• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

A Strong Case of First Game Syndrome

  • Frogge
  • 08/01/2018 10:33 PM
  • 1506 views

Veins by UminoA0i
Length: ~2.5 hours


Before we start I want to point out that this was, indeed, the developer's first game. This review, while poking fun at things in the game (...a loooot) is ultimately meant to be constructive. The game has a ton of problems, sure, but I also think the developer shows a lot of potential for making better games and I'd love to see their future works!

Anyway, Veins is a pseudo-Yume Nikki fangame. The reason I say pseudo is that while the game borrows a lot from Yume Nikki, it is also different in a lot of ways, such as how it actually has dialogue or how the world is a lot less open and the game feels more like a linear adventure than an open world exploration at most times.

I'll get more onto that later on as we play more of the game. So for now let's just start it up and-



Ooooooh dear. Oh no. I can't do this. No, please, for the love of god, my eyes literally cannot handle this.

Hold up. I think I can fix this. Give me a moment.


It's time to hackā„¢ into the game files. What's up, rm decrypter, my old friend.

Doo doo doo~ Just doing a few edits here and there. Dad da daaa~~



Oh my god. YES. Now this is a real relief on my eyes.


So for those of you who have no idea what I just did, I'll explain it to you. Basically, my absolute biggest pet peeve when it comes to any pixel art game is when there are pixels that are sized differently than one another.


Credit goes to DisfunctionalKarrmel for the image. I took the image from their review because it was a good example.


Most people don't consider this a huge problem. I mean, there are amazing games that have this issue such as Terraria or Stardew Valley.

But I get bothered like hell. Like I said, it's my absolute biggest pet peeve. Heck, maybe not even my biggest pet peeve in pixel art games, it might just be my absolute biggest pet peeve EVER. So yes, I had to bother going into the game files...

...to downscale and then upscale every single sprite...

...so that all pixel sizes would be consistent.

Oh, by the way, most developers, when informed about the issue, mention that there are too many sprites for them to go back and edit. So I decided to time how long it took me to ''fix'' the game's graphics for future reference.

I do not remember the exact amount of images that was in each folder, but roughly 50+ character sprites, 20+ tilesets, 20+ parallaxes and 50+ pictures took me only 39 whole minutes to ''fix''.

This is not at all meant to be a point towards the developer. Heck, I used to make the exact same mistake in my games when I first started out. I do not want to call the developer lazy for not going back and editing all their sprites, it's their game and they are free not to.

I just wanted to put it out there that it really doesn't take that long to rougly fix stuff up. If you're on a deadline, sure, I can understand wanting to focus on other things so you can finish on time, but for a serious project that you're gonna go over and polish... please, do not do this. My eyes are begging you.

Once again, not at all directed towards UminoAoi themselves. I'm sure they didn't know it was an issue since it's a fairly common mistake and most beginning developers do not know about it, but I would adivise them to avoid this issue at least in their future games.

Sure, resizing the sprites made a thing or two weird, but I could always tell what I was looking at and I think despite not being flawless edits, it was much, MUCH easier for me to look at the game screen. Do I regret spending 40 minutes to fix the sprites? Not. One. Second.

Anyway, mini rant done, onto other things.


666? Really? What is this, dude, creepypasta wiki?


Going into the game, I really wanted to be able to say Veins surpassed my expectations. I figured that now that the game got a make over, maybe I would actually like it a surprising lot! I was very intrigued by the cover art and also some of the CGs I saw while resizing them. Most of all, I really expected the game to have a good story.

Sadly, I was disappointed on almost all fronts. And honestly... I really don't even know where to start.

Well, I guess while we're on it, I'll talk about the visuals of the game.

I was happy to find out with the fix on the pixels, the game actually looked rather good! There were a lot of areas that were pretty nice to look at and some even looked downright gorgeous. Sadly, I also had a bunch of issues with the issues.

For one, there were a few areas that reaaaaally didn't look up to par with the others. The lighting effects were horrible both visually and practically due to the fact that the developer decided to use Khas' light effects script. By the way, don't do that, please. There are a lot of areas where the tints are exceptionally dark and wash out the colors and make them very... saturated and dark. And I've already talked more than enough about the pixel inconsistency which would have bothered me so much more if I couldn't have made my way into the game files.


For comparison, here's four areas in the game that I think look exceptionally gorgeous...



