Missing Wings (Public Beta Test - CLOSED)

May 18, 2018

(Link removed.)


May 10, 2018

  • Added a new game in The Nexus:
    X vs O
    (Two Player mode, with two actual people, is highly recommended.)
  • Very minor update in the Realm of Lightning:
    To help avoid confusion, you shouldn’t be able to go back to a Hall once you’ve already completed it.
  • I think I fixed the repeating line bug in the Realm of Void.

May 09, 2018

  • Added a new game in the Realm of Fire:
    Deadman’s Word
  • Realm of Void: It’s harder to get lost in space now. Selecting Mission Control after you randomly explore space should still tell you where to go (at least for the first parts) if you are in the wrong area.

May 08, 2018

  • Fixed a bug in the Realm of Earth where resetting the mountain was causing incorrect unique identifiers.
  • Started using CJW’s save plugin (for testing purposes; will be removed before publication.)
  • Added the following help text in the Realm of Void:
    “Here’s where to go next:”
  • Added an “early warning system” to the Realm of Water in case you are running low on food:
    (Your name), our food reserves seem to be critically low!

May 07, 2018

  • Mastery training has a new option: (Max)
    Selecting this will train up whatever element you select to the maximum amount possible using only a single click instead of having to click repeatedly one by one.

May 04, 2018:

Hi everyone. This is one of those contest entries that didn’t win, so needs to undergo and complete a public beta in order to be submitted to Hosted Games.

- Missing Wings -
Help an archangel return to grace in this non-traditional adventure.

(This is one of those projects that is mostly interconncted game systems. It’s not really meant to be a piece of interactive fiction more than it’s meant to be a game that slightly resembles interactive fiction.)

That said, I hope you all have fun playing it!
Any and all constructive feedback and bug reports would be greatly appreciated.

17 Likes

Need a summary or people won’t now about and be interested in it

2 Likes

For the stats it keeps showing me this when I click next

I did get the stat screen bug. I also got one in the fire realm while imputing a number of souls to buy.

I haven’t played all the demo - stopped after that last bug, and only got to do the lightning realm first - but I admit it’s a bit… unclear. There’s not much in terms of story or characters, what I played through looked like a succession of minigames. I… guess you advertised it as such, but I’m not sure if it’s terribly engaging.

Well I don’t get each of the elements

It’s like the elements don’t have any back story to them and I thought it was like an ability and don’t get me wrong I really like this but I also thought u were like a fallen angel trying to survive from other angels, demons and humans I think it would be great in my opinion

3 Likes

The introduction was incredibly confusing and did little to help explain what’s going on in the story.

The combat system is broken at best, you have no way of getting equipment or armor and the monsters originally always do more damage than you, which wouldn’t be too much of a hassle if your health wasn’t also abysmal compared to theirs
I literally could not get pass the early section of the game

This demo can only best be described as a poorly thought out and/or poorly executed mess. I think serious revision needs to be done to even make this comprehensible let alone playable or enjoyable

3 Likes

Which strategy might you suggest? An enemy has more health and does more damage than you, you have no way to even the playing field. It’s mathematically impossible unless there is some way to pull a special spell out of your ass which I was unaware of because, as aforementioned, the introduction was terrible

2 Likes

I’ve tried your demo, and I think there’s a bit of problem regarding… the flow.
Okay, it’s not a bit. Honestly, it’s pretty glaring.

Some sections (which I will call as “hub-choice”) loops too high. They loop back 1 more level above the parent hub, which forces me to click the same hub over and over again just to explore that hub. The example is the Guardian section. If I wanted to explore the whole “Talking” sections, it sends me back to the main parent-hub every time I explore a topic, which is… unwieldy and drags on too long.

Some elements of the story are not explained well, too.

Some long rambling

So I chose wind as my first element, and go to the wind realm since that’s the most logical choice. However, I don’t know that there’s a 50% wind option I can pick.

Heck, I don’t even know if the whole realm is a tic-tac-toe maze. Doesn’t really help how big is the maze will be, and what kind of encounter I’ll get. So far, I only got to e2, got relocated back to a1, and that’s it.

At this point, I dropped the game.


But TL;DR, in my honest opinion, you’re implementing something so sophisticated, that it kinda sucks. Not fun, only confusion.

