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Work in progress In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod
Streetboat Offline
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#71
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

well, i don't really have any other suggestions. everything else looks pretty mint. Tongue

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07-27-2014, 05:24 PM
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HumiliatioN Offline
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#72
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

I really like this "New animated hand with carrying that match" really refreshing idea and original.

But what you guys discussed about that match:

In my opinion.. I think you do your idea your way and improve how you like. And then overall after beta-testing and publishing final version, people decide and judge by playing it and testing what they think about your idea. If there are someones againts it some way or it's useless whatever.. Then you fix/improve it if there are many people critizing that match idea.. for example. It needs seriously improving, patching and just overall new look, longer distance radius with light etc.

But, that's just my opinion.

“Life is a game, play it”
(This post was last modified: 07-28-2014, 02:16 AM by HumiliatioN.)
07-28-2014, 02:15 AM
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Artsy Offline
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#73
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

Okay, here goes.
You don't pay attention when you detail. I found a lot of things clipping with another and it's hard to miss. I also noticed tree parts going inside a mushroom in the outside map.
Another thing I noticed is, the lack of block boxes at necessary places like stairs, fences, cliffs, bridges etc.
Entities like tables and static objects like stairs and carpets are obnoxiously overstretched. There's no reason for that as there are carpets meant for bigger rooms and others such for hallways. You don't follow that. But let's say you do, it's still overstretched and looks ugly.
Besides that, the mansion map seemed pretty pointless. All those rooms are poorly made and are not worth the time to explore because there's nothing in them. They're either empty or basic.
You need more work with the lighting, some billboards were clipping through the actual window rather than the yellow/blue paper that's referred as glass in the game.
The ending of the demo is very unfortunate and it didn't make me feel like I wanted to see more. It's just: here's a demo, here's a cheap jump scare, oh what's the next level and now it's over. It did not get my attention. The fact that you all had your names with gigantic letters in the beginning is just plain stupid. Are you really that desperate?
To say I got scared, I can't. It just wasn't scary for one bit.
The models? They're really low-res.
As for the terrain model, it's awfully scaled and it looks very ugly in such case:
Spoiler below!
[Image: 1MaQp45.jpg]
Compared to how detailed the TDD entities are, placing that gigantically re-sized terrain looks just plain odd.
It looks very rushed, take your time to fix all these mistakes and rebuild the maps.

So - more detailing and work on models. You have people with "good" mapping/modeling skills, why don't y'all just have a conversation and think of rebuilding/improving the maps and try to avoid exporting rooms from TDD and later on slightly modifying them to not look like they're not stolen?
The demo was not polished - not even to the slightest bit.
(This post was last modified: 08-20-2014, 08:26 PM by Artsy.)
08-15-2014, 05:33 PM
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daortir Offline
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#74
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

Just finished the demo !
There is quite a lot of things to say, so I'll try to organize this sorta review the best I can.

First of all, congratulations with the custom models and the overall mapping quality, both are really impressive ! We can see that the detailing is complex, and the atmosphere of the mod feels great.

The puzzles are well scripted, and I think you guys are doing a good job at being creative with them.

There are also a lot of things that I think can be improved. First of all, level design doesn't feel well thought-out. In the map you begin in, I just walked backwards because I like to look at things, and i just reached the end of the map. I could see the skybox clearly, I simply reached the end of the map without even glitching through anything.
The lighting is also really weird, at first it's a thunderstorm with lots of rain, and that's great. But then it's all sunny and shiny, and one door later it's rainy and dark again. The overall layout of the levels feels a bit weird-ish as well, we go freely from medieval castle to fairly modern mansion, to medieval cellars again, without any transition. Also what Robosprog said, the layout of the windows is illogical.

Also, the hub is a castle hall that has a level door to guest rooms right ? I haven't played TDD in a while but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same thing. Anyway, let's move on to the last thing that really annoyed me.

The pace of the demo isn't logical. We are slowly wandering around, not bothering too much about what is going on. Meanwhile our daughter is gone ! I mean, at no point I had the impression of being in any sort of hurry. I don't know, but if you want to make us feel like finding our daughter is the main idea behind the mod, maybe having a demo with a bit of a faster pace wouldn't have been a bad idea.
On this point I agree with Robosprog once more, the demo doesn't make you feel like you have to do anything. I was just wandering around trying to find the next puzzle to solve.