And two that... don't.


Now of course it's not all about just the tiles, the mapping has a large part in it too. For example, the image on the left is just RTP, right? Not necessarily bad. But it's the mapping that really ruins it. Why is that tree on top of the wall? Why is that house LITERALLY a wall? (Basically when you make your house one tile thick it looks too thin to actually live in. It basically just looks like a wall.)
Most maps in the game are pretty okay, there's just a few here and there that have bad tile usage, are very large and bland or just make no sense in the way that they are laid out.

There are other issues here and there, such as how some of the parallaxes aren't actually seamless so they look weird when they move around.


Uhh, that's not a seamless image, buddy, I can very clearly see where the image ends.


But if we're talking about something I CAN praise about the game's visuals, it's the art. The game has a very distinctive and adorable art style to it that is extremely well drawn. I truly enjoyed pretty much every CG in the game. Something else that's minor I would criticize here, though, would be that all the character busts are pixel art but... the CGs are hand drawn for some reason? Once again, it's inconsistent, but it's not particularly annoying that I would knock down the game's score had its other issues not existed. Something minor, but still something to watch out for in the future for the developer.


I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE the art. Ten thumbs up for it.


That's all I have to say about the visuals. I guess while we're on it I could talk a bit about the soundtrack. And it's, well, it's pretty much a yume nikki game soundtrack alright. It's mainly made up of short loops or ambiance. To be completely honest with you I just turned on itunes and put on my own music halfway through.

Now let's get to my other big gripe with the game, its story. Basically, the game starts off with our nameless protagonist locking herself in her room after her parents go nuts and start trying to attack her. The only way being out of her balcony, she goes there and ends up finding herself in a black void with several objects. This is the nexus, the hub area that connects the worlds to each other. If you've played Yume Nikki you probably already know what this is. Anyway, there you meet a boy named Daniel who tells you that something weird is going on and that you have to explore these worlds and find a cure, so the protagonist and Daniel team up to, well, explore said worlds.

Now I think this is a very decent premise. The whole thing about your parents attacking you is super intriguing...

But then the developer does pretty much nothing with it.


Not to mention, looking at things from a polish point of view, which I will talk more about later, the scene is not very well paced, it doesn't have the visual impressiveness to it to make it stand out as much as it deserves and I find the introduction scene to Daniel to be extremely stupid.

Basically he introduces himself as a childhood friend of our protagonist. The protagonist, now realizing she remembers nothing from her childhood questions him about it. And after they sit down and talk for a while, our main protagonist decides to blindly put all her faith into Daniel and asks him to tag along.

Okay, so straight off the bat, our main character is VERY oblivious. She does not, even for a moment, stop to suspect Daniel. Which, in her current situation, one would logically do, at least a little.

And man, I really gotta mention, I had such mixed feelings about the dynamic between these two. They warm up to each other and start acting buddy-buddy so quickly that it felt ridiculous. They talk about... memes. No, literally, they sit down and talk about memes every once in a while and apparently Daniel's a RAPPER of all things???


Oh god, Daniel, you are embarassing yourself so much right now you have no idea.


I'll talk a bit more about these two in a bit but I should probably give you a quick rundown of the rest of the story.

So basically, protag remembers nothing from her past. After finding all effects (these are basically special abilities that do different things for those of you who may not have played Yume Nikki), a door appears in the nexus. Beyond this point there are two endings you can get. There are seven clones of yourself you can find in the dream world that ask you to kill them when you talk to them. If you so wish, you can do this with the scalpel effect.

If you kill all of them, you get the good ending. If you miss even one, bad ending it is. There are seven of them in total. I pretty much avoided killing them at all for the most part. I figured if there was a good/bad ending situation here, being less violent would surely lead to the good ending, right? I didn't wanna screw myself over by killing them and get locked on the bad ending.

Well, it's the other way around, actually. This confused me the first time around but okay, no biggie.

In the good ending you find out that protag used to be a test subject for something called the afterlife project. It's some sort of project for when people die for them to witness their happiest memories and stuff. Except their testing is very unethical. From what I gathered, they did the exact opposite on the test subjects - showed them their deepest traumas. Now I may be completely off with this for reasons I will talk to in a minute, so please correct me if I pretty much got all of the story down incorrectly.

