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My contribution for the IGMC. A bucolic beginning on sunny day in green field, children gather to play a game of baseball. Unfortunately, Caitlin accidentally hits the ball into the window of an old house and her friends run off. Only one is willing to join her as she goes to take responsibility for her mistake, but they find themselves trapped in the house when the door swings open after knocking and nobody answers their calls. It doesn't appear deserted. The lights are on, the house is clean and in fine repair, but there is no running water, no food anywhere, and strange, creepy mannequins can be found around the house. When they finally retrieve the ball, all of the windows seal. There is no exit to be found, and when they find a mysterious device, the mannequins come alive and attack!

It's when they find a secret passage in the library that things get very strange and they find themselves at the heart of an alien plot!

A rather simple puzzle game with no difficult puzzles; simply item location and retrieval and enemy avoidance. The game focuses more on story than mechanics. Inspired by 60s and 70s era cheesy sci-fi.

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So I was playing the game and lamenting over how simple it was, when I realized, "Hey, this isn't as simple as I think. People are going to have a lot of trouble figuring some spots out." I wrote a walkthrough and included it with the download. If you get stuck, it should handily get you unstuck. With a few more tweaks to make sure there were no ugly spots or aesthetic glitches, I finally uploaded the game about half an hour ago and I have completed my submission for IGMC 2015. I can only hope my humble offering is worthy of notice.
  • Completed
  • pianotm
  • RPG Maker VX Ace
  • Puzzle
  • 08/05/2015 11:13 AM
  • 02/03/2023 11:22 AM
  • 08/07/2015
  • 27385
  • 4
  • 151

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Pages: 1
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I found a major bug. It's not game breaking, but it scrambles the narrative and actually lets you skip a good chunk of the game.
Just finished it, there are certainly some bugs.

When you need to get the control key from the kitchen, if you go through the hall right of the library door, you'll get the "that was close" message and retrieve it.

Another bug triggered Giznalp's text about the door before I even got into that room. I think it was caused by walking against the locked door in the corridor in the southern part of the base, as when I tried to head back up the verticle corridor afterwords, that's when it triggered.

Finally, at the very end when you get back outside, it's possible to walk up to the door and re-enter the house, cancelling the ending event.
nhubi
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
11099
Well the title did its job, it got my attention.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
author=Kyubey
Just finished it, there are certainly some bugs.

When you need to get the control key from the kitchen, if you go through the hall right of the library door, you'll get the "that was close" message and retrieve it.

Another bug triggered Giznalp's text about the door before I even got into that room. I think it was caused by walking against the locked door in the corridor in the southern part of the base, as when I tried to head back up the verticle corridor afterwords, that's when it triggered.

Finally, at the very end when you get back outside, it's possible to walk up to the door and re-enter the house, cancelling the ending event.


Yep, you found the bug, too. And two others that I thank you for.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
You must have had the very first version I downloaded. I had forgot to set the variables on all of my escape messages so you were getting them before the triggering event.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
I have put up a version that takes care of all of those glitches. I'm not sure how many more it could possibly have. It only takes 10 to 15 minutes to play and it has more glitches than one of my hour long games.
@pianotm - I'll give you credit for all of the references to notable works of science fiction, but I'll have to take the bulk of those points away for all of the visual glitches I encountered over the course of this game.

pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Ughh, and I tried so hard to keep those tile glitches out...I didn't even notice the lights, and I can't believe I still didn't manage to fix the passability on the door panel even being on my list of things to do. Well, another let's play from my favorite and only reviewer. By the way, if you back into the file room where the two aliens were talking, after they've left (You can go in after Griznalp accidentally locks himself in the control room), you can search the file stacks and one of the file numbers is THX 1138.

I hope I'm at least getting better.
I watched the let's play that was posted.

My thoughts are that yeah, it's got glitches, but you'd only find those by accident, and they don't crash the game or anything, What's more, there were some pretty good jump scares mixed in. I don't play adventure games, but still, not bad.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
Okay so, not to ruin anything i'm going to put a lot in hide tags, SPOILERS PEOPLE!

I died on the cheerleader mannequin and hadn't saved since right before I entered the house, so this is a game I may come back to but for now I'll give my two cents. Sorry, but it was kinda unexpected to get a death on contact, thought it might be part of the story so i didn't react quite right. :(


I do like this game, a lot actually. I get that 60s/70s cheesy feel like an episode of Twilight Zone or a nice little B-movie film.
So here's a few things:

I love the character sprites, are they your work?

Maybe instead of that space below the character's name you can move the text up to fit more in so it isn't so weird with longer dialogues?

On the first screen if you come from the teleport event from the side you transfer to the next map sideways instead of looking up, not a big deal but it's jarring and an easy fix.

Thank's Nick. which I'm guessing is just a common error? When every one else runs off and Nick stays. Shouldn't it just be "Thanks, Nick." unless I'm mistaken here.

Love the book shelves with alien type movies/shows/books. One of my favorite Twilight Episodes and books mentioned, so me likey that :D

I find the mannequins idea very creepy and I love it, so good job there.


And here's screenshots of mapping errors and message cutoffs, not sure if they have been brought up but going to put them here:








This is a bit of a double whammy for me besides the box being passable I feel like the right wall shouldn't be visible and should be a black cutoff for that screen.
I also feel like all the black areas should be shift clicked mapped where you don't see the brick tiles and just plain black. But that's just me.