So. From my point of view the artistic work in the mod is impressive. I think that when this is released, it will probably be one of the prettiest finished mods I've seen so far. The puzzles are fairly original, and that's always cool to see. But the level design feels a bit underwhelming. The demo also doesn't feel like it has the correct pace, it feels a lot more like we are exploring a castle, than being terrified about the fate of what a father should love the most.

Overall, this still looks kick-ass and of high quality !!

When this will come out I will definitely play it, and I wish you guys good luck with the end of the work on this project !

(This post was last modified: 08-15-2014, 11:09 PM by daortir.)
08-15-2014, 11:07 PM
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Zatchie Offline
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#75
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

(08-15-2014, 11:07 PM)daortir Wrote: Just finished the demo !
There is quite a lot of things to say, so I'll try to organize this sorta review the best I can.

First of all, congratulations with the custom models and the overall mapping quality, both are really impressive ! We can see that the detailing is complex, and the atmosphere of the mod feels great.

The puzzles are well scripted, and I think you guys are doing a good job at being creative with them.

There are also a lot of things that I think can be improved. First of all, level design doesn't feel well thought-out. In the map you begin in, I just walked backwards because I like to look at things, and i just reached the end of the map. I could see the skybox clearly, I simply reached the end of the map without even glitching through anything.
The lighting is also really weird, at first it's a thunderstorm with lots of rain, and that's great. But then it's all sunny and shiny, and one door later it's rainy and dark again. The overall layout of the levels feels a bit weird-ish as well, we go freely from medieval castle to fairly modern mansion, to medieval cellars again, without any transition. Also what Robosprog said, the layout of the windows is illogical.

Also, the hub is a castle hall that has a level door to guest rooms right ? I haven't played TDD in a while but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same thing. Anyway, let's move on to the last thing that really annoyed me.

The pace of the demo isn't logical. We are slowly wandering around, not bothering too much about what is going on. Meanwhile our daughter is gone ! I mean, at no point I had the impression of being in any sort of hurry. I don't know, but if you want to make us feel like finding our daughter is the main idea behind the mod, maybe having a demo with a bit of a faster pace wouldn't have been a bad idea.
On this point I agree with Robosprog once more, the demo doesn't make you feel like you have to do anything. I was just wandering around trying to find the next puzzle to solve.

So. From my point of view the artistic work in the mod is impressive. I think that when this is released, it will probably be one of the prettiest finished mods I've seen so far. The puzzles are fairly original, and that's always cool to see. But the level design feels a bit underwhelming. The demo also doesn't feel like it has the correct pace, it feels a lot more like we are exploring a castle, than being terrified about the fate of what a father should love the most.

Overall, this still looks kick-ass and of high quality !!

When this will come out I will definitely play it, and I wish you guys good luck with the end of the work on this project !

I agree on most of the points you're bringing up here. There are some things that you guys said that we have already decided to change. Due to heavy optimisation we had to reduce all of the textures because the texture memory was way to high for a low end computer.

We have put a lot of time and effort into making the detailing of the maps. I can assure you that all of our maps are original and made by our own hands. Map design is an area where we are a bit unpolished when push comes to shove but we're trying as hard as we can. As for the exterior, we didn't want to make some random blockbox in the way when you tried to go back cause it just doesn't make sense. But we are probably going to fix that problem somehow since you mentioned it. The idea behind the chandelier falling on your head is to make the player (faint) and being unconscious for several hours before waking up and that's why it's morning. We thought that the weather had changed and went from morning to midday and it's cloudy and rainy.

We haven't made the player stress through the levels cause what kind of mod would it be if you ran through all of the maps without experiencing all of the aspects. I can understand why you feel like the character is slowly wandering around, we will look into that since that's not really what we're aiming for. But you should keep in mind that this is a more like a teaser than a separate experience. It's the first maps of the entire mod, this is just the build up phase of our mod this section doesn't have a peak because the it's meant to build up what comes next.

We REALLY appreciate that you also pay attention to the good things we've done and not only the things we have to improve on. Your feedback was really good and gives us another perspective on how we can improve our mod and your experience.

Thank you daoritr.

