2017-11-21 12:00:32

Hello, Im Kai Wright from the University of Baltimore's game design class.
Like in my introduction, my game is called Dark house, it is an eerie horror game as you navigate a haunted house collecting items for a little ghost girl to get rid of her ghost parents. Unfortunately the story elements and voice acting are being temporarily replaced by straight forwards instructions and text to speech, just until the prototyping is over.
I would like to get some feedback on the prototype of my game. All of the mechanics of the game work, however some of the sounds aren't finished yet. If a sound isn't done it sounds like the google text to speech software, and will be replaced and updated later on. The feedback I am mostly interested in is if the sounds needed to locate the house are loud enough or not, or if I needed more sounds to help with the play-ability of the game.
The link to download the zip file with my game is below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7pat60zmag49 … 1.zip?dl=0

thank you-
Kai Wright

2017-11-21 12:32:20

Hello Kai, welcome to the forums and we're glad to have all the new games we can get.  I've downloaded the game and it seems you're off to a good start.  I wasn't able to exit without using Alt + F4, but perhaps I just didn't know what I was supposed to do in order to exit the game.

I'm sure you'll have others posting on here very soon, eager to test out your game.  Good luck on the project.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2017-11-21 22:55:16

Hmmm never managed to get this either.
I found walls but never what I was meant to find.

2017-11-23 08:01:30 (edited by defender 2017-11-26 19:38:25)

A few objects are very difficult to find because sounds like the fosset and flies are very quiet compared to things like the door; though I believe this has more to do with distance based volume level than the actual volume of the sound it's self.


I suggest that you only play the wall bump sound when moving, not simply turning towards a wall, as it keeps it down to an as needed sort of level, cutting down on spam.


Also, I noticed that most of the time you seem to be able to either walk through, or glance off of walls, so I would suggest either making all of the walls consistently solid, or playing a sound for when you slide against a wall, separate from the normal wall bump sound.


Consider adding the ability to snap to a specific direction (45 or 90 degrees is the standard) and possibly also a sidestep feature, that way, you can walk in straight lines when needed.
For instance, if you start facing north, than pressing control plus left arrow would autoturn you to the west, pressing it again would turn you to the south, pressing control right arrow would turn you back to the west, and again back to the north, etc, with each new direction being named as you turn to it.
Every audio game I know of with free rotation does this, because it keeps problems like getting stuck in a corner down to a minimum when just moving between areas, but you can still rotate freely to find objects as needed.
With side stepping, you might use shift plus left right arrow, to move 1 step left or right horizontally as compared to the direction you are facing (useful for following walls to find doors.
Maybe also add the ability to check your current direction in degrees, usually the f key is used (for facing).


I can't find the stairway near the clock, not sure if it isn't their yet, or what.
When I get right on top of the clock, nothing seems to happen, so if the stairs are off to one side, it may be a good idea to make a separate ambient sound for them.


I like your use of reverb, and that interesting Doppler effect with the (music box?) as you move around it, makes it sound like an old film.
The atmosphere is pretty convincing too, with the creaking door, old wooden floor and rain outside, with nighttime crickets
I think that creepy little piano ditty is pretty cool as well.


The walking sounds are very low quality, and the door sound, even though it's cool, has allot of background noise in it, so I suggest you search http://www.freesound.org for replacements if possible, it's an awesome site with straight forward CC licensing and a massive selection (they won't spam you either). tongue
For more music (if you want to spice things up)
the best sites I know would be http://www.freemusicarchive.com http://www.soundimage.org http://www.nihilore.com or http://www.marcelofernandezmusic.com/ro … ree-music/
http://www.incompetech.com

2017-11-26 06:22:45

Also www.incompetech.com