You learn that Daniel was actually a pet bunny given to our protag (Trust me, it sounds weird but there was like a lot of build up for it and stuff. This was one of the plot points the developer actually handled pretty well.), but he himself is also a test subject - he's a bunny that has been given the brain of a human. He cannot talk to our protag, but he understands perfectly fine what she is saying. Oh, also, he's capable of opening doors, apparently? Lmao.

Anyway then the testing becomes too much for protag and she tries to escape. And then gets devoured by the guard dogs outside. She gets brought back in the hospital so that some remaining data can be collected from her before she dies and then Daniel finds her. She dies right next to him at a somewhat heartfelt moment and then they both end up in the dream realm together somehow. I dunno, I didn't really get that bit.

Anyway, in the bad ending, Daniel kills protag before everything I've mentioned above is even revealed and it's revealed that, surprise, it was a loop all along! The protagonist, in an extremely cliche (but I'm fine with it, honestly, it's better than a lot of other twists I could think of) turn of events begins the loop over again, meeting Daniel without remembering him and then the credits roll.

The good ending, of course, has a LOT more to it. Like I said, everything I just described above is only revealed in the good ending. Daniel does stab protag once again, but then we get a flashback to all the events I just described. And then Daniel prepares to restart the loop when protag comes running in to hug him. Then it gets revealed that killing those clones... made her accept... the truth so now she can remember everything.......

Oof, okay, you lost me with that ending.



But okay I really gotta appreciate how much Daniel looks like Austin Mcconell in this one scene.


What I really hate about this ending is that it's just so cheesy and forced. It's meant to be touching and they cry and stuff, but all I can think of is the fact that the developer just sitting there, thinking about how they want to implement a happy ending so they try to come up with something but they can't think of anything, so they just threw in the ''I finally accepted it!'' excuse.

Which would have been okay if we actually got to see our protag slowly coming to terms with the truth. But she doesn't. There aren't any cutscenes you get for killing the clones. You don't get to see her recall slight fragments of her memory and grow as a character. You don't get to see her question her morals and her existance after killing a clone. She just kills a bunch of clones so... yeah, happy ending, I guess.


And the plot itself isn't the only problem here, it's also the dialogue between the characters.

Daniel and protag are both extremely monotone characters. Daniel shows a really cool other side to him near the end, but this goes COMPLETELY underused. They basically have the exact same each personality. They act like 14 year old children in their otaku phas- wait, are they 14 year old children in their otaku phases? They sure as hell speak like they are.
There's occasional well written dialogue between them and it's also fun to see them tease each other but the rest of the writing really doesn't hold up.

I should also mention that I could never tell who was speaking, mainly because the only difference between Daniel's dialogue and the protag's is that Daniel's name shows up in the dialogue box and protag speaks in quotations marks. That's pretty much it. Oh, and also, when a character's dialogue doesn't fit in the text box, the developer uses another text box, this time without names even for characters who do have names, so it's extremely easy to get confused and think it's protag that is talking. Even a slight bounce on the busts or ''beep'' for when protag speaks and a ''boop'' for when Daniel speaks could have really made it easier to tell them apart.

And couple that with the extremely frequent grammar and spelling errors and oh man. I get that english is definetly not the author's main language, but I definetly think a proofreader would have really done this game justice. Sentences also do not tend to have much flow at all between them, making it really easy to get lost in the conversations and have no idea what is happening.

I honestly didn't get a large majority of the story because I couldn't tell who was talking or what they were talking about.


Oh god, one Daniel was bad enough, now there's two?!


And finally I'm going back to explain why I hated Daniel so much. It's...

Because of his personality shift.

Yup, that's it.

Daniel is an extremely unrealistic character who shows some reality near the ending. Basically, when first given to our protag as her new pet, Daniel is extremely skeptical, just wanting to escape the facility instead of spend time being a pet to a young girl.

And then we get some text saying she grew on him and her childish aura made him like her.

I mean, come on, that's such a sudden personality change over something so simple. I mean, I could have at least gone along with it if we'd SEEN it. If we got scenes of protag being emotional and talking to Daniel and Daniel slowly warming up to her, or if we saw something bad happen to Daniel and saw the protag take care of him over it (like say, he hurt his foot somewhere or something I dunno and protag immediately began gathering whatever she could find around the room to start treating him) then I could have seen how their friendship came to be.

