Lost In The Pages (Formerly Uncle Irwin's Bookshop) - Last public version is up now

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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I will try. As always people my opinion so please no trolling pm lrkers please. The theme is well though and your combined writings go well i had hard problems noticing changes in flow of writing. Totally look like write by one person. A never ending story was one of first books i read in english within translation it has the vibes there. And with that a great potential really. However it is badly executed as a CHOICE GAME. I will try to weak my metaphors and still being sincere… Intro too rushed the highlights are "UNCLE BLAH SHUT UP ENTER THERE NO EXPLANATION. WHATSOEVER " like a destiny videogame quest lol. Let me adapt a little AND SHOW NO TELL. YOU are telling all time not providing any conection with my character or my uncle. You want i love him SHOW ME A REASON… A good example is walking dead tell tale videogame first season. They show your character. In a bad situation and then introduce that sweet girl saving our ass. Even I feel. Attached to Clem after save my ass and being so cute. Other example is Contact book and film both shows our character relationship. With dad as child looking stars and with the radio that make him loved in seconds. You only blah blah show mee why I SHOULD LOVE HIM.
The stats has no sense or work bad… I choose being a model for fotos … I end with no charisma anywhere. And with HULK HOGAN FORCE sorry no sense. The pesos scene is so confusing that i stop reading in stress… TEXT AND CHOICES APPEAR LIKE A WILD POKEMON no context no drama no introduced. Any kind of conflict and dynamism . like you were lost or stolen… No i was attacked. By a street merchant shouting me a weird list of goodies with no internal conection like you want a knife a life assurance. And viagra… A kitten and some bleach. … Also character has no option to choose how I feel noo is al BLAH BLAH YOU THOUGHT THAT YOU SAID X YOU FELT Y… Sorry Mara didn’t lol. IT IS MY CHARACTER LET ME CHOOSE. IT IS A CHOICE…

SORRY i really tried but i ended being an asshole betatester again… I just tried to help sorry. I really think you could end with something great with polish… I am terrible like a troll.

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22

There already is such a variable, but I hadn’t thought of changing any text other than when you meet up with uncle Irwin because of it yet. Now that you’ve pointed it out it makes sense.

I guess the thing with The Lady in Red could probably be “fixed” with the counter variable too. Like, having her influence on the stories increase as you’ve traveled through more of them, or something.

The title thing was an oversight on my part :sweat_smile: Oops.

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I agree with much of what MaraJade says.

Her comments got me thinking though.

I think the job choices are a thematic mistake.

Those are some dream jobs on the list. They’re the sort of ideal jobs, not the sort of work anyone would really want to run away from. Your life’s established, you’ve got a career, that’s successful. And that, to me, is boring in this case. By providing such a wide-range of dream choice, it ends up making things feel generic.

There’s a reason why these sorts of stories, the one where someone is transported into a fantasy world, is usually about children, or ordinary people transported into the extraordinary. Children generally lack power, they are filled with hopes and dreams and a spirit of adventure though.

It’s that dissonance between the two that’s so compelling. Escaping from the mundane world into a rich fantasy. The chance to become someone special. The chance to be powerful, when you weren’t before.

I’d say, in this game it’s the perfect opportunity not to give us a career choice. Give us those choices of what we dream we were doing, what we desperately wish was our job. Then make us a cleaner, or a retail worker, or stuck doing telesales. A mind-numbing grind of a job to support ourselves where we’re certainly not living up to our full potential.

Give us a flawed family. Maybe still living at home.

Or perhaps our family kicked us out, disowned us for whatever reason, and our Uncle, the oddball of the family is the only one who’s stuck by us. He has never judged us. He gave us somewhere to stay while times were tough, when the rest of them would have nothing to do with us. And now we’re still getting on our feet, he’s still there. He may be weird, he may be forgetful, but we owe him so much for not disowning us.

And we’ve yet again got to check on our scatterbrained Uncle, who we can decide how we feel about?

Let us have a variety reasons to want to visit him. Even if it is hit him up for cash, or escape from the noise, or get a decent meal. Maybe we care about him and appreciate the chance to escape the grind of our life. Maybe we visit out of duty. Maybe we’re just hoping he’ll give us some cash, or we’ll get written into his will. Maybe we only go because we’re nagged into it. Or there’s something in it for us. Or we like reading the stories and being around books.

