On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 08:07:59 UTC+1,
kevin...@googlemail.com wrote:
Hello,
we are two students from Cologne Game Lab and we are currently writing our master thesis in "Game Development and Research" on a project called "Code 7", which is a modern text adventure.
This game wasn't made in a text parser, but in Unity3D. We wanted to try to bring the idea of text adventures to a modern visualization mode.
You wake up on an abandoned space station that you and your partner wanted to investigate. After an incident you both get separated and now you have to navigate your partner to your location. You do that by hacking systems and extracting information.
On the way you face some dark story twists that make you question your identity.
You can play this about 30-minute prologue for free at: http://www.code7-game.com
The game is focused less on hard-to-solve puzzles and Forgiveness Ratings and instead tries to immerse the player with story and a juicy user interface.
We've gotten rather good feedback from the general public and already got through Steam Greenlight, but now we are looking for constructive feedback from the interactive fiction communities as we see you as one of the main demographics that we want to
please. Would you buy a full game like this? Do you like the idea of inputting commands instead of sentences and choosing dialogue options? Did you feel immersed in the game?
However this is just a prototype that was created in one week and there are some things about our current plans, that we want to mention:
- This prologue contains a very linear plot and you can't just roam around an environment freely. The episodes currently in development will have a more open-world-y feeling.
- The voice acting was done in just three hours in the evening before the university projects deadline and can be seen as a demo. For the new episodes we plan to get professional voice actors.
- We plan to have different difficulty modes, that can be distinguished on the amount of auto-completion you get from the game to address classic text adventure fans as well as newer generations of gamers and maybe bring them closer to the idea of text
again. You can read more about that on our devlog
- We are currently unsure if the next episodes will have any kind of hacking-minigames in the first place.
Thanks for any feedback,
Kevin Glaap & Zein Okko
Not a bad effort - I've certainly seem and played worse, from professional studios.
The story is... well, I probably wouldn't pay for the rest of the story. Clichèd, simplistic... it's not so much "bad" as "meh, I've seen it all before. HAL, get over here and show them how it's done!".
The story progression, pacing and atmosphere are nice. Better than the plot itself.
The voice acting was... well, yes, please do use professional voice actors. Or at least spend more than 3 hours with the people you do have.
There's a nasty bug near the end. After I speak to S. O. L. I. and its dastardly plan is revealed (the revelation made me just sigh heavily. I'm guessing that's not a reaction you want...) I was blindly typing in letters to see what autocomplete would
come up it (I hope that's intended, because if it isn't then you really need to work on your hinting. Mid-game I just kept guess-ing-the-first-letter-and-seeing-what-happened), and it came up with the plasmacutter again. I selected it, curious, and soon
after selected alex.hack. Somehow the game both went back to the plasma-cutter-opening-door scene *AND* to the hacking-alex scene, and I couldn't progress any further.
On the whole, you may have something there. As a prototype, this is interesting and I'd encourage you to explore it further. But the story is meh and the voice acting is Good Grief!, and I couldn't actually finish it due to a bug.
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