[Lachesis]

»» Archive Link ««

A mysterious killer is loose in Altair, and Sera has been kept up at night by strange dreams. One night—when a new power awakens in Sera—she hears a voice cry for help. Sera finds herself in a deadly search for the killer while evading the secretive MNS, who will stop at nothing to prevent the public from learning about Sera's "gift".











»» Archive Link ««

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 27 January 2020 - 06:01 AM
Reason for edit: Updated for 1.2

[Dr Lancer-X]

is this tiamat?

EDIT: actually, tiamat was default char set on halfchars whereas this is.. quarter-chars. interesting.

[Frankie]

Ok, I am not the brightest bulb in the pack: how do I beat the last scene?

edit: also, nice font

edit/2: ok, solved on my own


I enjoyed the game (I really am into adventure gaming), I wish I could know a bit more about the baddie and her background.

This post has been edited by Frankie: 12 May 2016 - 12:30 AM

[Lachesis]

Dr Lancer-X, on 11 May 2016 - 01:11 PM, said:

is this tiamat?

EDIT: actually, tiamat was default char set on halfchars whereas this is.. quarter-chars. interesting.

sort of.

Spoiler

While it's not remotely Tiamat in what would have been its completed form, it has a lot of similarities to the planned second act of Tiamat (out of four).

Tiamat's first act, which every screenshot I ever posted was from, was going to play out day by day, and at night, the protagonist (named Francesca, unrelated to the other one) would have a dream where she'd be able to strengthen her psychic powers. The number of times you accepted this would completely change the direction of the game. Once you'd played out two weeks, Francesca would leave school to search the city (also called Altair) for her missing sister.

In the second act, through multiple encounters with the police and investigating a serial killer, you'd find that they were targeting girls with psychic powers. Already suspecting that your sister has powers too, you use yourself as bait to lure out the killer and confront them.

That's about as far as the similarities between this game and Tiamat go. Don't Look Back can be looked at as sort of a condensed, standalone version of the first third-to-half of what Tiamat was meant to be, without the branching and the battle system and the murder powers. Some of it was intentional and some of it wasn't.

Frankie, on 11 May 2016 - 04:21 PM, said:

Ok, I am not the brightest bulb in the pack: how do I beat the last scene?

edit: also, nice font

edit/2: ok, solved on my own


I enjoyed the game (I really am into adventure gaming), I wish I could know a bit more about the baddie and her background.

In case someone else has the same problem,

Spoiler

You backtrack to the rusted bars ('Exit' on the bottom section of the walkway). The only way Sera has to stop the killer is to collapse the walkway. Sera doesn't want to try breaking the bars with her hands, but she can use the broken bar to take out two of them. Then, she'll finally agree to break the last barehanded.

And regarding the killer,

Spoiler

The implication was meant to be that the mysterious MNS branch isn't just keeping tabs on people with "gifts" (and killing the ones they think are abusing their powers) but is actually experimenting on and/or indoctrinating some of them for their own uses. The splinter group was using the killer and the girl you get Detect from to hunt and kill "gifted" people. I think I'd planned to elaborate on this more in-text but didn't have time to write the scene.

I thought the font turned out pretty well too.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Good game. Enjoyed that thoroughly.

Spoiler

I admit I got a little stuck on the final scene as well once I realised I couldn't hit the girl with the bar. Figured it out by just madly clicking everywhere

Lachesis, on 12 May 2016 - 11:10 AM, said:

sort of.

Spoiler

While it's not remotely Tiamat in what would have been its completed form, it has a lot of similarities to the planned second act of Tiamat (out of four).

Tiamat's first act, which every screenshot I ever posted was from, was going to play out day by day, and at night, the protagonist (named Francesca, unrelated to the other one) would have a dream where she'd be able to strengthen her psychic powers. The number of times you accepted this would completely change the direction of the game. Once you'd played out two weeks, Francesca would leave school to search the city (also called Altair) for her missing sister.

In the second act, through multiple encounters with the police and investigating a serial killer, you'd find that they were targeting girls with psychic powers. Already suspecting that your sister has powers too, you use yourself as bait to lure out the killer and confront them.

That's about as far as the similarities between this game and Tiamat go. Don't Look Back can be looked at as sort of a condensed, standalone version of the first third-to-half of what Tiamat was meant to be, without the branching and the battle system and the murder powers. Some of it was intentional and some of it wasn't.