Founder of Frunken Productions. Map designer and 3D and texture artist
http://frunkenproductions.com/
http://youtube.com/frunkenproductions
08-15-2014, 11:56 PM
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Juras Offline
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#76
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

Alright

Firstly, thank you all that you were willing to play and test our demo, but unfortunetely I'm afraid that I'm a bit dissapointed with your review Mr.Robosprog as to me it seems that you were only looking for things that were wrong and didn't even try playing it like a normal player would and missed atleast 1/3 of the whole demo.

We appriciate Robo that you took the time though to find every little thing as well as some bigger ones that was wrong with the demo like badly placed cobwebs and seams on the walls that you found, aswell as the windows facing the entrance map where you come from (we really didn't think about that when we designed the layout, it's fucking stupid when I think about it now lol), we'll definetely make sure to fix those things for the full version of the mod. I still however think that your review is not fair cause you didn't even expierence the whole demo and just quit where you say that you got "disconnected" from the guest rooms and that it ends there? Which is completely not true. It's wrong to say that our ending was "scrappy" becasue that's not how it should have ended, you simply missed the real ending. If you mean that you got "diconnected" from the guest rooms by leaving them and going back to the entrance then it's our bad since we forgot to lock the door leading back to the entrance, you're not supposed to go back there so oops...

Now about what you said that our levels are terrible and not planned. Let me start by saying that we actually do spend ALOT of time working on our levels and testing them. If you were expecting to find unique and amazing level design within only the first maps (which is a simple castlebase entrance and mansion part of the castle) of the mod then you really failed to realize the purpose of those maps. We wanted to make them fairly simple and didn't aim to showcase anything special in them level design wise since our main purpose in those maps is for you to find all the diaries and notes (there is 2 diaries and 1 note in the demo) and build up the creepyness through subtle scares. So you're supposed to explore more (after all, it says "I have to find clues about what happend to Lucy" in the journal, that's why you're not even supposed to feel stressed about finding your daughter and scared, just uncomfortable and creeped out. And I don't think that just because 1 or 2 rooms look "similiar" to ATDD, you can say that we "exported" them and "modified" them. We made every level, every room and detail completely from scratch. So I think it's really sad hearing comments like that when you have put so much work building your maps from 0. About the lighting. I could agree that it's weird having that color transition from the entrance and then into the guest rooms and we'll take that into consideration and probably make the entrance lighting rainy and cloudy, just like the guest rooms so it makes more sense.

Now onto the exterior.

You really think that we don't know that the terrain is low res? Trust me if we could we would make it look ALOT better but I think you're forgeting here that it's HPL2 we're dealing here with, not UDK and it's really poorly optimized for exterior enviroments. And when you're goal is to make a HUGE exterior with a big castle make it look decent AND make it run decently, then it pretty much impossible to have everything perfect in it. The terrain mesh is huge and it scales out the texture alot, so unless you would prefer having a slideshow in that map than yeah, we can't really make it higher resolution than it is. We optimized that map as good as we could. If you think you can make a better exterior map with scale THAT big, then be my guest good sir. About the cabin and the bridge. We've had all sorts of ideas about what kind of puzzle to do with them for crossing the bridge and we still haven't came up with something that would make more use of the cabin. So I agree on the point that the cabin is kinda useless right now and is only there to make the exterior not too linear. Last thing about the exterior. If you would have followed the road of the whole map then you wouldn't bug out, we also placed blockboxes everywhere on the treelines to keep them from making you fall through the terrain. We'll improve that though for our final version so that if you decide looking fo the mushrooms behind the fences isntead of following the path you won't bug out.
At the introduction we faded screen to black few times and teleported the player though the map a bit from the very beginning and we never had idea of our names to be there but since it would just fade to black anyway, we decided to add our names to those gaps and we don't think it's anything special and that it would bother anyone. It's just a basic introduction to the names of the main developers in the first minute of the mod.

Last thing to Robosprog. I'm guessing you didn't even reach the main part of the guest rooms and just stopped where the custom wall-set ends? If that's the case then I advice you to play the demo till it's "real" ending (cause yes we have credits and stuff that you wanted to be in the ending) otherwise you have missed alot of stuff.

I think it's good that you guys found stuff you didn't like and made us more aware of it by taking your time to write down these reviews, it helps us alot and it will definetely be useful when making the final version of the mod as good as possible. I understand though that some of you may find the demo kinda "slow" and you might not feel like you have to do anything but I promise you that there's alot more maps coming after the guest rooms with way more intresting level design and gameplay. The demo is really really nothing compared to what maps we have made after where the demo ends and the expierence as a whole that will be in the full version.