I know this project takes a lot of time to code, and I know it’s exactly your thing, but this game is just… too gamey. It’s not a bad thing per se, but when you set up a game, and not explaining the rules, it kills the readers’ expectation and hype.

Not to mention about how the economy works in here. What are the numbers, etc.

Like challenging a toddler to a match of chess.


@kyros, you know that you’ve come out super rude, no?
Stating your opinion is fine. Yes, I hate this game too, in its current state. But why with the spell out of an ass?

7 Likes

I presented a dilemma only to be met with a nonviable solution. If a mistake was made, I’d rather he would just own up to it rather than suggesting something that vaguely seems reasonable, but in fact impossible, in order to save face

Also, it’s not as if I’m being rude by cursing at his lineage or something of that nature. The phrase is an expression for trying to get something that doesn’t exist. If you have a problem with the word ass, you have a problem with modern society man

Have you considered making this a proper puzzle game?

Complicated puzzles in general are just too not-fun to do without visual. A map, a family tree, etc.
Also, we’re a bit addicted to good plots and characters, which is not this game’s focus. So we might not really be this game’s best audience either.

Thoughts on specific realms

Just went through the earth realm. It’s a creative idea, I give you that, but the implementation was …
I think this type of puzzle just isn’t suited to CS. Too much repetitive clicking.
It might have been more enjoyable if it’s shortened to four floors and eight ancestors.
Also, the game was a bit indecisive on whether or not two people were cousins. The same pair would sometimes be labeled cousins and sometimes not.
It was also unclear on how separated two people would have to be to be able to breed.

And maybe a bit of backstory on why breeding a tower of dwarves earned us a pair of someone else’s wings. A bit of backstory for all the realms, really. The minigames we’re doing seem to have at best a really thin connection to whatever element it’s associated to, as well as to the main plot.

The time realm’s rest function should be free, since we could just die and respawn to the same effect (but it’s more aggravating).
There’s not much strategy to be employed here, since both the enemy and us only have one combat-related action, and we have no information whatsoever on the enemy. This would be a great place to actually use all that nebulous ‘mastery’ of the elements.
I never did manage to actually kill any enemy, and ended up viewing it as a minor farm for cash.

The life realm.
The bone gathering part was a nice little math model puzzle if one wants to minimize clicks, although nobody’s actually coming to eat us, so there’s little urgency.
The breeding/claw evolving part was puzzling. There was no tip on where we’d get the gem, or why we need a gem. We could hunt and breed to the end of time and get nowhere. I only got to see the dream by code-diving.

The void realm has a interesting plot that most people will never get to see, because we can’t figure out what to do. I’m guessing this is a ‘pinpointing the location’ puzzle using the feedback of the probing? It would be helpful if we knew what we were looking for.

Overall…

Summary

I’m sorry, but some parts of the game in it’s current form is grinding, of the not really entertaining variety. Plus, there isn’t enough sense of accomplishment at the end of it to sufficiently motivate us to continue.
(It reminded me a bit of ME3 Citadel’s pull-ups scene.)

1 Like

Well I for one I’m still confused on all this because I chose death as my element thinking it was my ability and went to life realm and for an hour or so I was clicking on to gather food and reproducing it felt like it was endless :persevere:

Exactly.

The current incarnation of the game offers very little motivation for the player to ‘not give up’; the reward for the completion of a puzzle is a line saying ‘you got a pair of wings’. We have not been given sufficient reason to care about the objective: the quest-giver (almost all the characters, really) and the world are both quite flat, and nothing particularly interesting happens when we complete the objective. Where’s our carrot?

And there are some parts that are pure repetition no matter how strategically you think about it. The dwarf tower, for example. Assuming no restarts, no errors, no checking on family lines: we must repeatedly click ‘manage lineage’, a male name and a female name for 180 times. Not a speck of plot or dialogue or flavor text in between. It got boring really fast.

Out of curiosity; how many times did you play through this yourself?:hourglass_flowing_sand:

They will? For all I know, Ozen could secretly be the big bad in disguise. His exact words when sending us off:

“There’s not enough time to explain.”

and then :

You find yourself compelled to do Ozen’s bidding.

Um, no, I don’t. Also as the MC I resent this heavy-handed coercion and shall go on strike in protest.