But Daniel basically goes from ''I didn't care about her. I just wanna escape'' to ''Don't give up, little buddy! I know you can't hear me, but I really think you're totally awesome and I'll always be with you!'' in little to no time. Again, with none of his warming up to her being shown to us.

This just made me hate Daniel due to how much of a shell he was for a potentially great character who just got taken over by a ''everything is sunshines and rainbows! I believe in you!'' character.


Oh, also, unless you sit down at a bird cage to rest and talk to Daniel or you witness an event, the him and the protag never really speak. The protag just doesn't really... react to anything at all.

I mean, this is what most Yume Nikki fangame protagonists do, but for them, it's justified. In most cases they know they are dreaming so they know the creepy shit they see isn't real, not to mention, they tend to be silent protagonists.

Our protag here isn't a silent protagonist. And to her knowledge, what she's going through isn't a dream. So why doesn't she react to the tons of clones of her that lie dead on the ground or the pools of blood or the animal corpses she discovers?

Then there we a whole bunch of other characters but they get little to no screen time at all and I didn't particularly care for any of them so onto something else we go!

And now, onto the gameplay.

The gameplay is basically your standart Yume Nikki stuff. Explore and find effects, and then use those effects to find other things. There's ''events'' (once again for non-Yume Nikki fans, events basically refers to major scenes being played out in Yume Nikki games. That's not the best definition of it, but it should give you an idea.) and clones to search for.

In comparison to most Yume Nikki fangames, Veins has a fairly small world to explore that does not feel particularly connected or interesting for the most part. There's extremely minimal worldbuilding present here. So, the main character's deepest traumas, right? Let's see... a graveyard... a desert... an art gallery. Yeah these will do.

The world never felt particularly fun to explore. On the contrary, I found myself getting frustrated a lot. There's a teleportation maze involving some doors and I don't necessarily mind teleportation mazes, but the ones in Yume Nikki fangames usually tend to have a set pattern to them. They are easy to figure out most of the time. But in Veins, the doors in the teleport maze aren't actually connected. If you enter a door, there's a chance that if you try going back, you'll end up somewhere else entirely. This made things so frustrating when I just wanted to go back the way I came and then was suddenly back at the start of the maze. Finding the asylum effect was HUGE pain.
Oh and also the mazes. There is a maze in this game. Since Yume Nikki has one, pretty much every fangame needs to as well, right? Anyway, it's all fine and dandy, the maze itself wasn't too bad, but dear lord, there's one you encounter later on that's in first person of all things. I had absolutely NO idea where I was going and got stuck in this maze for a long while. All rooms looked the same, you had no idea which direction you were supposed to be going, you couldn't go back and you can't just get out. If you enter the maze, you're stuck in it until you solve it.


By the way, after interacting with a door, you can actually still move around while it's opening and once it does, it will teleport you to another map!


And then the much larger, and easily the biggest problem of them all - the game is so, so unpolished.

There are bugs EVERYWHERE, some that even made my game soft-lock and force me to restart. There are also visual polish issues I mentioned earlier. I don't remember a single cutscene in the game that played out nicely because all of them were filled with random cuts or sprites suddenly disappearing. It was definetly not a very ''theatrical'' experience in terms of its cutscenes. There's a few things here and there that looked very nice like an animation that played when you entered one room in the hospital, but otherwise, if this game were a movie, it would pretty much be The Room.


Oh yeah, you can also do the moving around thing during cutscenes too. I broke the game a few times due to this accidentally. My character should be sitting next to the bird cage here, but instead I managed to move her to under Daniel's arm.


A lot of things are poorly evented. When you enter a map, it usually takes a while to tint (PS to dev: You can set the tint time to 1. This pretty much makes tints seem instantaneous. For example, the room will be dark as soon as you enter a room instead of taking a few seconds to darken down.) and the title screen was like... extremely unresponsive??? (It look super cool, but I had to click continue like 5+ times every single time to get it to work. Still, vx ace is a bitch when it comes to custom menus and this is something I really struggled to fix recently myself, so for the developer's first game, just like most other things here, it is very excusable. Still cool that they added it in instead of just the usual rm title screen). It took me a few attempts to get the syringe effect to work too. I would just press shift but it wouldn't do anything. Oh and having to sit through ''Your memories have been saved'' each time I loaded the game was PAINFUL. Oh, and the transports between maps are set to action button for some reason?? Like every time you step on the edge of a map you have to press space to get onto the next one instead of it just automatically taking you. This would be fine with like, doors, but it's so weird for just normal hallways.


