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X-Noir Demo

  • Stoic
  • 11/17/2012 06:26 PM
  • 3758 views
It's been several months of quiet but now the X-Noir demo is finally available to play! The demo runs about 2 hours and features the first 2 cases of the game.

This is our first release outside of Master of the Wind so we're excited to see what old fans think as well as new ones. Hope everyone enjoys it and looking forward to your feedback!

Posts

Pages: 1
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
Just checked this out. Didn't play it for too long but I thought I'd chime in with some thoughts.

I'd say the graphics you're using really fly in the face of what you're trying to convey. The frankly silly VXAce-generated faces and adorable chibi VX Sprites don't exactly promote a feeling of urban malaise, political corruption, alcoholism, depression, etc.

The opening sequence really confused me. We go from Eddie contemplating suicide to him having fun with his friends a few minutes later. That scene at the bar hardly conveys any sort of image of a man who has been crushed by life. Quite the opposite, he seems pretty popular and has lots of people who like him. I'm sure Eddie's problems will be expounded on later but this struck me as a pretty odd way to open the game.

The combat system seems pretty neat and is a lot more fluid than I was expecting it to be. Gets button-mashy at melee range though.

I really like how when you're examining evidence you have to actually look at it and use deductive reasoning to figure out what it is. Makes the player feel smart or like they're solving something. I dig it!

I would say the city is generally too big and feels too samey, but that's probably an issue of limited map resources. But if you want to find more modern resources, there's stuff out there. Don't know if it's compatible with what you're already using though.

I think I remember reading on your site you were hoping to make this a commercial title eventually? I don't mind telling you I'd hope to see some improvements in the graphics department before that happens.
Hey thanks for the feedback Solitayre!

We're aware that the using of the VX Ace graphics isn't exactly ideal. While we are hoping for custom profiles and sprites down the line it's hard to tell when or if that will happen. Like with MotW we plan on pushing through development.

Glad you enjoyed the initial gameplay. I'll be interested to hear what you think of the "zones" which feature logic puzzles like in MotW and more combat.

As for going commercial, that's something that Volrath and I are not too concerned about right now. We've found it bogs down the project so we're going to focus on getting the game out first and maybe in the future we'll consider taking it further.
author=Solitayre
The combat system seems pretty neat and is a lot more fluid than I was expecting it to be. Gets button-mashy at melee range though.


Thanks, it was my first go at an ABS. If you've got any suggestions please pass them on.

To everyone:
I know I was a developer but only on the custom systems mostly. It's a pretty fun game and if you're on the fence, definitely try it.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
I'm not sure what the anxiety meter is really adding to the game right now, since at any time I can go back to Eddie's apartment and sleep until I get it down. I get that it's supposed to serve as a penalty for bad detective work but the player doesn't always have enough context to tell what the correct choice is. I get that there's some obvious Phoenix Wright parallels here, where you need to detect when people are lying and call them on it, but in PW you usually have detailed files and evidence you can refer to during your cross-examination. Here you usually only have a sentence or two, and often the thing they were lying about was mentioned in passing three conversations ago. Then there's things like the broken robot where you just have to guess which part Eddie finds important.

And again, the anxiety meter can essentially be ignored because I can sleep it off at almost any time.

The whole "hunt down the factory workers" segment is awful. You have to track down a certain number of them throughout the entire city filled with people until you've found some arbitrary number that refer you to Lester. I'd found Lester several times prior to this but he wouldn't talk to me, despite wearing a jacket marking him as a factory worker. This is an arbitrary barrier to progress, I could tell Lester was important when someone mentioned him by name, but couldn't confront him until Eddie said so. There's no good reason to deny a player who stumbles on Lester the ability to progress, because their alternative is to find a bunch of workers who will refer them to Lester anyway. None of the other workers have anything particularly interesting to say.

Putting 6-7 of those "Crack the code" puzzles in one room, even an optional one, made me want to pull my hair out. One is plenty.

Is there a shotgun in the factory? I found tons of shotgun ammo, but no shotgun.
Those are some good points you bring up. I agree that the anxiety meter is a bit superfluous right now. We are using it as a way to measure how well the player is doing in a case behind the scenes. We still need to think of better ways to use it in-game though.

Some of the questioning is a bit guess work although usually there is a better choice when you think about it. None if it really hampers your progress though.