In the context of games: because we enjoy it, because it is fun, because it makes us think and feel.
Which a *set [stat] + 10 doesn’t really manage.

It would not be impossible to add some sort of encouragement. For example, an immortal elemental watching over a family generation after generation could make an interesting story.

I salute your patience.

1 Like

Why is part 1 not story-heavy?

Individually each of your realms could be expanded into a story. The people we find in space could interact a bit more with us beyond throwing us some supplies. The forest spirit could tell us a bit more of who she is and why she’s trying to build bigger and bigger settlements. The maze could contain random encounters and fellow travelers. Etc. Anything to make the process of solving the puzzles less dull.

And as someone already mentioned above: we really need to know the rules of a puzzle before being thrown into it.

…and you lost me at “trying to do thematically with the title in relation to everything”.
???

It doesn’t necessarily have to do with difficulty, but I consider it … polite? … for a puzzle game to tell me it’s rules. Like stating that consuming bones increases the speed that we find bones. Stating exactly how many times removed two people have to be before they can mate. Things that we could figure out on our own but shouldn’t have to.

Though I will admit the space coordinate puzzle has baffled me.

1 Like

Hello! Thanks for submitting your game into the contest entries! I feel like your game is leaning more onto the “Open World” type of interactive fiction game, which is something you don’t really see here at cog, so I am happy to be able to play this demo! However, there is some ideas I would love to recommend.

  • When picking the elements, it would be much better if there was a description attached to each one, so the player would know which one they are getting themselves into, as well as making the player feel a bit more involved in the story.

  • The challenges are great! However, it would be nice if there were an explanation to each game. Such as the chess game while having the ‘Death’ element. Some people don’t know how to play chess, so it would be extremely tricky to play that game. Another example would be the card game while going to the Fire Realm. Some people don’t know how to play that card game, so they are being scammed for their coins.

Your game is a though-invoking game. However, the players aren’t able to use critical or creative thinking since there’s no direction or order in your game.

1 Like

…no.

Went through four of the realms in my first playthrough, left, and just couldn’t bring myself to go through them again, so decided not to start a second playthrough, and went code-diving instead.

excessive repetition + no fulfilling narrative = lack of sufficient motivation to finish the game.

1 Like
  1. The dwarf tower
  2. The mastery purchase screen
  3. Farming for money.
  4. Fighting monsters.

Other complaints

  1. The underdeveloped sub-plots and extremely vague over-arching plot.
  2. The lack of explanation for… everything, really.
  • Wind map: that the numbered tiles are teleports and not coordinates; where the start and end of the maze are supposed to be;
  • Gem management: exactly what the cost and benefit of each action is. Without it the whole thing is just an extremely frustrating guessing game. Similarly, there is absolutely no hints of what the correct action for the military is against any given opponent. It’s all totally random, based on some mysterious logic that presumably exists as authorial intent.
  • Not telling us the rules of chess and the mastery requirement. (Also, while it’s impressive you managed to code a chess game into CS, the enemy AI is extremely stupid.)
  • Not telling us the rules of the casino games
  • Not even hinting at where we’re suppose to go after arriving at mission coordinates.
  • The list goes on.

I liked the maze and lightening puzzles. They were relatively quick once you figure out what you’re doing, if a bit on the simple side. In fact I wouldn’t mind something even more complex than it, as long as the rules are clear and it is the the quality and not the quantity of the puzzles that are going up.

I can tell you’ve put a lot of effort in this, and I feel bad for saying this. And yet.

One thing I don’t know if you’ve considered. If we wanted to play play a chess game, or a card game, or a management sim, there are a hundred of non-CS games out there with better graphics, easier controls, and smarter AI.

The strength of CS is in storytelling. There are puzzle and management elements in other games, but they are complementary to the plot; something that increases our immersion in the story. The reverse (using a story to increase our devotion to the puzzles) may or may not work; I haven’t seen it on this site before.

A CS game that focuses only on these elements and has no coherent narrative… story-wise it’s weaker than other CS games, mechanics-wise it’s less enjoyable than non-CS games. It’d be …

Who do you envision as the audience for this game?

4 Likes

I don’t even know what kind of response I expected…

Very well, so be it, you are entitled to your opinion.

2 Likes