for skipping over less active periods of time.

We're using 20s slang in measured doses. Overly 'cliche' can kill dialog.

We confirm saves only if they overwrite a previous save game. And we affirm a save when quitting. It uses a special save slot. I'm not sure the affirmation is fully implemented yet.

Your feedback was great! I'm sorry it sounded like you weren't enjoying the game. It's certainly not for everyone. I hope I haven't sounded dismissive but explanatory. Your detailed, constructive criticism is exactly what I need right now as we implement the last significant design revisions.



Kon-Tiki,

So you found a case where complex flirts were offered. I didn't think I had put any into the demo. They require multiple return flirts to answer. See above for more info about Flirt.

One other thing, I didn't post this game looking for bugs. The questions I asked had to do with experience. What was the experience like? I'm grateful for the bug reports. But my primary goal is to see if the game is ready for an audience.

There's plenty of work to do and plenty of room for improvement, but overall, the game has been shaping up rather well. I've received feedback from several other forums, some more and less positive than this one, but I'm very optimistic.

Thanks again everyone! Hopefully, I'll be hearing from more of you soon.

Keith Nemitz
Ordinauteur
Mousechief Co.
www.mousechief.com

Whew,

I go out for a haircut, and look what happens! :-)

Guert, Derek, you are my heros. Thanks. What you wrote should be sticky'd at the top of this section of the forum. I've been involved in a few developer forums. I'm not a prolific poster, but I try to help out where I can. I've beta tested other developer's works for nothing, hoping someday they'd do the same for me.

Guert, when you want help with your next game, please let me know.

The same goes for anyone else who gives feedback, even if its not for my game. Hell, it's true for anyone who posts here.

Rinkuhero,

That is fantastic info! I'll definitely be working with your suggestions. It's too bad about the Fib game. It used to have the option to REVEAL a shell to remove eyes, but there was a risk. That added a nice tactical depth to the game, but almost nobody 'got it' during user testing. So, last week, literally, I rewrote the game for simpler play. I'll be tweaking it.

The word guessing game gets harder as we begin to use more complex sentence structures and language. Also, they get longer. User testing showed this game to be just right for casual players. This first part of the game is meant to be easy and instill confidence in the player.

To continue playing, you'll need to revert to a saved game and beat the nurse again. After her, return to administration and get a clue from the secretary. HINT: After that, you'll need the crowbar.

The music is determined by location, not person, and the little games have their music. This may not have been a good choice. Will think about it.

I'm sorry, about the speed, and a little surprised. PyGame on PC uses hardware acceleration. I was counting on it to keep things smooth. My workbench is a 1.4 MHz G4, Mac Mini. My test bed is a 500MHz G3, iMac. My PC is a tad faster than yours, but has a better graphics card, so I guess I was fooled. Are you saying it's unplayable or just annoying? Sounded like the latter.

Mouse-over help has to be done extremely well to avoid confusing casual gamers. I stuck with one consistent source of info. There are some shortcuts. Click directly on a girl to see her stats and inventory.

When choosing an encounter, click the i button for a description of talents and their uses.

I'll look into the taunting issue. I agree, but we'd have to treble our taunts, and that would probably cut into their quality. We're still trying to replace some of the weaker taunts. Wish us luck.

Thank you again, for your excellent feedback!

Just a bad habit. I'm use to emailing the app to my co-workers, and a lot of email systems don't like EXEs. (for some reason :-)

It'll be an .exe when it ships.

Kon-Tiki,

I updated the game files with a fix for the crash bug. One of the scripts would fail if the player lost the expose game against Clara in the library.

I look forward to more feedback!

thanks,

Links fixed.

That's what I get for copying and pasting from a different forum post!

sorry,

Hi,

Mousechief Co. has some new mischief for your mouse. Please try this extended demo, and help us make a better game. I added a list of our questions and concerns at the end of this post.

About the game: This is our fantasy RPG of social satire. The interface metaphor is a vintage, parlor boardgame. I like to think it's something you found in your great-grandmother's attic. I also hope you'll forgive your great-grandmother if she ever did anything like what happens in this game.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!
(In the 1920s, small town USA was never this fantastic.)







FYI: PC version probably doesn't work under VISTA!
This extended demo goes beyond what will be available in the trial version. The game expires at the end of July. Expect a little rough reading. We can't afford proofreading until near the end of development.

Download Links: expired



Please help us with the following, after playing the game:

Did you have fun?
How far did you play?
How comfortable were you at learning the various, little games?
Were the goals clear and compelling?
At what point were you drawn into the story? Never?
Is this your kind of game?
Could it ever become your kind of game? How?
What do you typically play for interactive story goodness? (yes, RPGs, platform adventures and even FPSs like Half Life counts... :-)

What did we do wrong?
What did we do right?

What do you REALLY want to tell us about 'Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble'?


thank you,

Musenik, is that Flagship game available for download anywhere? It looks interesting.

Sorry, I still have the code and executables for Flagship: Champion, but they last ran long ago on Win95 and MacOS 9. If I ever get the money to do it right, I want to revisit it. It had a great starship combat system, unlike anything out there. Ships had weapons but no shields. Tactical movement was key to defending and attacking. Moves were made by folding space, and that caused local disruptions in the fabric of space which blocked weapons fire.

So, if you moved right, you could create positions where you could fire on your opponent but they couldn't fire back. It was a grognard's delight!

I love this topic, but darn if I can't remember my first! I do remember programming a game that ran on my High School District's DEC 10, from a terminal on a 2400 baud modem. It was like the old IMSAI star trek game but in pseudo 3D. The player was in the middle of six screens from were enemy craft attacked. The player picked a screen and fired shots at were the ships would next move. It was written in Fortran 77.

Before that, I was designing rule mods for Avalon Hill wargames and D&D adventures.

I'd say my first indie game was this. Warning: 15MB quicktime movie:

http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/champion.mov

I've been curious about how the initial round of judging is organized. Are the submissions handed out randomly to judges? Do judges get to pick the game they judge? Are the judges categorized and then given games in those categories?

Inquiring minds...

I've just started Advance Wars and have nearly completed Age of Empires. I would say graphically AoE has it all over AW. AW is very elemental in its warfare, and reminds me very much of Military Madness, which I play on Wii VC. AoE has generals and that economy thing going for it, and I like its depth a lot. I prefer it to the real-time version on PCs.

The anime cutesie thing that AW does is somewhat annoying. The history that AoE develops as story is much more interesting, because they pick some really great heros: Joan of Arc, Ghengis Khan, Myomoto,...

The issue that worries me is, there are so many types of games, and so many types of game players, how does a journalist convince a reader to respect his observations?

The same can be said for movies. I shopped around until I found reviewers who seemed to mimic my tastes. I'm not sure how to do that with game reviewers. They aren't the 'personalities' movie reviewers are. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates movie reviews by author. They aggregate game reviews by publication, like every other game review aggregator.

In general, game reviewers tend to be young, and tend to enjoy more action in their games, and they like challenging games because they're powerful gamers. I'm older and have abandoned most action games. Some of that has changed with the Wii. But I digress.

Today, when I read game reviews, I feel like a stranger in an industry I've worked in for nearly twenty years.