This is not the first time we got a complaint about hunting for the factory workers. I didn't think it was that much of a pain since there are 9 and you only need to find 5 but we'll have to reevaluate that section.

You could find the shotgun in the sewers or purchase it at the mall.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
I think both dungeons are generally pretty well-paced aside from the one room I mentioned, enemy placement is sometimes obnoxious but I feel like enemies take just the right number of hits to kill. I run out of ammo a lot but that's probably because I am being a cheapskate and not buying any. I feel like the second boss was just about right, the first one felt like he took way too many hits to kill but this is probably because I did not find the shotgun!

This is as good a time as any to point out that I do not like Eddie as a character. His constant whining and griping do not come across as justified, as, like I pointed out before, he has lots and lots of friends and people who respect him. There's little in the game at this point that supports his inferiority complex and he just comes across as a drunk asshole rather than the sympathetic character he was obviously intended to be. I kind of wish someone would just smack him and tell him to grow up already.

Also I'm not sure if your intention was to essentially give away who the villain is at the end of the demo, but it's about as subtle as a monsoon.
Hey, someone actually played it. You've made a lot of good points and given good feedback, particularly in regard to Lester. I suppose he shouldn't appear at all until Eddie is given more information about where he hangs out. Like AB said, the anxiety meter is only half-implemented right now, if that. We have more detailed plans for its role in the game but we haven't finished with it and it might not be totally ready until the whole thing is done, given its planned role in the ending. At any case, this is hardly as polished as a full MotW arc, as I'm sure you realized. We're still figuring a lot of this out.

As for the commercial stuff we floated on the website, that's not at the forefront right now. It just saps all the fun out of the production because, as you said, we can't very well go in that direction with the graphics we're currently using so you start getting into a mode where you think "Oh, should we even add this new character, that new location, etc? We'll just have to replace it later." For now, I'd just like to create for the sake of it. If something else happens later, it happens.

Your comments about Eddie amuse me. Please understand that I am not holding up this sad sack as someone who should be admired and emulated. He's a miserable human being, but showing him some sympathy in the story doesn't necessarily endorse his behavior. I just know that most people have no compassion for someone who is such a basket case and can't get out of his own way, so I thought maybe I could show him a bit of compassion or at the very least, understanding.

The scene at the beginning is meant to show that all his talk of suicide is crap - the slightest hint of a simple pleasure like buffalo wings or a movie and he's ready to forget about it for a bit. However, you're not the first person to be perplexed by it so it seems I didn't pull it off as well as I liked. And you're right to point out that he does command at least a little respect among his friends, but it doesn't really matter if you don't respect yourself. Numerous people will call him out for his behavior before the game ends although this doesn't really come up in what we've released so far. But thanks for playing and giving a detailed reaction, that stuff's fun.

author=Solitayre
Also I'm not sure if your intention was to essentially give away who the villain is at the end of the demo, but it's about as subtle as a monsoon.

Think so, huh? Well everyone said Rayne Mistral was "obviously" The Sparrow, so we'll see.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
Volrath
The scene at the beginning is meant to show that all his talk of suicide is crap - the slightest hint of a simple pleasure like buffalo wings or a movie and he's ready to forget about it for a bit. However, you're not the first person to be perplexed by it so it seems I didn't pull it off as well as I liked.

It's just a very odd set-up. We start with a man about to commit suicide. My default assumption is to take this seriously (I hate when suicide is played for comedy, for instance.) and assume this guy is in a bad place. But then he heads on over to the local pub, everyone greets him by name and enjoys his company, he has a good time. It's a pretty upbeat scene! Then we're back to somber when we have the opening credits crawl while he staggers home drunk and really depressing music plays. I'm not sure what I'm exactly supposed to be feeling! Is it supposed to be sad or funny or I don't even know.

The impression I'm taking away from Eddie is he was once a good man, a pillar of society, who we're told has just fallen on hard times. But there's just not much to suggest that Eddie has it so bad right now, so without any context of his supposed past failures I'm just not grasping at what he has to be so upset about. As such, his constant self-pity just comes across as irritating.

Volrath
Think so, huh? Well everyone said Rayne Mistral was "obviously" The Sparrow, so we'll see.

