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TIGSource ForumsCommunityTownhallSave the Date. It's a game about having dinner.
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Author Topic: Save the Date. It's a game about having dinner.  (Read 14106 times)
Klaim
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« Reply #20 on: May 30, 2013, 10:11:34 AM »

Just resumed my game and got to the right ending.

This game is pure genius.  Gentleman

Now reading the whole thread.
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Klaim
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« Reply #21 on: May 30, 2013, 10:36:44 AM »

Ok as soon as I figured it was not the best good ending I retried to play with hacker mode activated so that I can try other ending I think would open new paths which I was right but so far I got to the same good ending in the end.


Just a minor bug report: if you press F9 (quick load) without having any saved game not even quicksave it will report an error.
EDIT> It's only if you have no quicksave, not if you have no normal save

I'm playing without quick load/save to keep a clear mind picture of the tree/graph of paths.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2013, 11:11:13 AM by Klaim » Logged

Klaim
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« Reply #22 on: May 30, 2013, 11:21:07 AM »

Ok now that I've seen all the paths and didn't find other endings, I read your last spoiled text and figured I've seen everything.

The hacker ending mixed with Neo and Wizard are cool but could have been done a bit more differently so that the fantasy expand a bit.

What I miss in this game is a special ending. I'm not sure what exactly but something based on reloading the game from a save made at the right time (because of the title) would have been awesome because hard to find but still some kind of obvious.

Hmmm anyway I wouldn't call this "pretentious" as it's not trying to tell me anything about how to live. However I would call it "meta". Also, a bit like Whedon's work. The meta discussion about the damsell in distress was interesting but maybe you could have used it to make a special ending like the girl endup being the hacker (maybe by making the hacker thing being different, like the variable is the name of THE ONE and you put your name and you are the hacker, but if you put her name she become the one and you are her support so everything ends up fine, something like that; or she is trying to hide the fact that she is the one while surviving and guessing coming events or something. Anyway that would have been some kind of meta meta path, which would have made a point AND would have been epic).

Anyway, good game! And simple!

EDIT> I forgot to say something: as almost all the endings are funny, this works remarkably well. The "failing must be spectacular" feature works well.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2013, 11:34:00 AM by Klaim » Logged

Klaim
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« Reply #23 on: May 30, 2013, 11:54:01 PM »

Congrats! http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/05/30/wot-i-think-save-the-date/
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Montoli
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« Reply #24 on: May 31, 2013, 12:09:36 AM »


I saw!  I was super psyched!

...

... then it killed my website. Tongue

But I got it up again, so everything is happy again!
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« Reply #25 on: June 02, 2013, 07:53:25 AM »

I like the graphics and I like dating sims! Just downloaded it.
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Bree
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« Reply #26 on: June 02, 2013, 12:19:35 PM »

Just finished it a couple days ago. That was absolutely brilliant. Thank you for making it and sharing it with us.
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Mittens
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« Reply #27 on: June 02, 2013, 05:33:51 PM »

clever game, made me smile
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agersant
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« Reply #28 on: June 02, 2013, 08:45:41 PM »

Amazing game! Reminds me a bit of the anime Steins;Gate too =)

I didn't find out about the hacker ending before reading this thread. I think the "close the game and use your imagination" ending would be a bit more satisfactory if there was some sort of very subtle hint that you're doing something right (or planned) when you confirm you want to quit the game.
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TheLastBanana
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« Reply #29 on: June 03, 2013, 02:31:34 PM »

This was great. Good call on the "skip" button — that made going through the branches repeatedly a lot less annoying.

I think your message was actually pretty interesting, too! I've been thinking a lot about player interaction with the story lately, so this was an interesting way of framing the problem. Smiley
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dcalogue
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« Reply #30 on: June 04, 2013, 10:33:16 AM »

wow, it has been a long time since I post in this site.

So, here are my comments, copy/pasted/modified from a post I made at other place.

