Adventure Gamers - Forums

Jdawg445 - 02 September 2022 08:18 PM

Your speaking my language, fully. I hope it delivers, i appreciate the fact that you recognize the fact that so many devs use buzzwords like broken sword, gabriel knight or monkey island, without knowing what that really means. How long will the demo be and will it have real gameplay in the demo? Too many adventure game demos these days are basically long trailers. Also how long will it take for the full game to be completed, and what is the game length your aiming for? Thanks for all the info.

It’s a properly playable demo, with about 30-45 minutes of gameplay I’d guess (I’m not actually sure because we haven’t timed people with it yet, but that’s what we’re aiming for). I mentioned before that Part 1 has you find five ingredients for a voodoo spell - the demo has you search out two of them, which gives you access to roughly half of the locations in Part 1 that the full game has. It’s a tricky balance of showing off cool stuff, but also holding stuff back for the full game! It also leaves out a prologue section from the full game as we don’t start it at the same point the full game starts (which means when you play the full game, you get new content right from the start, rather than having to repeat stuff if you’ve played the demo).

The full game is going to be full-length, equal in playtime to Monkey Island and Broken Sword, and we’re aiming for summer 2023 as the release date. The game’s actually fully playable from start to finish right now, but there’s a lot of animation, music, additional writing, and voices we still need to incorporate.

seakash - 03 September 2022 02:11 AM

Definitely digging the original Broken Sword games graphics vibe.
Hope the soundtrack is orchestral too!

I can’t tell you how pleased I am with the score! If you listen to the music in the trailer, that’s all custom music by our composer, using a modified version of our actual main theme in the game - the Foolish Waltz.

Hey everyone! We’ve just taken a big leap and launched our Kickstarter and demo. I can’t wait for people to try out the game and give their feedback.

In the demo, we jump you into the end of Part 1, skipping the prologue, where Murphy needs to gather the final two voodoo ingredients for a ghost summoning spell. It’s fully voiced in English, with subtitles in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

For our Kickstarter, we’re offering a 90s-style big box PACKED with documents. Please take a look and back it at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inklingwood/foolish-mortals/

I’d love to answer any questions people have about it too!

Demo on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1848440/Foolish_Mortals/
Demo on Itch.io: https://inklingwood-studios.itch.io/foolish-mortals

I just finished the demo and my overall thoughts are that I am impressed. I will list pros cons and suggestions.

Pros
- Great voice acting except for the main character, will get to that more later. I loved the waiter and grave digger the most.
- writing was excellent and you had me chuckling a few times especially at the grave digger
- Art is great, very pretty. I do hope there is more background animations for scenes though, the town was pretty but very lifeless.
- Music was outstanding
- Loved the opening credit scenes, reminded me of some great b movie murder mysteries from the 80s like clue, private eyes, and haunted honeymoon
- loved the closeups of the newspaper and magazines, I hope this continues.
- Was a real demo that lasted about an hr, with some real gameplay, but too easy, more on that later.

Cons
- I do not like the voice actor for the protagonist, The acting is not horrible, but he seems to childlike and lacks the charm of a gabriel knight, george stobbart, or a guybrush. I get he is supposed to be the player and everyman on a strange island, but I found him incredibly dull
- The lipsync on the up close shot of the fisherman was way off for me.
- I had quite a few audio pops especially at the start where there was dialogue and music.  Speaking of which the audio mix seems off. I had to way lower the music to hear the voices
- I also suffered massive slowdowns when exiting one scene to the next that would last for 3 to 5 seconds before speeding back up.

Suggestions
- Change spacebar from pause to hotspot marker
- Change the color of the hotspot marker. The white blends in too much
- Also the hotspot marker does not highlight everything on screen, For instance in the restaurant it did not highlight the globe for me. 
- Greatly increase the walking speed, he moves way too slow even though you can double click to exit
- The puzzles were way too easy and almost on the verge of being signposted too much by character dialogue.

