(05-26-2013, 12:36 AM)Bridge Wrote: I will most likely play the demo but I'm not sold on this game at all. I think the premise is rather lazy, to say nothing of the unremarkable voice acting and bland level design. Still, I acknowledge this is a humble student attempt and will reserve judgement until I've actually played it (if I do). In any case, I wish you very good luck with development of the full game; if nothing else your hearts are in the right place.
EDIT: About the voice acting though, I think the British-sounding guy is pretty good. The inflections and dynamics are all pretty solid, though perhaps a bit hyperbolic at times.
I really hope that you'll take your time to play the pre-alpha demo once it is out. Because I think it will answer most of your questions about things. We don't want to say too much about the game itself with just a teaser. There are some reasons why:
It's been developed so far in just 7 weeks. We only have about 20 -30 minutes of gameplay right now, so there is not much gamephotage to show without spoiling to much of it.
I'm sorry that I go a little bit defensive.. I guess it is because this game feels like my little baby! hehe. Thanks a lot for your creative criticism, this is what makes us indie-developers want to work harder to reach our goal!
(05-26-2013, 05:37 PM)Traggey Wrote: All my best wishes to you, say, where do you study?
Me plus my fellow teammembers are currently studying in Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, with different focuses. We are a team of gamedesigners, artists, a programmer and sound engineers. I am one of the gamedesigners!
(05-26-2013, 05:37 PM)Traggey Wrote: All my best wishes to you, say, where do you study?
Me plus my fellow teammembers are currently studying in Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, with different focuses. We are a team of gamedesigners, artists, a programmer and sound engineers. I am one of the gamedesigners!
Ah, always fun to hear from fellow students, I attend Futuregames Academy in stockholm.
(05-26-2013, 05:37 PM)Traggey Wrote: All my best wishes to you, say, where do you study?
Me plus my fellow teammembers are currently studying in Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, with different focuses. We are a team of gamedesigners, artists, a programmer and sound engineers. I am one of the gamedesigners!
Ah, always fun to hear from fellow students, I attend Futuregames Academy in stockholm.
Well that's nice to hear! Are you submitting something to SGA by chance?
(05-26-2013, 05:37 PM)Traggey Wrote: All my best wishes to you, say, where do you study?
Me plus my fellow teammembers are currently studying in Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, with different focuses. We are a team of gamedesigners, artists, a programmer and sound engineers. I am one of the gamedesigners!
Ah, always fun to hear from fellow students, I attend Futuregames Academy in stockholm.
Well that's nice to hear! Are you submitting something to SGA by chance?
We were going to, a little project we called Havok Point, however things are ever so busy in school right now so we don't have time to finish it up~
(05-26-2013, 05:37 PM)Traggey Wrote: We were going to, a little project we called Havok Point, however things are ever so busy in school right now so we don't have time to finish it up~
Yea I know what you mean =/ Well, are you going to the SGA conference during the finals? ^^
Hello guys!
I just wanted to make you guys aware of what I and seven friends have been doing for the last couple of months. We've been working on a game with the title Stairs and we're going to compete with the title in the Swedish Game Awards (SGA from now on). This is an updated version of the previous post, due to the fact that the pre-alpha demo is now out for people to try it out!
Why are we doing this?
The idea was to create a "flashback" to old-school horror games, as we believe that most horror games of today have become a hybrid of action and shooters. So we wanted to "go back", so to speak, and what we created was Stairs.
What is Stairs?
"Dwell deep into the unknown and into the mind of the weak and the wounded. Learn to obey your deepest fears, interact with other peoples worst nightmares and survive the twisted images created by the dark side of our psyche."
The game has been in development for about ten weeks and it's running in the UDK engine. Right now, we have a "Proof of Concept" of the game and as soon as we're done at SGA we're most likely going to make it available to the public, for free. What happens from there? We're not sure yet, but we hope to be able to keep on developing the game and see what it leads up to. But we're still students, so this is more or less an experiment from our side, and a very exciting at that!
