Code 7 Prologue

[k***@googlemail.com]

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

[Richard Bos]

Post by k***@googlemail.com
Would you buy a full game like this?

Fuck no.

I much prefer adventure games to broken menu systems like yours.

Richard

[namekuseijin]

ditto

you want to develop a 3D game with voiceovers for dialogues and all bells and whistles, fine. Some games even remind some IF in some aspects, like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

but they definitely are not TEXT adventures, so why bother? why some people feel the need to call their 3D action games interactive-fiction, RPG or whatever? It's difficult trying to understand the fucked up reasoning behind the iliterate crackhead generation...

[rpresser]

Post by k***@googlemail.com
Thanks for any feedback,
Kevin Glaap & Zein Okko

The story wasn't too terrible. It's been done before, though, and
much better.

The presentation however was quite disappointing. Besides the clumsiness
of typing numbers or awkward words instead of full sentences, the
frequent misspellings and even MISPRONUNCIATIONS made it very hard to
stay immersed in the story.

I would not buy, or even play a full game like this. 15 minutes is
about all I could take.

[k***@googlemail.com]

Hey thanks for your answers.

Please remember that this is just a one-week university project prototype. There wasn't much time for proof-reading and there were no professional voice actors involved, which will be the case for the final game of course.

Could you be a bit more specific what you didn't like about the presentation or "broken menu systems"? The whole idea of the UI is to simulate a broken glitchy computer system. Would you like to be able to turn these effects off?

Again, we are here to get feedback so we can do better in the actual game and not to provoke hatred. I'm really sorry if you didn't like the game and wasted your time. I just hoped for a conversation about it.

[Peter Piers]

Post by k***@googlemail.com
Again, we are here to get feedback so we can do better in the actual game and not to provoke hatred. I'm really sorry if you didn't like the game and wasted your time. I just hoped for a conversation about it.

I'd encourage you to check out http://www.intfiction.org/. You won't get the sort of directness you've been getting here; you'll either get feedback or silence (it's a moderated place with a code of conduct).

As far as the proof-reading goes in your reply to rpresser, remember that it's a text game you're making. Proof-reading is not optional, nor can you afford to make a shoddy job of it; the text is the heart of your game, it's what the players will interact with, pay close attention to. Put it another way, a text game full of typos is like a 3D game where clipping doesn't work, textures are wonky half the time and everything that animates flickers enough to make your eyes water - and if people pointed at those things and you said "Well we only had a week", they'd say "Then take longer than a week and fix those things because they're making my eyes bleed!".

[Peter Piers]

BTW, for everyone who didn't know, there are favourable reviews of this game:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/19/freeware-garden-code-7/

People at Steam also seem to love it.

So, OP, I'm sure you know this by now, but you have a captive audience, so you can pretty much continue as you are. Personally I can't get behind most of the things those people are saying, but I can't imagine my opinion will make a difference at this point.

[Peter Piers]

Post by k***@googlemail.com
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?
- 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.