I liked the game, but there was something that was a big let down. When I entered the game folder I was really thinking of changing the game as I wanted to write my own ending, so the I am the Haxor ending, while funny at first, became almost a joke on me after some thinking.

I tried to decompile the game files a couple of times, but failed miserably. I mean what is the point of a game that tells you to make your own ending if it doesn’t let you actually do it? For me it’s not enough to imagine an alternative ending, I want to actually write it and play it.
It has been some time since the last time I tampered some game files, but this game really motivated me to do it, isn’t that one of the reasons why people mod the games? To add or change the game universe more to their liking?

I ended up writing to the author of the game asking him for the source files, and I will write my own ending soon (when I find the time to do it), because that’s what will make me feel that I “ended” the game.


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« Reply #31 on: June 04, 2013, 11:21:28 AM »

You should post your ending here once it's done, I kind of want to see what you come up with.
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« Reply #32 on: June 04, 2013, 12:02:03 PM »

I'll ask for permission to see if I can post the .rpyc files, since a screenshot won't do it justice.
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Montoli
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« Reply #33 on: June 04, 2013, 12:08:04 PM »

Go for it.  I know I asked you to avoid redistributing them, but what the heck.  It's not like someone determined can't get them via decompiling anyway.  And now I'm really curious what you came up with. Smiley
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« Reply #34 on: June 05, 2013, 12:27:33 AM »

Just played through most of it. It's definitely one of the most interesting games I've played in a while, and I laughed from delight several times.

I think ... It's best that there isn't a pre-written good ending, but it's not so good that there's no way to know when I'm "done" with the game. I looked at most of the before-aliens meta-discussion, reached a tentative (and correct) conclusion about what the good endings are, and then went into the app bundle to see if I could find out what paths I missed. Basically, it would be kinda nice at some point to get some sort of indicator like "You've read x% of the game's text".

The Hacker mode ending seems kind of out of place, it's a cliche power trip fantasy. "Enter your own text" is an ok idea, but I think I'd prefer if it just abruptly said "You live happily ever after" without any other information. Or maybe it should be much weirder, like something glitchy, combine text from all the bad endings and then arbitrarily say "This is a good ending, The End".
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« Reply #35 on: June 05, 2013, 08:49:23 AM »

I really liked this! Keep up the good work!
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Montoli
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« Reply #36 on: June 05, 2013, 03:01:28 PM »

Basically, it would be kinda nice at some point to get some sort of indicator like "You've read x% of the game's text".

Actually, having some sort of progress indicator was an idea I wrestled with for a while.  Either as a "you have seen X% of the text" stat, or as an indicator of which conversation options you'd explored.

I ultimately decided against it though, because...  One thing I heard from a lot of people was that they sometimes felt bad when they lied to Felicia, or winced every time she died, etc.  This made me feel AWESOME, since it means I'm managing to get at least some sense of immersion and/or suspension of disbelief.  People were at least buying into the game's main conceit enough to treat Felicia as at least provisionally "real".

I wanted to preserve that.  And I know all too well how much people love getting 100% completion on things.  For some reason, when you show someone a bar at 80%, they become compulsive about making it hit 100.  And I didn't want to pit the fragile sense of immersion I'd somehow managed to cultivate, against peoples' completionist impulses.  Because when I thought about it like that, I didn't like immersion's odds in that fight. Tongue



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« Reply #37 on: June 08, 2013, 06:50:36 AM »

For what it's worth, the "goodbye" ending was the last one I chose and it was the best ending I can imagine for a game so narratively ambitious. You've played through all these doomed scenarios with the mindset of trying to solve a puzzle. You've had the rug pulled out from under you by way of an insightful conversation with the author about game narrative. You've all but given up on the "puzzle" and resorted to digging around in the game files looking for more, leading you to the ending you thought you wanted, only to find it totally unsatisfying. At this point you have the choice to either accept this hollow ending or return one last time to end the game in a way that's at least cathartic, if still doomed. I really enjoyed how game, narrative, and player agency all came together to create a sense of closure in the "goodbye" ending.
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tanyaxshort
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« Reply #38 on: June 08, 2013, 04:03:35 PM »

Hey man, great game!

