which I accidentally forgot to remove.

Haha, just a coincidence then.  Well it certainly set the tone, and I'd vote for keeping it in.  Anyway, looking forward to seeing where it goes.

My favorite part was that there was a button that just caused me to curse.  That captured something special about those days when you wake up and know it's going to be a crap day.  I'd love to see more of that in the game.  It's those moments that then make it so meaningful when I get to escape and be a bird. 

I'm struggling a bit to suggest anything else to add.  You could rest your head against the shower wall.  But things like fighting with your alarm clock while waking from a dream, running out of milk as you pour some cereal, spilling coffee, etc. are all a bit cliché? Or more to the point, the beauty of the curse is it's ambiguity.  As the player, I get to fill in the reason why he's cursing, so I feel more connected. 

In that same vein, I like the decision of stripping down a character (literally) to create a bond with a player.

Mmm.  Sounds like fun - think anyone is going to be working on mini LD games?

Aw man.  I wish I had checked this before going, but it was a fun event regardless.

Any ideas on how GameLoop Philly will turn out?  I'd consider driving over to that. 

Hope this doesn't end up going too off-topic, but it seemed like a reasonable place to ask this rather than start a new thread.

I'm thinking of moving to Berkeley for grad school and was curious what the Bay Area indie scene is like.  You guys plan on doing this meetup regularly in the future?  Are there other indie gatherings in addition to the South Bay Jam, SF postmortem and the Bay Area Meetup Group?

Some of you guys seem to be hopping public transit to get to this meetup - how much of a pain is that?

Have anyone seen any of these?

I've grown with those.

Agree.

Looks like it could turn out to be fun - keep going!

I don't have much in the way of feedback.  When you say your sprite goes invisible, do you mean you can still move and attack but you can't see your main character's location?  Wouldn't blind be more of 'you can't see anything around you'?  (Or maybe you just turned off the sprite because that is easier to implement at this stage?)

Hm, I don't want to rehash what anyone else said.  My main problem was just that I didn't feel challenged; I just felt like I was being told press left 7 times as fast as you can.  Maybe you could have developed the mechanic a bit more around the process of sorting - something that maybe involves some planning in addition to rapid fire button mashing.

Not trying to be harsh - just constructive.  You've got a framework for a game, so with a little more depth, you could have something fun.  I'll definitely play any new versions.

Dashing works weird for me. For some reason, I move in the opposite direction to the button I'm pressing...

Yeah, I have the same issue.

@SirEel
Right, yes, you didn't say stairs.  My brain likes to play tricks on me - sorry about that.  For whatever reason,  I thought you were talking about a different bug with the clothing and staircase upstairs in the home.  But indeed, you are quite right about the jumping back upon picking up an article of clothing.  Looks there is just a weird reset position line of code - thanks for pointing it out.
Yeah, the characters could use a bit more differentiation.  We had some time constraints, but hopefully in a near future version, we'll remedy that.

@SirEel
Ek! You are right about the stairs.  The time spent walking up/down the stairs should probably shortened too.  For the money ending, do you mean the guy you talk to about the will?  We tried to make three separate, but intertwining stories based on the choices you make.  You end up being a lawyer for the couple in the love ending.  Was it that the introduction of that plot element was a bit hurried?

@nahkranoth
Thanks for the feedback.  We'll check out some sans serif, more pixely fonts to see how they look in context.

Thanks again for all the feedback!  We tried to implement as much as we could while still adding the content we had planned to add.  It's officially on kongregate here, so let's call it version 1.0.  Even though we debugged amongst ourselves, I'd be surprised if there aren't things that need a little fixing still...but we're calling it "Finished" anyway.

Any new feedback would be appreciated.  We definitely look forward to posting our next game a bit earlier in the development process, so we can better incorporate feedback 

@TheLastBanana
Thanks for the explanation.  That's a bit of the feel we were going for with each ending framed around either the past, present or future.  But like you said, only one feels like a real conclusion to the game.

@Jasper Bryne
You are right- we're going to start working on rewriting bits of it.

@jotapeh
Yeah, we've had some trouble representing people/things at the right proportions without cheating.  We started drawing the second chapter of the game at pretty low resolution and ended up getting locked into that.  I assume most of the sprite trouble was in that second chapter? Did any particular sprites jump out as needing to be reworked so as to not break the experience?


Thanks for all the feedback!

Awesome!  Thank you for taking the time to play the game and note your thoughts- it's a great, constructive list of what works and what doesn't.  We will definitely implement these changes (particularly the game breaking one where you can't talk to Melissa).  Breaking up the text while reading the papers sounds like a very solid idea- it would certainly make the press-space-to-read-papers more meaningful.

The brother...yeah, good point.  We used him as a tool in the first level, but did not find time to really integrate him elsewhere in the game.  Ideally, we'd have liked to integrate the gameplay from sunrise a bit more into the narrative as well.

I'm reading into your words a bit here, but I take it that the love ending was the one that sticks out in your mind?  How did you feel the endings stacked up against one another?

[Convergence]

Hi! Two friends and I finally decided to try our hands at making a flixel game after seeing some of the awesome stuff in the compos here.  So here's the alpha of our first game. None of us have any formal training in...well, anything game-related except for programming. 

So, any and all feedback will be fantastically helpful and would make us eternally grateful- particularly any feedback on emotional impact or, you know, lack thereof.

EDIT: Final version done (though we will probably have to fix any bugs if any arise).
 

Final Version:Convergence

The only keys are left/right (or A/D) and space.  It is a multiple ending game about exploring, making choices, and the world each person creates.  (There are three true endings, but two additional 'perfect' endings for playing the game certain ways.)

I played on a touch pad and surprisingly had little trouble controlling the ship.  I'm going to hold off on commenting on controls until I see what else you plan to have the player do.  My only thought in that realm was that I couldn't tell how far away I was from an objective.  That could be as easy of a fix as adding a little sensor somewhere to indicate distance from target, so you can start decelerating earlier.

I have to agree with hplus on the character portrait design.  To me, they definitely helped make the game feel like it had living characters, but something felt a little off about the graphics.  The female character design wasn't a huge problem to me, but I think the slow morphing from computer to female would definitely better communicate your intent with the narrative.

I very much enjoyed listening to voice-overs - that also helped the characters come alive.

So overall, it looks beautiful and feels like you've packed a lot of personality into the game so far.

Just thought I'd note that it didn't lag for me (windows 7).  I'll give the game a longer playthrough when I'm not using a touchpad.

I'm going, but I'm new to tig.  I'd consider jamming over sleeping though I say this never having officially jammed.

This looks seriously fantastic in concept.  I wish you the best with the snags along the lines of implementation.  Also, seconded to the great devlog comment.  Cheers.