Nothing wrong here, but I like the RMN shoutout, always nice.








Riiight before I got the gameover, wasn't sure if Nick was supposed to be facing me when we were backing up.




I know you're working with bigger sprites here and that makes things awkward but you should definitely make most tiles impassable with that handy X instead of trying to go for the Above Hero parts, since this game doesn't really need it.


I do really like this game, this is my shit right here and the genre I love. You have a way about story telling and grabbing that niche you are aiming for but the mapping could use a lot of work and something I would be happy to help you with if need be. Just PM if you're interested in something like that.

I will be visiting this game again, because broken record here I do like it. This is something I could see popping my cherry on reviews for I enjoyed it that much.

So, look forward to me coming back on this and hopefully helping you out a bit to get this cool game what it deserves!
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
InfectionFiles
I love the character sprites, are they your work?

Yep, cartoony and basic.

Maybe instead of that space below the character's name you can move the text up to fit more in so it isn't so weird with longer dialogues?


Yeah, I've started changing the colors of the names in my current games. It works a little better.

On the first screen if you come from the teleport event from the side you transfer to the next map sideways instead of looking up, not a big deal but it's jarring and an easy fix.


Yeah, I have a really bad habit of doing that. I really need to stop.

Thank's Nick. which I'm guessing is just a common error? When every one else runs off and Nick stays. Shouldn't it just be "Thanks, Nick." unless I'm mistaken here.


Yeah, basically. It's one of those things you don't notice.

Riiight before I got the gameover, wasn't sure if Nick was supposed to be facing me when we were backing up.


One of the things I hate about caterpillar systems. I usually don't use them but for this game, I felt it was necessary since it's basically a buddy type of story. Not using the caterpillar system would have required a lot of unnecessary eventing to make sure Nick was in every scene.

The one map with the weird wall wandering off into the black was a bit of an error in judgement with mapping. I don't do that anymore, and with all of these errors pointed out, I should probably go back and fix that. I'll probably tweak this up a bit once the swapsie event is over.

Honestly, I got such a small response with this game, I didn't think anyone liked it, which is why I really haven't bothered with it (and why I haven't asked anyone to review). Also, the mannequins, one of the easiest ways to avoid them is to run around an object. VX Ace's approach player setting for events is smart enough to figure out how to move around objects, but it takes it a few tries to figure it out, which is more than enough time to get away.

Yeah, I'm figuring out that with big sprites, you just have to grin and bear it and X everything out.

Anyway, thank you so much for your comments. It does really make me feel better about this game.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
Just finished the game! My first death was basically because I didn't expect it I guess. I don't know how else to go about this rather than trial and error because I thought her coming towards me was a scene related thing and didn't run oops!

So after a few screenshots I figured out that the blue lights are all passable so I won't flood with screens on that, that was kind of a biggie but these mapping errors don't affect the story obviously there are just a lot of them.

Here's a few other things:




Missing "they"?


Not trying to be a negative nelly with these screens just putting them out there


So here's a I really love this menu btw :D


Loved those walker graphics and the aliens, some nice art right there. Simple but great and definitely better than I can do :P

And you're quite welcome, sir. I really did enjoy this game, a lot. So much that I came back and finished it, if that says anything.
It was a fun, short romp that I could almost picture as a goosebumps book or something along those lines.
Again, loved the mannequins, and there is something creepy about approaching the one alien and him screaming "Humans!" and the touch resulting in death. Pretty hardcore. Spoiler:
Also liked the plot of Nick being a robot the whole time because I was kinda suspicious to begin with for some reason and I'm glad that paid off!


I totally recommend this game!
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Okay, I knew about the lights and the keypad from Sacred's let's play. I swear, I thought I fixed that. Maybe I didn't upload...

I threw in a little Hitchcockian thing where the robots have a telltale feature that isn't obvious but is right in front of you. If you look at facechips for the mannequins and Nick, you notice that none of them have eyebrows and that all of the humans do. The menu has a vague little Easter egg in it, too: it uses the X-Files font. This was all shortly after I followed the custom menu tutorial and was having fun with the things I could do.


Thank you, again! I had the story in my head, but I couldn't really find anything to match the style that the story engendered.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
Maybe that's what it was, sub-consciously. Because I even examined the differences between the mannequins and the character's facesets. I noticed that the main character had her own style and the mannequins had theirs, but I can say that I didn't see the eyebrow thing, so that's really cool. It was also Nick's obliviousness to all of it that became clear when it was known about body switching, that sealed it right there. But I wish I noticed the eyebrows because I did check the faces! That part escaped me though.


I would really like to see this game with all your own graphics to keep it consistent and clean. It has such a great vibe to me already that I think if all the graphics were the same it would be fluid as hell. Maybe something to consider, I know it's a lot of work but it might really give this game the edge it needs.

As for the menu, that makes sense, I liked the font but wasn't thinking X-Files which is funny because I have been watching it recently after the whole bringing it back thing. One thing that did bother me was pressing space or enter would start a new game. So dying meant i had to wait the (what few milliseconds lol) for the menu to cycle to the load game option. Not a huge thing, but I was feverishly clicking to get back in game and had to return to title a few times after restarting the game lol

But again, you're welcome and thank you for the neat experience :)
I hope you don't mind, but I did a play through of your game. Thank you so much for making the game!

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