I actually like dating sims (usually when combined with other elements), and I liked ... well, the frustration of it, and learning what was really going on. I really liked the meta-ness, actually. It might be pretentious in its ambitions, but I think it fulfills that with really simple language, in a simple and elegant way -- it doesn't become full of itself or arrogant. So, super-kudos. It was a fun discovery game. Smiley

The only small thing that bothers me is... well... I kinda wish it wasn't always a woman dying. After the third time it starts being a (funny) joke, but... I dunno, it might be good if sometimes YOU died instead? Or... you had different friends that all died? I feel like I see a lot of women dying in lots of games, and the male protagonist trying to "save" them or protect them, like it's up to the dude to decide what happens to the lady and she has no will of her own... but honestly I only got mildly sadface briefly, it's only a minor complaint, and is probably just my hypersensitive radar, since I laughed and all. Smiley

And grats on the RPS post!
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Montoli
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« Reply #39 on: June 08, 2013, 04:34:40 PM »

I'm glad you liked it!

Ok, large block of spoiler-text self-justification, ENGAGE!


Yeah, I've gone back and forth on the sexism thing a bit.  But there are good (I think, at least) reasons why all of the "bad endings" had to involve Felicia dying:

One of the things I tried really hard to do in the game, was make it so that you don't have an extra protective layer of "your character", between you and the game.  There is no "your character".  There's just you, and the game.  When picking dialog choices, you're not guessing "what would my character say here."  You are (hopefully, especially by the end) picking what you want to say.

Which is a wonderful thing, for getting a point across!  The player has no buffer - the game isn't talking to their character.  It's talking directly to them.  But it's a double-edged sword.  It also means that the game basically can't DO anything to them, and they know it.

Sure, I can write an ending, "and then you died.  you should feel bad."  But it doesn't mean anything.  The player knows they are fine.  And if I wrote an ending like "and then you push Felicia out of the way, so you get shot instead of her, you die, but she lives" then people would just say "oh cool, I beat it."  Because you dying in the game costs you NOTHING.

But Felicia on the other hand, doesn't have the same protection.  If she only lives in the story, then if the storyteller says she dies, she's in trouble.  (Most of the game is, in fact, about trying to get the player to take responsibility for the story in some way.)  So putting HER in danger actually makes a legitimate threat.

So I basically HAVE to have all of the bad endings be her dying.  I really don't think it would have worked otherwise.

I did wonder about the sexism thing.  It's certainly possible to say things like "I don't like how the girl is the only one who dies here, why are there no men dying in this game?"  (There's even a bit where Felicia discusses that, on the hilltop, because it WAS something I was thinking about during development.)

Ultimately though, I needed one character to die a lot.  And swapping their gender to avoid complaints about "why does the [female] always die!" just means that now I have a male always dying now.  And if the first one was sexist, I couldn't think of any reason the second one wasn't also.

So I left her Felicia, and hoped that the best thing I could do would be to ignore gender all together - She dies a lot, and happens to be female, but it's not like she dies BECAUSE she is female.  The two are (hopefully) entirely unconnected traits.

One thought I've had for a while is that it would be nice to be able to play where the person you're going out with isn't female, if you want to.  (Not all potential players want to date women.)  So I may still make an update for that at some point.  I just have to figure out how to present it in the right way, since I'm dead-set against having the game actually ask you "do you want to date a man or a woman".

So we'll see what happens.


Anyway, thanks for playing!  And yeah!  Got a RPS link!  (And now Kotaku, Verge, and a few other websites.  And some wonderful youtube streamers!)  It has been quite a ride!
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