HOME | DD

tobyf [2010-11-20 02:26:49 +0000 UTC]

First of all, sorry for taking so long - it's been a pretty busy week at Uni. Now, as for your entry - I think it's nicely done. I love the style of your characters that you drew, they look very cute and sympathetic. My favourite has to be Kai (who is just plain adorable), closely followed by Kim and Jonas. The colour coding worked quite well - I honestly didn't notice you mixing up their names, since I was just going by the colours anyway. Even when I specifically looked for it, then it took me a minute to find where you mixed them up.

The story itself is catchy, and I can definitely see how it's entertaining to play through - there's a lot going on, and I imagine one would feel quite involved fighting off the bandits, chasing after them, only to be left alone with Kim. From here, there is a lot of potential for a continuation too, and the story itself - with the player having to chase after Kai - has a certain kind of urgency with it. Now, there's only few drawbacks I noticed - the biggest one is that your story is very short. It starts with a scripted event, and the player is left with a bandit in a fight they are supposed to win very easily. Which leads to a second event with two bandits, and then the story - as I have it so far - "ends" (I know, it just begs to be continued, but I'm not that good of a story writer ). It's a very short and very involved quest, but continuing its fast pace and very high quality is a daunting task for a single developer.

I don't have any characters similar to yours, so I'd need to animate (seeing they run off) at least three of the characters (Kim and Kai look fairly similar, and the unnamed bandits might look similar to Jones as well). I'm a slow animator, so I estimated the time to implement around five days, mainly accounting for drawing the poses and animating them. Which also means that if I implement the story, I pretty much need to focus on extending it, since it'd be a lot of work to just stick with a simple quest. Players cooperating with each other might be a little difficult too, if they're not there at the beginning, since the story itself really only makes sense if you play through it from the beginning. Very positive aspects are that you have a progression in difficulty; you start out with a single bandit, and then move on to a more difficult fight - even though then it's not clear how difficult that second battle should be. Twice as difficult as the easily won fight? This might not be too challenging still - but if it's more difficult, it might come off as surprising - kinda like no one was really able to deal with the zombies were in the cave. Your characters sound realistic, believable, and one can really feel for their troubles. It's definitely a gift, and it shows that you are very skilled writing up stories. I also appreciate that your story is quite different from many existing quests in the game - the assault in the village forest ("Reserves for the winter II") is probably the most similar quest, with the attackers running off and you having to chase after them in a follow-up quest. Still, your story has Kim and Kai in it, and Jonas who sounds like he might even change sides at some point. Such things (whether or not he'd do that, and what had happened to Kim / is happening to Kai) keep stories interesting, so that's a big plus.

On my internal rating you reached 3,50 / 4,00. I'll write up the comments for all entries over the course of the weekend, and then announce the results.

Toby

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

tobyf [2010-11-07 22:14:02 +0000 UTC]

Alright, sooo I guess the race is on, huh? I'm hereby confirming your entry to the contest, and wish you best of luck!

(I'm planning to post feedback when all entries are judged, if that's fine with you. ^^ I love your drawings, in any case - the characters look so adorable, and they're well done and nicely coloured for being just sketches. The story is a great read, and thank you for the colour coding - I can match what your characters are wearing to the colours of the text, how convenient! )

👍: 0 ⏩: 1