Overall I enjoyed the demo and will be keeping an eye out for when this is released. I dont do kickstarter at all anymore, been burned one too many times. Good luck on your campaign.

This is really great feedback, thank you! Obviously the demo is just what we have currently, and stuff like this will really help us hone the full game. Here’s my thoughts on the critique:

- With Deadnettle feeling lifeless, it picks up more in Part 3, but I definitely want to do more in Part 1. We have the chimney smoke at the moment, but I want to add seagulls in the sky, and even lights turning off and on like Melee Town.

- With the lip-sync, we actually don’t have any lip-sync in the demo - it’s all just mouth loops. We will be putting it in for the full game, we just ran out of time for the demo.

- Audio pops too. I’m not entirely satisfied with the sound balancing overall - mainly because I did it all myself for the first time. For the full game I want to find someone with a lot more knowledge on it than me to make sure all of the voices, sound effects, and music work together properly.

- We haven’t come across slowdowns before - 3 to 5 seconds definitely isn’t good. There is more optimising we can do with the game, but I think that’ll mainly be getting it to more testers to see if we can figure out.

- We actually had space bar as hotspot highlighting, until we got tester feedback to add a pause in, and I chose space for it just because that’s what LucasArts games used. Wrong decision there though - we’ll swap it back to space for highlighting and P for pause.

- We’re thinking we’ll get the hotspot highlights animated with a black/white glow, because they do blend in too much at the moment.

- The missing hotspot highlights will be my error - particularly on the CC interior. We had that background completely redone just a few weeks ago.

- Walk speed will definitely increase. The tricky thing there is that we need to reanimate Murphy to suit a faster speed, because just increasing his speed with his current animation looks ridiculous.

- Very interesting feedback on the puzzle difficulty. Obviously this is the beginning of the game so later sections will get a lot more intertwined and complicated, plus the full version will have more locations and items to obscure things, but I definitely don’t want it to feel signposted. I’ll keep that in mind!

Thanks for accepting the feedback. One more note on the puzzle design the most egregious of it was the newspaper lady basically telling you how to solve the fish puzzle to get your picture taken by her.

I’ve just finished the demo & looking forward to more. It definitely emanated a Broken Sword vibe to me. But hope fully you will be able to make the character move faster! 

Thank you so much! And yes, haha, we put out an update just today that speeds Murphy up!

BIG UPDATE NOVEMBER 2ND 2022 - OUR KICKSTARTER ENDS TOMORROW!

Hi adventurers! I just wanted to share that the Kickstarter for my merry & macabre point & click adventure game ends TOMORROW!

Please take a look at it at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inklingwood/foolish-mortals/

Over the last month, we’ve hit tons of stretch goals for bonus puzzles, music, backgrounds, and even an INTERACTIVE SONG PUZZLE like The Curse of Monkey Island’s “A Pirate I was Meant to Be”! We have a load of awesome rewards on offer too - from appearing in the game as a GHOST, to a 90s style BIG BOX packed with in-universe documents! Please take a look! 👻

Thank you so much!

A bit of an update to share - we’ve unfortunately had to push back the release date because, while we were aiming for Halloween it became apparent we were going to miss it. Missing it meant going up against Christmas sales, which is a terrible time to release an indie game. Still, we’re making the most of it and are going to use that extra time to redo some early assets that were created before we had the incredible Kickstarter response. It should make for an overall better game!

I’ve written a big explanation at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inklingwood/foolish-mortals/posts/3882495 if anyone wants to read it.

Hey everyone! We’re still on track to release later this year, and while my wife Sophie has been working her way through the bug list, I’ve put my time towards getting the Kickstarter rewards ready!

This arrived today: a part-handmade mock-up of our Foolish Mortals big box to check spacing before we do the full run!

There are still a few tweaks to make, but we’re on track for a really cool big box. It’s a rigid-style box, we’ll be adding spot UV to the front and back, it has a gorgeous black interior, and it’ll be PACKED with feelies.

Image Attachments

Click thumbnail to see full-size image