First playthrough

[oldmanjank]

Played through the alpha demo a bit yesterday and just now and you definitely got a few jumps out of me. Nice work

Initial thoughts:
It's gorgeous. The music and sounds all add to spookiness. I really liked the sounds of the chains getting louder as the light faded while I walked down the final hallway with the axe. Really great detail.
At first I found myself using the run feature a little bit, possibly because I had watched a few play-throughs online and wanted to move a bit faster, but I found myself strolling after a few minutes to take in the backgrounds and have a closer look at the details.
I did notice a small discontinuity in the background scrolling as I walked that bothered me a small amount. It seems to be a little correlated with the character's head bobbing backwards, but it's not every step, and it of course depends on the background scrolling.
I liked how, when rounding a corner from one screen, or entering a door by pressing up, the up key was briefly disabled while walking down or sideways on the subsequent screen. In the play-through videos I watched during the kickstarter, I noticed the character would walk up a couple steps on the new screen because the player had been holding up before, but this didn't happen to me. Nice.

Some interface/usability feedback:
- On OS X, it looks like fn-command-F4 and fn-option-F4 both work for quitting.
- After downloading an update it looks like I have to "Big Picture" Steam before starting the game for it to to be scaled properly (It's a little cut off on the top if I don't "Big Picture"). This was for 1440x900 on a retina MBP.

I think it's a testament to the game quality that now I'm salivating for more content. Can't wait!

[matt]

Thanks for the feedback! I'm glad to hear you like it.

When you say discontinuity in the background, do you mean a horizontal line tear? Do you mean that the background doesn't scroll smoothly, or do you mean the background just looks weird sometimes? The first would be a video card issue, I thought I fixed the second, but maybe I'll have to work around with it. The last one is due to the vertical line pattens interpolating weirdly when you have fractional pixel movements, and while it is possible to fix (but a pain in the ass), I kind of like it.

I'll have to look more into fullscreen not playing nice on retina. I have a Macbook pro with Retina, and on Windows, I turned off scaling and bumped down the resolution because it was pretty much incompatible with every game. I don't do any Mac gaming, but I guess maybe their scaling doesn't play nice with OpenGL either... *sigh*

[oldmanjank]

I meant that the background doesn't scroll smoothly. For what it's worth, I didn't have to "Big Picture" Steam before the update that downloaded yesterday, and it's not a huge issue because it played fine when I "Big Picture"d.

Keep up the good, hard work!

[jknoxdabass]

I am assuming this where I can describe and discuss my thoughts on the Alpha. This game is the first game I've ever alpha tested, so please forgive me if my thoughts and suggestions seem out of place. I still just excited that I got to help out.

So, my first initial thought was HOORAY! I was really excited to get this. I have been anticipating it ever since I saw PewDiePie play it and I backed it on Kickstarter. After that awe effect, I immediately took notice of the sound and music. The sound design and music are breathtaking eery. Sound effects seemed to be perfectly placed and worked well on building tension. I felt the sound gave the game an empty and all alone feeling. True isolation was felt. Then coupled with the music, it's a brilliant recipe to have me on the edge of my seat. The music truly kept me on edge. It has a foreboding presence of doom and despair. I literally could not stop focusing on the music and sound during my playthroughs. Next, the design of the darkness is cool. I loved how you were never fully blinded by the darkness, only severely hindered by it. It felt more realistic to me. It provides a false hope that the player can tell what is happening and that they can maybe survive it. Furthermore, the art style of this game is just truly unique and lovely. It is very pleasing to the eye in my opinion. It's a fresh animation design that I've never seen before and I love it.

I only noticed a few things that seemed in need of fixing. The first one was the candle and axe for me. Every time I tried to run with these items, they decided to leap from my hands and just follow me from behind. Also, I made the girl ghost disappear when I jumped into a room and then went back into the hallway. I don't know if this is suppose to happen, but I had the feeling that most likely she should have still been there. Even though I read that the running animation is still an early prototype, I must note that the character shows no effects from running a long distance. The labored breathing caused by running is awesome and works well, but no animation to back that up kinda killed it for me. It did not provide that sense of "Holy crap! Hurry up and catch your breath and get moving again!!" Now, I don't really consider this a problem, but I wish to bring attention to it. I felt like most of the rooms did not provide much in the way of progressing the gameplay or story. While most if not all the rooms were creepy, I could not help but have a thought of why they were there at all. Some of the things will most likely be explained when we are given some more of the story, so I may just be over examining and over analyzing.

Regardless of those minor things, I enjoyed the alpha and cannot wait for more! I'm so pumped for this game. Keep up the great work! You definitely have a fan in me.

[matt]

oldmanjank - I'll see what I can do about the background scrolling. It's possible that it is dropping frames on your computer. You said you have a mac book pro. Do you know what graphics chip it has? (Ie. Intel HD 3000 or something) On windows, there is a nice tool called fraps that shows the FPS you are getting. Not sure if there is one for Mac. Maybe we'll put in a toggleable debug FPS display in a future build.

Alternately, you could try running it at a lower resolution and see if it's any smoother. That will tell if you are limited by graphics performance.

jknoxdabass - I'm really glad to hear you are digging the game so far! The run prototype is half finished, so the animations for holding the objects are totally missing. pretty much everything with the run needs a lot of polish. I just wanted to get some feedback on the mechanic of it - is it frustrating that you can only run short distances, etc, etc. It seems like (besides the animation) the response has been positive so far. Thanks for playing the game!

[jknoxdabass]

The short distance you can run is awesome really. It adds to the dread of being caught and sense of hopelessness because your character isn't quite fast enough to get away.The running mechanic creates a sense of realism for the player. I love it and the asthmatic breathing is too legit. It gives life to the character, further immersing the player into the game. I hope what I have posted has been helpful or encouraging.

[matt]

Thanks! It definitely has!

[oldmanjank]

Huh... played through again at the same resolution and didn't have the background scrolling problem. I've got an NVIDIA 750M and an Intel Iris Pro.

[matt]

Hmm.. Well I suspect it was a frame rate issue then. Not sure why you'd run into problems with that hardware, but you never know on computers. Something else must have been hogging my precious resources...

Glad to hear it is running smoothly now!

[Aludra]

Finally had time to sit down and play through the alpha demo! First, let me say that the art style continues to impress me! I absolutely love the line work, the dynamic shadows and all of the little details in the background (skulls in the wallpaper, all of the portraits, etc.) Having interactive objects/blood be the only coloured objects in the game gives them great impact.

Running on a PC, I had no problems. It was a little distracting that any prompts for key bindings were for controllers only ("press back to start over") but I'm sure that this is to come.

In terms of the sprint function, I was initially a little annoyed with the very limited sprint distance. Realistically, I feel like I would be able to sprint more than just the length of one corridor, especially if something were chasing me. However, in the context of the game, this is probably a very good thing. I can imagine the tension it would create to know that something was coming for you and wanting to run, but knowing that you can't just blindly sprint ahead without knowing how far it is until you can find somewhere to hide. Very nightmarish! The audio cues were very well done, as well. It was easy to tell when the character was about to run out of steam and added more realism.

I hope this helped!