Oh bugger...the grown ups have found us...
And glad I did it.
[...] the text boxes were meant to be pure and clear (hence why they seem to intrude on images now in Chapter One, [...]
Personally, I found them perfect like they are. Not invasive and transparent enough. I prefer that to no boxes at all, what I always found a little weird because the text seem to float on the air.
The MC's words and thoughts still don't come across as clear as either of us would like. I'll see what I can do as I do concur with you on this.
The main problem is that the italic font isn't marked enough. Put side by side, the difference is visible. But here you have one, then the other, and something you're wondering if it's italic or not.
But perhaps that the answer isn't in the font itself. Why not having a
Character dedicated for this ? Something like :
Code:
define mcThoughts = Character( "Thoughts", window_background="ui/talkmc.png", what_style="mcThoughts" )
style mcThoughts is say_thought:
color "#fff"
outlines [ ( 2.5, "#00264d" ) ]
italic True
So, instead of "You" as name, there will be "Thoughts", which seem relatively explicit (at least for me). If you can make the text wrap in the name box, you can even go with "Your thoughts" if you want it to be even more explicit.
Also, thank you for your kind words.
You deserve them.
- The characters have an effective and deep personality, far from the habitual cliche and different enough while still being complementary ;
- The dialogs are well written, with the right dose of humor ;
- The story interesting, with enough mystery to be captivating, but not to much so it's not confusing ;
- The rendering great (and now that I try to use Daz3D I'm even more amazed) ;
- The User Interface fall right in place ;
- The game mechanism works fine and give enough freedom without loosing the player ;
- The choices have an effective meaning, without blocking the player (well unless "pew pew pew in your face" ) ;
- Hell, even the "pew pew pew in your face" is proof that you effectively thought about the outcome of the players choice ;
- The hints are correctly dosed, neither too blurry, nor too directive, and they really help to not be stuck.
And on top of that, you even stopped with a wonderful cliffhanger.
On the other side, there isn't many things to say.
The game probably need to be restarted once, because the role play part is important and, like any other games, adult ones or not, it take some time to find how you'll do it. But that's not a big problem, it's Ren'py, just skip the already seen texts and it don't take much time to fall back where you left.
The only thing that was "wrong", is the trigger for the system outage. You're in the crew room after having talked with Sarah, and you need to left, then go back to it, for the scene to be triggered. But that's not this much a problem and it's easy to trigger it, just not this intuitive.
Perhaps also the apparent (it's the first release, I don't know what will happen next) incompatibility between Chris' routes. I feel like I could love to have a save where I squeezed it, while in the same time she was so near to Sarah's lips. The text saying that she'll not offer the possibility to change the decision make it feel like it's now or never. But perhaps is it just to say that you can't quit the cage once she put it on you, and she'll try to put it later if you choose her solution over Annie's one.