The Cerebral Symphony

Howdy all, Chapter One demo is out... give it a whirl...

What did you think, Benos, Cornflake, chana, psy_wombats? Would be curious to hear your feedback.

Ok chaps -benos in particular- I have reuploaded the demo now with the red system less harsh on the eyes and the upbeat personality much easier to play in the first battle. Thanks for your input on this benos and Creation.

Would anyone who was responsible for any of the 60 downloads the demo has had care to give it a review?

author=chana
It was ok, good points : the main character with his different personalities, the mapping's ok, the problem : no real story to hold everything together(I didn't play the whole demo).

You can't diss the story if you haven't played the whole thing! It throws you in at the deep end, right, but the context and interrelationships gradually unfold. Is there a part of the story you didn't understand?

Oh sorry -I reuploaded the proper Ch1 a few days ago and posted in the blog comments where our conversation was happening; I thought you would have got a notification about it. Other than that, Ch2 should be here by Christmas, though progress is slow :S

Feedback, incoming.

-"one day, brad went on a drug trip" kind of feels like a weak opening line. Even just changing it to "Brad was tripping" would feel a lot stronger.

-writing starts off kind of choppy, and the first battle feels like it's jumping in ahead of the plot. Things smooth out immediately afterwards, but first impressions are key. Maybe a little more time to develop Brad, so that he doesn't come off as so much of a caricature, and a few more lines for Luke would go a long way towards glossing the reader into the game.

-the music is really quite good. Engaging and midi in a nice way. It's never abrasive, and it fits the personalities well.

-"you can tell what personality Luke is in from the menu color, whichwill change" needs a space

-"we are gathered here to pay tribute to the great god Serotonin" this game has some absolutely perfect lines.

-scripting different dialog for each personality must be a huge pain, but I freaking love the interactivity it gives the game. Kudos for doing that.

-after accepting the mission from Naomi to hack the bot, I wandered around town for a bit, but no one was interactable except for the robot vendors. Maybe have a "but thou must complete the mission" script railroading me into going directly after the bot if you don't want to do a ton of dialog.

-before going to see the bot, I wandered over to chat with Quoc. Triggered some dialog, which was awesome, but then my exit back to the town ceased to exist and I found I could walk through walls, which was less awesome. The ladder still worked, though, so I was able to get stoned downstairs, despite being able to walk through all the people, walls, furniture, and gently rotating penguins down there, too.

-it's the little extra touches that really make the game, and the "please don't leave me" when you go to quit is spectacular

-there's a ribcage I can walk through near the lower triangle of the map in the town before doing the bot quest (not sure if it's passable after doing the quest. Right now Luke's torso kinda seamlessly merges with it.

-some doors in town are not clearly doors. The one that leads to the robo vendors appears shut until you walk into it, and the one to the left by the save point (with the skull over it) is apparently open, but can't be passed through.

-On the way up towards where the bot quest was indicated to be, there's a door next to a save point next to a treasure chest. The chest is non-interactable, and the door doesn't open, but walking onto the save point jumped me into a cutscene with Luke asking to go to the Hive.

-Loved the elevator scene.

-when Luke is using the overseer to spy on the outside of the temple, the first thing it picks up is Snowy, and the next is the robber. Why weren't Luke and Naomi picked up? They entered through the front door. Maybe make the scene a little longer to prevent potential plot-holing?

-I really hope having to write down and remember phone numbers will not be an important system mechanic. It kinda breaks the player from the flow of the game if they have to go hunt around for a pen and paper, and then remember where the damn paper is when they forget about the game and come back to it in a month and then have to start from scratch 'cause it's an indie title with no strategy guide...yeah. Just saving you a lot of potential future headache, man.

-save point inside gobot can't be walked over. instead, you talk with it to save.

-I love the bios, but doing Naiomi's bio before her seeing the moon on the gobot roof kinda kills the surprise/foreshadowing you were doing leading up to her reveal as a werewolf.

-the big, wide open rooms with the security droids who can see you from offscreen? Yeah. Frustrating. Especially when mission score is a thing that matters. Drop their vision range, and change that janitor's dialog, or put up little blockers in the corridors of some of the major areas.

-trying to take the ladder to the room immediately after getting to specs downloaded to naiomi's pda results in the ladder being unusable. Maybe have Naiomi warp to the stairs down immediately after getting the data if the cutscene with the lady is essential to the plot.

-the DJ's kickin' rig in the back of the club can be walked through if you approach it from the middle of the dance floor.

-not sure how I feel about the character portraits on the save screen. I know it's deliberate, but having them be kinda primitive is probably going to be lost on the audience, who'll think "wow, them's some hacky portraits" instead of "oh, that's a design decision."

-got to the end of chapter one. It's good, solid story-telling. There's certainly bugs, but no game-crash ones, which is respectable.

I like the system a great deal. The environments are carefully put together, although sometimes they just inexplicably feel clunky. I think this is because the game doesn't quite match the development software. TCS deserves to look way sleeker than it does, but I guess indie game design is really about making what you can with the tools at hand. Don't drop production on this because someone said it didn't look pretty enough. It's already an excellent game in its own right.

I know this is kinda a lot of feedback at once, but I typically go through and comment as I play, so this is basically all of chapter one at once. I hope it helps, and I'm definitely looking forward to the next working demo.

Thank you! :D

Just give me a shout when there's anything in particular need of testing.