Thank you all for your feedback. Let me respond to a few comments and questions:
In "Together at last", after the candle is blown out, go back up the stairs you just came down, left all the way to the end of the corridor, then open the door (all while in the dark). The character gets stuck in an endless loop of putting down the blown-out candle to pick up the lit candle, then putting down the lit candle to pick up the blown-out candle. This happened to me accidentally on my first play-through of 0.5, and I had to quit out and restart from the beginning of the level, because selecting "Continue" had him already stuck in the loop.
This is a good find! I actually just fixed it by accident yesterday because we decided to change it so you can't walk up the stairs in pitch black just because it'd be confusing. That should be sorted out in the next build. Thanks for passing it along!
Oh and a quick comment on the survey, I bookmarked the survey after my first playthrough, but didn't fill it out until I played the last level a second time, so I hope that doesn't interfere with any metrics you're tracking. I'm not sure how those are gathered or how long they're stored, but if you want to look at the data from the first playthrough, that would be the long session from yesterday.
That should be fine. Filling out your user ID is actually part of the URL, so it should be in there. In addition, the user tracking is not that important. I just thought it might be useful if someone said something was way too difficult but didn't leave a comment, I could take a look at their records and see how many times they died and where.
Looking at the game as a whole, I felt like it relied on the mansion environment a little too much. We've got one asylum level, the first level that's just a little bit of forest with the rest mansion, and the last level that mixes everything, but is still mainly mansion.
This is definitely true, and the branches will rely on the mansion less. We built out all this other art and barely took advantage of it, so we plan to rectify that. hahah
The grandfather clock chimed 10 times, but the hands aren't set to 10:00. Actually, the setting doesn't make sense at all, since the minute hand seems to be right at the top (as you'd expect), but the hour hand seems to be just a few minutes before midnight.
The short story behind that was that I was going to procedurally animate the hands, but I wasn't sure how I'd make it work out to strike a time right as you walk up to it because you could move towards it and then turn around backwards and run away. I was crippled by indecision, so I never did anything. We have pretty full plates, but maybe I'll revisit that and think of something.
I tried to experiment a bit with the baby monsters that break through walls. With the first one, if as soon as you hear it, you run toward it instead of away, you can see the wall it supposedly broke through, but it isn't actually broken. In the final level, you can't run back that far before you're caught, but you can backtrack after entering the stairwell. Again, the wall isn't broken.
Doing the destroyed art is time consuming, and we didn't think it was worth making the assets when we hoped no one would see them. hahah It probably isn't really worth doing since it's going to be a small percentage who try to check.
I also ran into a difficult to reproduce animation glitch with one of the baby monsters. After falling through the floor, I encountered one where I believe you're supposed to run forward into a cabinet before he can get you. By the time I saw him, it was too late to get to that cabinet, so I tried to run back (left) instead. I didn't make it to the previous cabinet, and when he grabbed me, Thomas glitched through the monster's arms, and ended up superimposed over the monster's shoulder to the right while the blood squirting animation happened.
I've seen this, but it is so hard to reproduce, I haven't been able to sort it out. I think the problem is that Thomas is facing the wrong way, so the animations don't line up. He should be facing towards the monster for the hug. When this happened, was he facing in the same direction of the monster? If so, then it's the bug I'm talking about. Otherwise, there's another bug I have to try to track down.
I'm not sure if this is worth changing, but I did notice that after you walk on the broken glass in the last level, you leave bloody footprints for as long as you walk in that room, but stop immediately after leaving it. And if you go back, the footprints are gone. Did Thomas leave footprints when he stepped on glass in the asylum? If he did, I didn't notice it.
Yeah, he leaves footprints in the asylum. There is a lot of blood on the floor, so it's hard to notice. To save on memory, most things only persist within one world. That's why the footprints stop when you leave a room and aren't in the previous room when you come back. It would be a bit of a pain to change it, so maybe I can chalk it up to being in a nightmare? hahah
Also, on the surveys someone mentioned "I did notice that there is no longer a part where you run away from one tortured girl and another one has popped up behind you, I liked that setup in the previous build."
Actually, I didn't remove it. It's just with the changes to the behavior of the enemies, it's possible you weren't backtracking long enough to trigger them. Everything was all set up with the assumption that you are running from the enemies, but since you don't need to run, they might not always trigger. Did the set up work for everyone else? It's possible there is another bug, but maybe I just have to tweak the placement of the triggers and all that.