Oh, and dev, you do know that rpg maker has a loop feature by default, right? You don't really have to duplicate a map three times and add a trillion transport events around it to make the looping work.


I mean, the game couldn't really even implement most of Yume Nikki's elements. You couldn't use an effect from the menu to unequip it if you already had it equipped, and there was no way to even like wake up before getting the syringe effect so if you wanted to return to your room you had to walk all the way back.

But you know, I talked about the negatives of Veins a lot. The game isn't all bad, trust me, there are things it does really well - the small things.


This is an amazing section. Basically, you're in an art gallery and there's this secluded bloody part of the gallery. The closer you get to it, the more of these mice men start to appear. This was the most unnerving scene for me. It's a much better way to creep your player out than throwing blood and jumpscares at the player (this game doesn't throw jumpscares at you but blood is fairly common, which is fine, it just makes the game more edgy than scary or serious)


There were a few scenes here and there that really shined in comparison to the rest of the game. I know I said I didn't like the worldbuilding, but it also did things very well at times. I really like the effects and how they all pretty much tie in with the story somehow.

The scalpel and syringe relate to the hospital theme, the bunny ears reference Daniel, the card effect is probably a nod to how most doors at the hospital were probably unlocked by cards, the asylum effect represents the looming insanity over our protag and the glasses also give you a lab coat and make you look like a scienetish to represent those who conducted the experiments on you. The tea party, ghost and no eyes effects were the only ones that felt a bit out of place mainly because I couldn't really think of any way they tied into the world building or story. I loved how Daniel wouldn't step into the hospital because he's been traumatized of them and I loved how you can lots of bunny imagery in the dream world to foreshadow events to come. I love how the chasers are nurses, it fits the theme of the game really well.


Oh, also, the game doesn't use the default ace menu! For a first game, that's super impressive that the developer managed to center the menu commands and remove the things they did not need. A lot of developers don't even really bother doing a 5 minute google search to figure out how to do this.

In fact, I really wanna praise the developer for the efforts they spent on the game. Yeah, it's unpolished and I'm not a big fan of it but they clearly tried very hard to make this game as good as possible. The sheer amount of art proves it. Drawing that much sure as hell ain't easy.

All in all, would I recommend Veins? No, not really. But do I think this developer is showing potential and could develop something very great soon enough? Hell yeah. They made their leap into the game dev world with an ambigious project that wasn't particulary great, but in doing so they proved that by improving themselves over time they can definetly make something well worth playing.

I give the game 1.5 pokemon sprites that have been upscaled incorrectly out of five, but congratulate the developer into joining the game dev community and wish them the best of luck on their future projects!

Posts

Pages: 1
Thank you for such a long review!
Generally I had a lot of trouble with this game, because I picked one of my stories, which seemed to be perfect for it, aaaand to be honest, at first I thought that it won't be that difficult. How naive I was haha XD
I started it not long ago after getting my first graphic tablet, so it was not only my beggining in creating games, but also pixel art! That's why some of the locations looks better and some of them looks much worse ^^".
With eventing... Yeah, it was my worst nightmare XD... I actually didnt hava any idea that there is an option to loop the map, so... Yeah, I made hundreds of teleports around the map QnQ. I feel so stupid now, but in the same time I'm so greatful, that you showed me that option! I hope that the next time it will be much better, without all those bugs! I've learned a lot since then *n*!
About the characters and their realtionship, at the time I was creating this game, I couldn't think of a better way to show it, and at the end I decided to put there something what would show only some part of my idea... I wasn't happy with it, but couldn't do anything more, since I really wanted it to be a Yume Nikki fangame.
I was thinking about remaking this game after some time, and changing the style of it, so I won't have to keep some Yume Nikki elemets in there, soooo maybe it will be better like this ^^. But for now i want to focus on my next project! Hopefully it will be better ^^
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
I'm glad you enjoyed the review! Once again, this is a great attempt at a first game, especially in comparison to most other people's first games, mine definetly included. Eventing will get much easier over time. It was playable and that's still an accomplishment!

If you ever do make a remake, I'd love to give the game another spin. Really looking forward to Dreams of Gluttony too! It looks like a huge step up from this game already ^^
Pages: 1