We are two programmers and we developed in our spare time a website where you can play our new interactive novel, Choose Your Own Adventure style.
It’s called “All Your Magic Are Belong To Us: The Legend of Green Lake” and is set in a mountain camping where strange things happens. You are Scott, a kid with a passion for investigation, determined to unveil the mistery of the Hand passed by word of mouth at the campsite.
We built the database and the frontend from scratch, with original drawings, a curated soundtrack to highlight the mood and all the perks coming from having our game working as a website (multiple save files, inventory etc).
We are very proud of our effort and had some nice reviews on the italian version (we’re from Venice).
We translated it ourself, and is now fully available in english!
We would love to have some feedback on the story, the platform and the translation, and we hope you are going to love it as well.
Thanks to everyone that will try it and let us know what they think!
So I gave this a quick little try, and I love it. The atmosphere is perfect, the design of the UI is gorgeous, and I love how you broke everything up into pages like a classic CYOA book. So many good nostalgic feelings came rushing back when I started playing. I’m definitely going to play all the way through when I have time.
Thank you very much Trevers17, both for your time and your words!
We truly believe in this project and we hope to bring it to many other people.
If you enjoy it, try to investigate all the locations, there are some nice easter eggs here and there
I see. Well tbh my opinion is that even if an error in the title is intentional bc of a reference or some attempt to be funny, it’s enough to make me pass up on checking out the rest. Sorry.
We’re sorry to hear it being such an issue to you, you might have liked it
In the meanwhile we had a bump of almost 70 new users overnight, so thanks everyone for giving a try to the game and we hope to hear your thoughts on it soon!
I have to agree. I was about to point this out before reading this. Tbh I also know the nerdy reference, but still thought the authors were making a mistake and didn’t bother reading. There is so much or grammar or there, isn’t it better to just choose a different title that might not immediately alienate a large audience like Cari-san and myself? (Who knows, you might have had 140 new users otherwise…)
We surely will think about it, but we have to gather more feedback going that way.
Right now we have two “tickets” in relation to what now are 100 active users.
So please if anyone thinks this is an issue tell us here like adrao and Cari-san kindly did.
I mean, I get not getting or liking the reference, but completely passing over the story, and then announcing “I will not be playing the game” isn’t really… useful?
Unless your advice is change the title. Which might be better if you suggested alternate titles or played the actual game to then be able to comment on what title would suit this particular game.
Typos and such
Some kids already know each other and talk about all the things they’re going to do during the holiday: probably they’ve already been at the campsite together in the past years.
Swap they’ve and probably (?)
«It rained a lot and, when it rains, the rain sound covers its».
Seems off? At the very least change its to it at the end of the sentence.
The kid with curly hair jumps in. «The legend says that in this campsite a hand is prowling - a real hand, cut clear above the wrist - searching for the body to which it belonged. If it finds someone different from its owner walking around at night, you can be sure that fot that person things will come to a bad end!»
For instead of fot
You’re not sure if it’s the story or because of the auditorium’s door left open, but you fell a little shiver down your spine too.
Feel instead of fell.
Maybe felt(?)
In that exact moment a lightning illuminates the outside square. Close to a building, a motionless figure despite the rumble of the thunder, is watching you.
Change to
In that exact moment lightning illuminates the outside square. Close to* a building and despite the rumble of the thunder, a motionless figure is watching you.
Maybe also change “close to” to “next to” or something?
In a second the square turns dark again and in place of the appearance only a bright red dot remains, but one thing you know for sure.
That figure was lacking of a hand.
Maybe change to
In a second the square turns dark again, and in the spot where the figure once stood only a bright red dot remains.
There is one thing you know for sure:
The figure was missing a hand.
Not wanting to dogpile, but I wondered if the title was a typo indicating a badly written script or a computer game reference as well. When I started reading the game and saw it seemed to have nothing to do with computer games or space battles I was even more confused. Also bear in mind that memes date. (The fact that some people didn’t recognise what this was referencing is evidence of that, something that tends to get worse with time.) I wonder if you’ll lose more audience than you’ll gain with that as the title but in the end it’s your work to do with as you wish. On another note, was this a hardcopy gamebook at some point? (Or has it been around for a while?) The storyline seemed kind of familiar in a half remembered way for some reason but I could be mistaken.
I think it can be helpful to bring the authors attention why people might decide to not play their game, epecially if the reason is the title: literally the first thing a reader sees. After that it comes down to the authors decision wether it’s worth to lose a few players over it or not.
As for a suggestion for a change I did it in the form of trying to put the same thing in a more correct english? (Wasn’t sure if I should do that after all I’m not a native english speaker, but that’s why I posted here in the first place in an attempt to help.)
But the author said the title is an foreshadowing so I assume their game has several more “nerdy” references in it(?). So I’m not sure anymore if it needs to be changed: the reason why I think so now bc people who like those references in their games will play it anyway and people like me who aren’t so fond of meme references like Leeroy Jenkins’ name randomly popping up (idk if that happens here, but that happened in an other wip and it was an off moment for me) and stuff like that know that it’s best to stay away as it isn’t our cup of tea probably.
And I suppose with this explained I should really make this my last post on this thread. Sorry for the inconvenience, Authors and still wishing you good luck with the project.
I have to agree as well. I was not aware of the meme you based the title on. So i thought that the author may be bad at translating to english. Im sorry for thinking that way. I tell myself not to judge a book by its cover but I still did anyway. Sigh. Anyways, after reading the comments i came to the conclusion that its a pretty good story and ill definitely be giving it a try soon. But a lot of others may not check the story solely because of the title. So i also think that changing the title may help to attract more people to check the story. (Sorry for replying to u adrao san. I kind of messed up i guess)
Nope, all original work. We would love to make a printed version of this though at a certain point. If it gets enough buzz a kickstarter sort of self-print could be our best chance.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the title. We will consider all the implications to changing that in the short term.
We have to admit that the title you proposed fits just as well the foreshadowing we were going for, so that is officially on our table to discuss. There are several things to think about of course, like seo positioning, changing the URL etc, but we definitely want to get this right.
Thanks again!
Your feedback is always precious, and user cases like “bad title, won’t read” is of course a very important thing to be aware of, so don’t be sorry!
Hope you will like it!
Heya! I just wanted to chime in with my own two cents:
I just saw this and so won’t be able to read this until I get out of work, so I can’t say anything about the appropriateness of the title with the events of the story. What I can say though is that I think everyone on the forum needs to be aware that we’re all schticklers for proper grammar. That’s not a bad thing of course, but we should be aware that not everyone will be so stringent on the title whether or not they know about the meme, and more importantly I can see many people reading this because of the title (as my little brother did when I asked him about this).
Titles are very, very important as they are the first thing a reader sees and whether we want to or not, everyone does make a quick judgement based on whether or not the title catches their attention or pushes them away. So my advice—again, prior to reading anything—is to think very carefully on what kind of expectations you want a reader to have when they see your title alone.
For me personally, reading the title hit me with a bit of nostalgia and makes me expect a light-hearted comedy with nerdy overtones and more than likely more meme references if there isn’t a camper named Leroy Jenkins I might riot, lol
My second cent has nothing to do with the game, lol. I just wanted to tell you that you can reply to multiple people at once by using the @ key followed by their username (@username) and they should be notified that they’ve been replied to. I’m not too sure if anything specific happens if you double or triple post (I know the system does momentarily silence users who type too quickly bc they detect them as bots) so really, this more like another one of our forum’s quirks. I just think we find one large post more palatable than multiple smaller one (at least I do).