Those are the sorts of choices I see as important. Our motivations. What makes us as a character. I think you can keep the same actions, just provide differing reasons for them.

I think the first section of the game is important for setting up everything else. It’s the framework that holds it together. At the moment, I think the base idea is good, but it’s in need of some work, and to allow for some character building since just now it didn’t compel me to read on and I’d very little sense of being able to form my own character. The few choices I had felt meaningless.

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24

Agreed if I really were a male supermodel, I wouldn’t want to escape into fantasy, hell no, but like @FairyGodfeather said my mc only dreaming of being a successful model or actor while grinding away at Walmart or something equally dreary and unrewarding, or simply the classic of a young wannabe actor waiting tables of course would work much better for the plot. Of course those crappy jobs would fire us in a heartbeat, for not showing up, if the time spent in the books is equal to real world time, but maybe if the skills (and possibly appearance boosts) we gained on those adventures transfer over to the “real” world maybe we can get a shot at our dream career at the end of the main story?
I don’t really like the rest of the family disowning us, seems a bit like overkill, maybe they’re struggling too and just don’t believe in us like our weird uncle does. Of course if they’re sufficiently bigoted any mc of mine could be kicked out and disowned over the gay thing, but I’d only use that as a last resort.

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25

Seems like in all the stories, the MC seems surprised at only their surroundings, and not the fact that they’re in a book.

Is it a problem?

@adrao
@Felicity_Banks
@Sashira
@Cecilia_Rosewood

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26

It’s how I coped when my family kicked me out. I’ve vivid memories of many of the books I escaped away into when things were difficult. How the library was one of my safe places. I can remember the book I had with me the first time I was kicked out. I can remember those I took with me when I entered the social work care scheme.

How those books gave me something. I can remember how they opened up worlds full of fantastic possibilities to me, when everything else seemed hopeless. It was nice to be a little less alone.

That’s the only reason the suggestion came to mind. I have a tendency to just suggest a bunch of things, throw them at a wall, maybe something will stick, if it doesn’t, no biggy.

I’d say if I was doing a similar story, I’d write it in such a way that the protagonist is escaping from something. Even if it’s just a boring mundane life. You know mind-numbing boredom and a general sense of there has to be something more, and then finding it.

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27

Wow, that’s rough, while we struggled at times, I’ve been fortunate that I always had mom to come home to and no-one in my family took me being gay all that badly, unlike people at school and in the neighbourhood…

True, true, not every mc needs to have that much family drama though, in fact I think my mc would do fine if he was just escaping his life of struggling with dashed dreams and a boring, low-paid dead-end job.

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28

So a couple of things off the top of my head, when I have time to replay I’ll point out the typos and other stuff I noticed xD

First, some stories were in a format that went “act 1, act 2” and such, and some others weren’t, so if there could be just one format for them all it would be nice. Real world books work with episodes most of the time anyway and if you’re trying to emulate them, you might as well make em all alike.

When I finished Dragons and Devices successfully, it prevented me from re entering the story. Was it because the RO I chose was there? Or is that supposed to happen if you find the memento thingy? It would be nice if it happened to every successfully finished story though.

About the companions and the stories… I played through most of the stories but 2 which didn’t have titles, but after I finished the other ones the game gave me an option to just put a bunch of books together and be done with it. Wouldn’t it be nicer if you had to go through everything and only after you’ve cleared them all give you that option that leads to the ending of the game? Tied to that is the companions issue, since I didn’t get to play all of the stories I don’t know about 2, but almost every story besides those had only female romance options D:!! And the other stories which had males, are more of an option instead of forcing you to have a female companion so there’s that… I was playing as a female, not sure if it affects the companion’s gender in the stories, if that’s the case then I must have super bad luck lol I feel that the RO I chose (sweet Lorenzo :heart_eyes: ) was perfect, I felt like I got to share enough time with him to be attracted to him, also the other interactions in other parts of the game are sweet. The other ROs I got to meet were varied, some I felt the option to have them as a RO was unjustified like Angelina, I really didn’t get to share a lot of time with her to want to kiss her at the car accident, or the mermaid one I forgot her name. The ones at New Heaven Cop were nice though, if you chose to go to all of the places you could share more time with them and at the hotel before the arrest it’s the perfect moment to introduce a romantic option lol

