Re: Alcyone: The Last City Kickstarter with playable demo
Thanks for the feedback!
For instance, at one point it said click the help button in the sidebar, but jaws couldn't find it. It said it was strongly recommended you equip your equipment before continuing, but the only option was a link to continue, so I didn't know if there were a button similar to help that I was missing.
At the moment there's no help button in the sidebar (there will be in the next version of the demo, if I find time to write it; otherwise in the release for sure) and I forgot to take that mention out — apologies there! When you unlock the inventory there's its own button that does appear so if that's not showing up that's a bug.
Another constant issue I had with jaws was I had to keep refreshing the page using the insert escape command. If I didn't do this, links were unclickable using enter or space. NVDA seemed to work fine in this regard, but found I couldn't read sentence by sentence in NVDA, so switched back to jaws and kept refreshing.
I'll look into this, but I'm upfront that I'm a pretty shit programmer and I might not be able to address each program's compatibilities specifically. I heard that it works really well with stuff like VoiceOver but this is not remotely my area of expertise so I'd love to get further help/information about how it all works.
When I got to the map being unlocked, there was nothing at all to select/click. I assumed that was the end of the demo, so didn't think to refresh the screen. Seems from what others have said that I missed something.
Nope, when you get to the map that's the end of the demo. At the moment the game just "stops" so I'll try to be more elegant about showing the player that they've reached the ending. I was trying to avoid having to add content for the demo that I'll have to remember to delete when the game is properly released, but it's had the opposite effect of confusing people at the moment.
Also Jaws wasn't reading words that had possessive apostrophes properly.
I'm not quite sure why this would be, that sounds like an odd quirk.
As far as in-game playability was concerned, the story and setting seemed like interesting ones, and I definitely wanted to know more. My only slight criticism would be that I felt my options always boiled down to a choice between heroic drama and subservient dullness, are you a man or a mouse. It seemed obvious which avenue an action movie would go down, and at first I chose this path, then thought maybe the writers know I'll do this and are going to punish me for my obviousness, so I started going down the 'keep your head down' route just to be different. Would like to see less black and white options in the finished game. I know how much work must go into these things without a million and one options, but a few more grey areas would be nice.
Good job though. If the end result is as engaging as the demo, I'll be donating or paying.
Yeah my intent here is that the player goes through character creation, picks an internship, and then completes the Nihility encounter — all of those make up the "tutorial." I was using the internships to prepare the player for how the game mechanics work going forward, so the choices are very good/bad. They will be a lot more shades-of-grey once the tutorial area finishes, so I guess I have to do a better job of explaining to players that it's a bit "easier" because that's supposed to be the tutorial. Choices will definitely be a lot harder to make as the game progresses. I want players to feel that there's a reward for each decision they make, but one that comes with serious consequences as well. It's good to get a sense of how everything comes across to other players, though; I can only do so much in my own head.
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