I'm on to you.
author=Solitayre
We start with a man about to commit suicide. My default assumption is to take this seriously (I hate when suicide is played for comedy, for instance.) and assume this guy is in a bad place. But then he heads on over to the local pub, everyone greets him by name and enjoys his company, he has a good time. It's a pretty upbeat scene! Then we're back to somber when we have the opening credits crawl while he staggers home drunk and really depressing music plays. I'm not sure what I'm exactly supposed to be feeling! Is it supposed to be sad or funny or I don't even know.

Hmm, well here's how I look at that whole intro - Eddie's despair is real and suicide is often on his mind. However, there's a part of him that does want to hold on and that's why it takes only the tiniest distraction (wings in that instance) to get him to back away from the ledge, metaphorically speaking. Eventually, the therapist will try and make him aware that he really does want to live and that's the part that he ought to embrace rather than keep returning to his usual patterns of misery. Obviously none of that is evident in the first scene, but this pattern of "Eddie is on the brink but then goes about his business instead" will repeat itself a few times during the game and then I hope the player will have a better idea of what's going on with him.

Eddie's in his element at a place like the bar, he enjoys chatting with people and genuinely would like to help when he can. That's probably what made him a good politician. But when he leaves and walks home, the only company he has is himself...and he obviously loathes himself. So that's my rationale for the grim tone of that bit. And as for his reasons for being depressed in the first place, that's kind of a chicken-and-egg question, isn't it? Did the unraveling of his political career (details will be forthcoming about that) cause the depression, or did he react so badly to that setback because of the depression? I think a lot of people with depression wonder about that sort of thing, I'll be candid and say I certainly do.

So even though I can do all this explaining, it's clear to me that the opening scene isn't working so well. We put out a much rougher demo on a smaller site a while back and people expressed basically the same confusion you did about the overall tone and "mood whiplash," as TV tropes might put it. I tweaked the scene a bit after that, but something about it still isn't communicating to people who aren't living in Eddie's head all the time like me and ArtBane. I don't want to get a point where I have to abandon subtext and flat-out tell the player how to feel about it, but I am having a hard time coming up with a good solution for making it work.

Basically, what I would like people to get from it is "Eddie talks big about suicide but is not fully committed to it if he can get distracted so easily from it by wings and beer." But having a character actually say that...well, then you get the "show, don't tell" problem.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
Okay, I understand what you were going for, I just think expecting players to understand what's going on in Eddie's head two minutes after we've been introduced to him is probably asking a lot of them.

Regarding the depression, I don't know how much of "depressed" I see in Eddie, 90% of his problems could more readily be attributed to "alcoholism." I understand that this is probably Eddie's way of self-medicating, but it's given significantly more prominence throughout the narrative, even when talking to the therapist. I was actually a little annoyed that you could use beer to reduce his anxiety because I didn't want to feed his bad habit.

I've been wanting to do my own detective fiction game for probably around a year now so this was an interesting play for me, if only to see how much different my own ideas are from where you guys went with a similar premise.
author=Solitayre
I was actually a little annoyed that you could use beer to reduce his anxiety because I didn't want to feed his bad habit.


There's definitely some not-so-nice implications from that. If we're able to pull it off, we were hoping to have a "drunk" state that would kick in if you put away too many beers. In combat, this would make you far less accurate with your shots but we haven't come up with a consequence for when you're just walking around the city. Maybe you randomly pass out and someone steals your wallet, haha.

I suspect I'll return to the intro again, although I'm still at a loss for exactly what to change to pull it off. I obviously can't convey Eddie's entire psychological profile in a couple of minutes, but maybe if the rest of the game gets inside his head effectively, people can re-examine and the intro and it will make more sense.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
author=Volrath
There's definitely some not-so-nice implications from that. If we're able to pull it off, we were hoping to have a "drunk" state that would kick in if you put away too many beers. In combat, this would make you far less accurate with your shots but we haven't come up with a consequence for when you're just walking around the city. Maybe you randomly pass out and someone steals your wallet, haha.


It would be a lot of work, but I think it would be utterly hilarious if you could go up to important witnesses while drunk and start asking them really stupid questions.
We did get the text distorter working when anxious (or was it drunk) but it was too good.
author=Fomar0153
We did get the text distorter working when anxious (or was it drunk) but it was too good.

I loved that thing and still would enjoy seeing it used somehow, but that will take additional brainstorming.
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