Yep, that makes sense- I thought there were some things I remembered. The dream thing sounds particularly fascinating-- there's an old proto-Key eroge called MOON. (I worked on the translation project for it) which had something vaguely similar- my memory of it is pretty poor now but I do recall there was a counter of the number of elpod sessions you went through and that would affect how successful you were at some things in the story (can't remember if you could do too many and screw up your game). As far as developing this as a sort of partial-proto-Tiamat I basically did a similar thing for my game-- I took the kernel of a particular idea I've been obsessing over for ages now, simplified it as much as possible and made it. I think it was a good thing to do because I've gotten a much better idea about what is necessary for this sort of game to work. So I'm nowhere near done with my game, even though I'm not continuing to work on this precise version of it.

[Bramble]

Dr Lancer-X, on 12 May 2016 - 02:07 AM, said:

Good game. Enjoyed that thoroughly.

Spoiler

I admit I got a little stuck on the final scene as well once I realised I couldn't hit the girl with the bar. Figured it out by just madly clicking everywhere

Yep, that makes sense- I thought there were some things I remembered. The dream thing sounds particularly fascinating-- there's an old proto-Key eroge called MOON. (I worked on the translation project for it) which had something vaguely similar- my memory of it is pretty poor now but I do recall there was a counter of the number of elpod sessions you went through and that would affect how successful you were at some things in the story (can't remember if you could do too many and screw up your game). As far as developing this as a sort of partial-proto-Tiamat I basically did a similar thing for my game-- I took the kernel of a particular idea I've been obsessing over for ages now, simplified it as much as possible and made it. I think it was a good thing to do because I've gotten a much better idea about what is necessary for this sort of game to work. So I'm nowhere near done with my game, even though I'm not continuing to work on this precise version of it.

Actually reminds me. At the final scene, I died about 7 times (not a bad thing), and then figured out the solution. But then, the timing didn't work out and I would still die. So I thought I had the solution wrong. I tried other things, and then I went back to the solution I had thought was correct. And it worked! Brilliant, but I wonder if it was intentional to make the timing of it that tricky. I wish you could apply that *spoiler* ability and it'd just lock in after you've used up the bar.

Let me know if that doesn't make any sense at all, ha ha. Great ending overall.

[Lachesis]

TBH I rushed through the programming bits of the last board in a few of hours, and most of that was drawing the killer's sprites and measuring object dimensions (the last board is by far the most complex, and like a moran i saved it for last). I tried to make it so that the time between the "It's about to collapse!" message and the kill trigger should have been small enough that using Shield at any point during that time should have kept you alive. I probably messed it up though : (

[Bramble]

Lachesis, on 12 May 2016 - 05:58 PM, said:

TBH I rushed through the programming bits of the last board in a few of hours, and most of that was drawing the killer's sprites and measuring object dimensions (the last board is by far the most complex, and like a moran i saved it for last). I tried to make it so that the time between the "It's about to collapse!" message and the kill trigger should have been small enough that using Shield at any point during that time should have kept you alive. I probably messed it up though : (

Ah, no worries. My memory of playing that part might even be skewed because I was frantic in trying to defeat the boss. At the end of the day, your game rocks.

[kclancy]

I made a Let's Play for this game. I don't think Let's Plays work very well for adventure games since you are essentially just watching someone click on a bunch of stuff, but whatever.
https://www.youtube....5xmla5jhib1kk0k

[Dr Lancer-X]

I agree this particular game might not be the kind of game that works best for a LP, but it's still very nice to see. I hope you keep doing these. For adventure games the key might just be to include more narration so there's something more to listen to while you click on things.

My only complaint about the video quality would be the fan noise, which is pretty loud. If you can filter out that noise in post-production (I know some Youtubers do this, not sure what they use) that would be great.

I definitely appreciate how you give all this background information (about MZX etc.) when talking about the game. I think this could be a neat way of getting people to find MZX.

[Lachesis]

hey, cool!! it's a bit of a weird game to LP, but thanks nonetheless. i'm glad you're enjoying it. :- ]

[Lachesis]

Just released a small update to this that replaces a BGM track and fixes several bugs and typos. Play Discreetly Now