Thank you Robosprog, thank you Artsyracoon and thank you daortir for your opinions Smile

Co-Founder & Lead Art Director of Red Line Games
3D & Environment Artist, Animator
http://jurasbatas.deviantart.com
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2014, 12:16 AM by Juras.)
08-16-2014, 12:06 AM
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CarnivorousJelly Offline
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#77
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

(08-16-2014, 12:06 AM)Juras Wrote: <...> You really think that we don't know that the terrain is low res? Trust me if we could we would make it look A LOT better but I think you're forgetting here that it's HPL2 we're dealing here with, not UDK and it's really poorly optimized for exterior environments. <...>

Have you heard Robosprog's continuous complaining about HPL2? If he says it's low res and can be fixed without breaking the engine, it can be fixed without breaking the engine (seriously though, he knows more about the engine's limits than most people on here). Upgrade that texture before someone equates your mod to an NES game for the low-res tetures :p

(for those of you who would take offense, that last little bit about NES is a joke)

Also, didn't realize you guys released a demo. I'll run through it in a bit after I'm done studying for today - probably record it and upload it to youtube (free publicity :D) and give you guys the link.

[Image: quote_by_rueppells_fox-d9ciupp.png]
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2014, 12:19 AM by CarnivorousJelly.)
08-16-2014, 12:14 AM
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Artsy Offline
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#78
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

Although there is something that I liked which was the forest sort of look of the outdoor map and it was nice seeing castle backdrops and hills and all that. But, the cabin is pretty useless as of now so you may just place a resource that's needed to get in the castle or something so it would have a purpose.
I noticed that the ghost enemy only has 1 animation (it's just the same anim. for all anim. slots) - is that just for the demo or..?
I'm also just going to ask what's wrong with the witch/ghost's hair, it looks... not that great. It just looks like a bunch of planes at one place and its connection with the head looks very odd. I understand the concept but it could have been better imo.


EDIT: Nevermind, ignore this Frunken Productions - I forgot you guys never read feedback unless you feel like it. But even if you did read this, I know you'll never improve things. You've already got everything set in your minds. Who needs feedback, right?
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2014, 12:34 AM by Artsy.)
08-16-2014, 12:21 AM
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Juras Offline
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#79
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

(08-16-2014, 12:14 AM)Carnivorous Jellybean Wrote:
(08-16-2014, 12:06 AM)Juras Wrote: <...> You really think that we don't know that the terrain is low res? Trust me if we could we would make it look A LOT better but I think you're forgetting here that it's HPL2 we're dealing here with, not UDK and it's really poorly optimized for exterior environments. <...>

Have you heard Robosprog's continuous complaining about HPL2? If he says it's low res and can be fixed without breaking the engine, it can be fixed without breaking the engine (seriously though, he knows more about the engine's limits than most people on here). Upgrade that texture before someone equates your mod to an NES game for the low-res tetures :p

(for those of you who would take offense, that last little bit about NES is a joke)

Lol. Thing is pal, the texture was higher res when we first made that map but it was a slideshow on a mid-end pc and I don't think people would have wanted that so we decided to reduce it for better optimization. I don't care how much he knows about engine limits, but unless he can prove me that I can upgrade that texture by making an exterior this big himself without it being 5 fps then we won't do it Tongue

Co-Founder & Lead Art Director of Red Line Games
3D & Environment Artist, Animator
http://jurasbatas.deviantart.com
08-16-2014, 12:22 AM
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CarnivorousJelly Offline
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#80
RE: In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

Textures aren't the worst for optimization; particle systems and lights are. Rather than sacrifice something that's blatantly obvious, go for one of the other two.

Also, what is with Frunken Productions and ignoring feedback? I feel like I'm talking to a bunch of ostriches afraid of critiques. Just burying their heads in the sand until someone comes by and says "hey, don't worry, you're amazing and perfect and everything's exactly as it should be". Honestly, I feel like Wapez is the most reasonable one on this team - at least he (politely) acknowledges when there's something that can be improved.

... case and point below

[Image: quote_by_rueppells_fox-d9ciupp.png]
(This post was last modified: 08-16-2014, 12:39 AM by CarnivorousJelly.)
08-16-2014, 12:24 AM
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