[excentri]

Graphics - Excellent. Good-looking 3D environment that fits well with the sci-fi setting of the game. It feels like a real environment that the player is standing in, which is great for immersion.

Thank you! We made it as good as we could with the limited time we got.

Sound - The haunting back melody works with the isolation theme of the game. Does start to get a bit repetitive after a while. I think that is because there is only one tune and any tune is going to feel repetitive without any variety to set it off. The computerised voice is also very well done.

The music was made in about 30 minutes and yes it gets repetitive after a while. Though we could have paused the music after one loop and continue it after a while.

Story - Interesting concept but getting the entire thing in one go from the database makes it more like reading a short story. The limited environment makes this virually unavoidable so consider this as a positive comment. As long as you have the story revealed in a more interesting fashion in future then I think you don't have any problems with the content.

The story wasn't really my part in this project but the thing is that this game was made as project in a course of our education. We should read a bunch of text that was about cyborgs and other things like fear. With that text we should form a question and make a game out of that.
We were a little bit limited but it was fun nonetheless.

Movement - You've fallen into the same trap as a lot of games with node-based movement. If I'm standing at the bed the synthesis/food hatch is right next to me. However, to get to it I have to walk to the middle of the room. Having to take a wholly artificial diversion like this just reminds the player they are in a game, blowing the immersive feeling from the graphics. This is not to say that node-based movement is a no-no, but if you're going to have an open space, you really need to have open movement in it, at least to adjacent nodes.

Yes, the only reason that we didn't make that was that we didn't really thought it was that difficult to navigate, and the hotspots in pipmak isn't really fun to make. We had to guess where to position the hotspots and redo it many times before we could get a usable one. Thought we had it in mind all the time of course but we never got that far to make it.
We will not make that mistake again.

Because this is such a small game, there isn't really enough interaction to tell if this will make your future games too simplistic. There are many good precedents for single-click play so I'll reserve judgement.

That's correct. This game was made in thought of our time-limit, therefor we couldn't make much interaction at all. Our current "real" project will be different. I promise!

Gameplay - As you intimated in your opening post, it is very difficult to work out what to do. I wandered around the small space, used the computer to synthesise all the food (collecting each from the hatch) and read the database. After that I wasn't really sure what else to do. I wanted to try to do the recommended exercises but couldn't interact with the floor. I wanted to try out the bathroom facilities but that was a no go. I wanted to try to combine the foods I'd synthesised but there doesn't appear to be an inventory to allow that.

This game was in fact more like a test and we really like the 360 panorama games and wanted to make one. We worked for about 12 days and this is what we got.

This may be solely because this is a test-piece that was made in two weeks (so this is all there is to do). If not, you need to give the player some better hints on what to do.

That's correct. We call this game a test-piece. This is all there is to do, though we know that we could make it much better, but not in two weeks. The output was made with priorities to get a playable game in a small amount of time.

Incidentally, is the game saved in some sort of test mode?

We haven't actually tested to save the game at all because there is not many things to do to make progress.

With no manual I took to experimenting by tapping random keys when I got stuck. Various options changed the field of view, resolution and other operational features.

I know. I forgot to turn that off.

More importantly C caused the interactive portions of the game to highlight (revealing two additional sections near the bathroom door which I couldn't get to work).

Spoiler, don't read if you want to complete the game by yourself.

Spoiler:

This is the hard part of the "game". To open the hatch in the floor you have to order sugar with the computer. Pick up the sugar and toothbrush in the food-hatch. Go back to the computer and navigate to the database and sphere blueprints. Highlight the floor tile in the picture and press the mouse button(You get no feedback at all when doing this which is bad). You have now activated two booleans that now says true. Now you can open the floor tile near the bathroom door. I wont spoil any more but that's like the main puzzle in the "game". It's very far-fetched but there actually are people that have completed the game.

Definitely leaves me interested in seeing more from you though.

Thank you! We really appreciate all the feedback we have got from people around the world. We learn more and more what people likes and dislikes and that's important to know.

I am happy that you have taken time to play our "game" and given us feedback!