No, but seriously. If you guys truly want to help BYOND, why don't you participate in Ludum Dare 24? We just recently had a contest so all of the participants that participated in it know what to expect. The only exception with Ludum Dare is that you're limited to develop a game in 48-hours, rather than a week. I mean, sure, BYOND doesn't have a physics framework built-in, or an amazing graphics renderer, or even [insert-utilities-that-other-engines-have-but-we-don't]... you get the point; but, we do have something other engines don't - the ability to prototype a game quickly with native networking right at our disposal. Instead of worrying about BYOND's disadvantages, think about its advantages and use them!
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Hm.. I'll do that instead then.
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A few things I noticed while playing At First Glance:
1) The narration is too low. In addition to the loud background music, I could only make out a few words. 2) In the opening scene, the breaks between the text/narration are too long. It needs to be more fluid, in my opinion. I understand having a break, but make it 5 seconds or less. 3) After moving towards the girl in the first scene, narration occurs. The dialog that begins with "Before we could..." eventually popped up but disappeared after a second or two, but the narration continued and everything worked fine afterwards. (I believe #5 explains why this problem exists) 4) Next is the "tree scene". I am not sure if it was due to the delays in text/narration or something else, but I walked nearly on top of the girl and continued clicking her with no results. After 10 seconds or so of clicking, the text/narration finally appeared. 5) After I walked off of the screen to make the transition from the "tree scene" to the "windy road scene", I finally started to get annoyed with how slow the character was moving. At first, I did not mind as the paths I walked were relatively short. It also appears the EAST (left arrow) skips the text/narration. As I walked this windy road, text would appear, but because I was holding EAST it would instantly disappear. (Causes #3?) 6) This is how far I got. I'll assume I screwed up and that there is no "restart level" command? Overall, it is a good puzzle game. It wasn't too challenging, but still enough to be fun. The slow movement really made it less enjoyable though. At times, I knew where I needed to go, but had to wait until my slow character got there. Thus, I found myself resting my head on my palm in boredom. Nice work, as always! | |
I believe Oasis' event did well because he was active in the forums, thus motivating/causing other entrants to provide daily updates.