Frictional Games Forum (read-only)
Painful Shadows - Printable Version

+- Frictional Games Forum (read-only) (https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum)
+-- Forum: Amnesia: The Dark Descent (https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/forum-6.html)
+--- Forum: Custom Stories, TCs & Mods (https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/forum-35.html)
+---- Forum: Showcase (https://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/forum-36.html)
+---- Thread: Painful Shadows (/thread-14437.html)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

RE: Painful Shadows - kartanonperuna - 04-08-2012

Huh?Pewdiepie has nothing to do with that room.


And,thank you.

RE: Painful Shadows - Leeeyam - 04-08-2012

(04-08-2012, 07:12 AM)Xss Wrote: So, I have finally given it a try! Smile

The pluses:
- Very original custom story since it does not rely on jumpscares, a bit like My Love Smile The stealth part was rather easy, since no matter what I did the guards never saw me...It was like being an invisible guy! Still, I managed to get a tiny jump scare at one point!
- Great voice acting, specially from the guards.
- Those dialogs were actually hilarious! Smile
- Very nice use of the music in general. I chuckled a bit when I saw Normand Corbeil at the end credits: I mainly know him as the composer of the movie Screamers.

The minuses:
- I sadly encountered a couple of bugs, actually two or three crashes. One of them happen after returning the poison to the client: if you have the poison out (or the inventory screen opened) when the dialog starts, you will get a crash and be thrown back to windows :/ I also never saw the Grunt model at the end of the game, only an empty room, nor the "thank you" whispering. I saw all of that by looking at someone's LP.
- Too bad you couldn't grab everything, at some points I was to tempted on taking a crate and throwing it in a guard...Well, that's just me being very stupid when I do a LP. When I saw the feather and the sleeping guard I suddenly wanted to grab it to tickle his ear! XD

Soooo, little question...I found a "secret room", near the client's place...Pewdiepie's room with piggy? XD
For the love of god, put that in a spoiler lol




RE: Painful Shadows - Xss - 04-08-2012

Sorry about that: I have the hardest time to create spoiler tags in this forum :/, I managed to find an old post of mines in which I figured out how to use them, so it should be ok now.


RE: Painful Shadows - Xss - 04-17-2012

Soooo, Kartanonperuna allowed me to post my LP of the custom story in here, so there goes the first part.






RE: Painful Shadows - Xss - 04-18-2012

Part 2:






RE: Painful Shadows - Juke - 05-07-2012

Okay so I finally played through your custom story and I gotta say I liked it a lot. It had the feel of a world where people are living in, which was further enhanced by the voice acting of the guards. The music was fantastic and it didn't have jump scares so I was a happy bunny.

Unfortunately, it was not without its faults. My biggest problem with the mod was the audio. The volume levels were so off that the background music ended up drowning the conversations most of the time, which is a shame considering how enjoyable some of them were to listen to. Simply tweaking down the music could have helped a lot but I also would have liked subtitles because there was a lot of whispering and murmur in the dialogue. Not necessarily a bad thing but because of the music I couldn't even hear half of it.

Another thing that I'm not a fan of is the camera forcing you to look in a certain direction. I don't mind turning the player's attention to a guard or a sound but after that you shouldn't lock their vision in one place for longer than a second. Just because I'm not looking doesn't mean I'm not listening and I like to glance around or have the option to leave if I feel like it. This gives the player the feeling that they're still playing and in control rather than watching a cutscene every time a conversation pops up between side characters.

These were actually the mod's strong point and you clearly put your heart and soul into the guard conversations and I enjoyed them immensely. Although a little more variety could have made them even more excellent, seeing as you had other voice actors at your disposal who could have voiced more of the guards and pagans as well. However, you still brought to life the otherwise rigid looking guards.