Just finished playing this. Have to admit it made me quite unsettled but I have a lot of problems with it. I took some notes while playing:
Spoiler below!
Echo - The echo effect is just horrible. It distracts from the actual dialogue and just makes no sense at all. I recommend redesigning it completely, perhaps opting for a more traditional effect that brings both clarity and mystery.
Flashlight flicker could be improved - When the flashlight flickers on and off in tense situations it doesn't do so the way it should. Seems quite erratic and clumsy.
Voice acting is goofy - Don't really know how you could fix this per se, I realize you guys are both the devs and the talent (presumably?) but it's just distracting sometimes. In general you have poor control over the timbre and dynamics of your voices, and your thick Swedish accents cause the dialogue to be a bit poorly enunciated.
Framerate issues - No obvious cause, but the framerate would drop in random locations. Nothing game-breaking but it is noticeable.
Camera flash lasts too long - I know the camera flash necessarily needs to illuminate the surrounding area but the light in the game doesn't behave like it would in real life. With something like a camera flash in complete darkness, the light is gone before you know it. In fact, you need to really pay attention and you have to know what to look for to actually be able to see anything. If you want to sacrifice realism for the sake of gameplay that's perfectly alright, but the way it's designed now is too excessive. There is a fine line and I believe you crossed it.
Bland level design - There are invisible walls all over the place, I'm sorry to say but it is a telltale sign of poor level design. You turn a perfectly traversable (and yet architecturally insane) blocks of corridors into a maze (as if it wasn't one already) just for the sake of pacing. Sorry, but that's really not a good enough reason. There are plenty of ways to do both.
Confusing ending - I don't understand the relevance of Samuel eating someone and going to a mental hospital. I did not find it obvious at all within the context of the story, especially since Samuel is barely a character.
One-dimensional characters - Apart from having different names and voices, everyone is essentially the same. No personality whatsoever.
Fractured, incoherent story - I just don't understand what happened or why. At first he was a reporter debunking some myth and then he's suddenly trapped with a group of supposed friends and they have to resort to cannibalism? It was entirely unappealing in its storytelling and just the story in general. Not very interesting.
Obvious scares - Nothing earth-shattering. There certainly could have been more imaginative scares.
Very tense chase - I actually liked this part, it got my heart pumping for sure. I almost ran into a game-breaking glitch getting stuck behind the door trying to open it but I got out. Might want to find a way to protect the player from that.
Sparse, uninteresting music - The game is almost completely silent and the few notes that the cello/piano play are not very interesting IMO.
Obvious and tedious puzzles - The puzzle design is so obvious it might as well have not been a part of the game. The whole buttons thing took 2 secs to figure out and after that it was just running back and forth, occasionally getting startled by the "flashback commencing" sound. Who on earth, other than SCP, would design a facility like this, where only one door can be opened at any time that is controlled by a room all the way in the corner? Inefficient and idiotic for sure. It just doesn't provide for interesting gameplay. The only puzzle that required any thought was opening the door that ends in 5 in conjunction with the right hand one on the end of the room - which in itself took not much more than 5 seconds. Apart from that there were no "puzzles" as such which was disappointing.
Unsettling yet colorless atmosphere - I dig what you have going on here, but you can do much more. The monster thing is not very interesting and while the layout of everything makes me a bit uneasy it isn't a special kind of uneasy that is subtle and multi-faceted. There are so many missed opportunities here. There is just so little mystery.
Typical pacing - As I said, you can see most of the scares coming from a mile away and you can see the pacing unfold as if you were following a literal "storyline". Quite unappealing IMO.
Sorry to be so critical but these were my genuine thoughts while playing. I still wish you good luck continuing this project and I am sure with some improvements it can turn out pretty well.
(This post was last modified: 06-01-2013, 02:55 AM by Bridge.)
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