Also I think there should be more of an introduction and epilogue, the intro to fully put you in the mindset of the character you’re playing, maybe share more info about Uncle to motivate us to save him. And the epilogue because my reunion with my RO was cut too abruptly xDDD

The general flow of the game was nice, if you hadn’t told me it was written by several people I wouldn’t have noticed really. When you finish a story, I think the interactions with uncle to mark the end of one story and that you should go to another is spot on. The pacing was just right, both inside and between stories. The idea is very interesting and with a few fixes here and there this will really be a shining jewel, I’ve always loved the idea of traveling through different fictional worlds!! I have some issued with the red lady though, I was playing The Queen’s Child and it suddenly dropped me something about a red lady when I didn’t even know who she was by then, and the MC acted like I (the reader) should know. Maybe have uncle explain very early in the game some details like that one so you know who to look out for? It doesn’t have to be through the radio because initially it doesn’t work, but it could be like a journal kept by uncle that we can find? Idk

That’s it for now, I hope it helps D:

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29

SPOILERS IN POST (I have know idea how to blur out text)

Feedback:
@Sashira: when investigating the house the choice made gets temporarily blocked until another choice gets made

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This is inconsistent with the questioning of the suspects and as far as I have read most other choices after

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The Dragons and Devices thing was indeed because of the RO. I mean, it would be pretty weird to re-enter the story after that because your chosen RO wouldn’t have a clue who you were :sweat_smile:

The mermaid isn’t a RO (yet)(though I could imagine people might want her to be one. :stuck_out_tongue:) The story was simply too short to write in proper interaction between the MC and her. Only the NPC in Dragons and Devices and those in New Heaven Cop are supposed to be RO’s (though I don’t remember how @adrao handled the romance if the MC was already romancing someone earlier) (Although… I think Angelie might be an RO as well, but she was only made one later in the process. She wasn’t originally meant to be one.)

You want more RO time after the big thing? :smirk: I might be able to arrange that :stuck_out_tongue:

(The bits in the main game for @adrao’s RO’s are not written yet, by the way. For those who were wondering.)

More info on the Lady in Red. Noted.

31

My Feedback - The only thing I did not enjoy so far was when I’d muck up and have to repeat the same story multiple times. After the third time trying to figure out how to stop @Felicity_Banks’s murderer in College Daze the process became more of a chore then a treat.

I really enjoyed the story and the characters and the situation involved was fun but by the third time of confrontation I was feeling repetition fatigue.

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@adrao

I saw an instance of the macguffins being mentioned in your mansion story before I was revealed in the main story.

Not sure about the others, though.

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33

Minor update. Added achievements for my “books”, edited some transitions and little things to them to sort out some minor inconsistencies. Made some (small) changes to the main story.

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34

@UmbraLamia thanks for that, its now corrected!

@Inessy I agree that Angelina was a bit forced, so I now deleted her as a RO, and just left the ones in New Heaven Cop.

35

Hey, I was checking “The mansion of D’Anjou” and here are some of my thoughts.

  1. I am often being referred as “Ms” when I picked the nonbinary option.
  2. As a Filipino who lives there, I find the price of the equipment surprisingly too pricy (that I got a heart attack seeing them) especially with the mosquito repellent (usually around a 100) and the scented candles (around 250-300 for a set).

When I have more free time, I’m going to check the others.

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36

heres a question…

how do you save Lienzo in Dragons and Devices when the top hat takes him over because I keep dying?

(would put this in a spoiler but its not working n my computer)

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The same as in all other “books”. Try to pick the option that corresponds with your best stat.

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38

Ok thx for catching my blunder with the spoiler rosewood :smile:
BTW, I enjoyed what I read so far :thumbsup:

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39

I was quite sad that cutie, Cecil wasn’t an RO, I do love me a witty, sharp dressed dandy. :kissing_heart:
Or that we couldn’t at least flirt back at him. :disappointed:

@Sashira since he a character in your story would you consider changing that, as the handsome, witty and sensitive dandy would complement my wannabe model and actor mc much better than Lorenzo who is already too much like him?

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40

I don’t know if deleting is the right choice I mean you know better, haha, maybe people would like a vampire girlfriend but maybe spend more time with her?

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