You could really do with an animated guard model to be used in place of the regular monster (hint, hint, nudge, nudge all modelers). Because they were immobile they couldn't react to thrown boxes and barrels and you had to resort to invisible walls to obstruct the player from going where the guards would see him. This is perfectly understandable given the limits of the engine and your resources, however, I think it would have been less immersion breaking to have some sort of indication, like a message pop up on screen, to let the player know the reason he cannot proceed that way. For instance, you could have "I cannot go there without the guard seeing me." or "That place is too crowded to pass through unseen." etc.
Spoiler below!

Speaking of immersion breaking that song in the tavern, while it may sound somewhat appropriate, was immersion breaking for me because it was in Finnish when the rest of the story is set in an English world. Not a huge deal but I just thought I'd mention it.

Concerning the messages and informing the player of what is going on I thought that the mementos could have been made use of in some cases where after overhearing a conversation it would make a note of it. The problem lies of course in the implementation of this because you have to make sure the player doesn't wander off during a conversation and then make a note of it anyway without even hearing it. Naming doors "Home", "Sewers", "Apartment", "Tavern", etc. and letting the player know when a door is locked would have been helpful as well.

I'm not too bothered by bugs in general since they exist even in full made titles but I'll list some that I came across:
Spoiler below!
  • The forest was a real problem to get through. You really had to push through the trees and risk getting stuck in the undergrowth just to get to the cave door.
  • If you left open the wardrobe door in the tavern rooms upstairs you could get the doors stuck on each other. This could have been solved by having the room door open out rather than in.
  • Moving past conversations too quickly made them overlap each other in unrealistic ways or you could hear them from a distance that was not plausible.
Now that that's over with I don't want you to think that I'm saying all this out of spite. Rather I want to point out flaws that you can perfect and keep in mind while developing new custom stories. I had a great time playing this custom story and look forward to seeing how it developes further. In particular I liked the way you made the player sneak by having them crouch under an invisble wall. That way they couldn't proceed past certain points by simply walking past guards like they weren't there.

Spoiler below!

My last question is more curiosity than anything else but what happened to the kids? In the beginning of the story you hear Rikhard say "So that means the kids are not home?". Clearly they must have lived but nothing is mentioned of them afterwards. This isn't actually crucial to the plot itself but it does leave open other avenues for the continuation of the story.



RE: Painful Shadows - Ansatsuhan - 05-07-2012

Hmh, when I enter the sewers the game loads what I believe is the sewers map of Abduction. Does anyone know how to fix that?

Also, there are some zipped folders in the Painful Shadows one (guard, maps, ps1, ps2). Are they needed they way they are, need to be unzipped or can they be deleted?

RE: Painful Shadows - kartanonperuna - 05-08-2012

Thanks Juke for the huge review.


-The sounds will be better in the sequel
-I try to not use block boxes as much now
-In the sequel,if you go too close to he guards,you will get caught,killed,and have to restart.At least in some situations.Sometimes,even if you step on something loud,you get caught.
-There will be cutscenes in sequel but much much more interesting.The camera is moving and all that.
-I have thought about animating the guards and them being actual real enemies but things would get really complicated then.
-The finnish songs are just reminder that the storycreator is finnish hahaha.Plus I couldnt think of any else good tavern song that I wanted.
-The kids...lets just not talk about them.I kind of just pulled them in for the joke.I guess if you think about it,they were taken away from him since he started drinking and propably was not seemed fit for fathers role.

As for you,Ansaathikb nglofnhfm

Just delete the abductions map?

And the zips I guess you could delete I kind of just forgot them there.

RE: Painful Shadows - Ansatsuhan - 05-08-2012

Well, thanks for the info about the zips. ^^

As for the problem with the wrong map loading..I meant some real way of fixing it. Deleting it would be an obvious solution but I was looking for something less desperate. I had some similar interactions with Abduction and The Small Horse which could be fixed by changing a line in the custom_story_settings.cfg. So I'm basically asking for a way to change the config to make clear where exactly look for the map so they won't get mixed up.

Greetings, Ansaathikb nglofnhfm XD