UnNatural - A supernatural horror game - editing complete, beta testing over

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Okay, to a look. First, the consequencialism vs deontology seems like an interesting stat split, and I like it. However, deontology is not a word most people know (not to mention it’s specifically the study of duty, not a belief that duty is important). It’s probably best to change that to something else that more people will get quicker.

After getting hit by the bully: “You go downstairs and eat your tea in silence.” Um… I think there is a problem with that sentence. How awful does my aunt have to be at making tea to make it so that you have to eat it? : p

As it is, a lot of the early story (the character building) goes by quick, with little ‘fluff’ to keep it interesting. That combined with a number of obvious ‘what kind of stats do you want’ style questions drags the start of the game out a bit much. By the time I get to the point of joining the SRT, I don’t feel like it’s important to at all. There needs to be more of a ‘hook’ to keep me interested. The syncing also feels a little rushed, with no back story or real solid connection anything else.

Then the early parts feel too ‘wish fulfillment’ style openness. SRT sounds like it’s, at the least, paramilitary, if not full blow special forces. ‘Do whatever you want’ style training is left for those that are already highly skilled in their fields, like snipers that already have had thousands of hours minimum field work, and uncountable hours on the range.

There’s no reason you can’t skim a year+ ‘standard’ training as a minor ‘asset’. Actually, that may be best. Have the PC join as a minor asset with their expected role depending on their stat choices (so an intellectual that went to college will have studied monsters/their specific monster for years, while a physical PC will join as some kind of mass riot/monster response member, where they are just one of many). Then, something happens in their day to day dealings with SRT, which causes the ‘syncing’ (ie, the place they work as a knowledgeable specialist is attacked, or if they are the riot response style character, in one of their deployments to deal with a minor zombie outbreak, someone manages to hide a bite, which later causes an outbreak at their own home base.) The PC then manages to make their way into the science/experimental wing and ends up ‘syncing’ (either on accident, or to stop the monster). Then the ‘SWAT’ style portion of SRT recruits them because of their syncing, rather than the other way around. Eh, just think that there could be a little more realism, so that the PC is a badass, because they are a badass, not because they are the PC.

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@Reaperoa Just a note, “tea” is Brit both for the drink and the early-evening meal (stemming from Ye Olde English “afternoon tea and scones”; a traditional snack around 4pm since dinner wasn’t until 8pm!), so I’m thinking it’s the latter meaning intended here as nowadays the early evening meal is just “tea”.

@Nocturnal_Stillness He does have a point. It’s a global medium and worth trying to bear that in mind . . . FWIW I have this problem all the time with Vendetta!

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@Reaperoa

good points will see what I can do.

@Vendetta

your right by tea I meant early evening meal. will need to be careful what terms I use.

Thanks for all the feedback!

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Great story, can’t wait for the next update

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I chose to investigate the house without talking to my partner I think …

(I was revising for a test and being my procrastinating self I found an excuse to play this instead.) :!!

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Great game, I have a question.

Since werewolves were born with their powers can they transform at will, even during the day or during a non full moon night?

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@Haru

haven’t fully decided but am considering letting werewolves have the ability to partly transform as long as there is moonlight but they have no choice when a full moon, as full moon = full transformation

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got an errorError: {}
Scene: Episode one
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/17.0.963.79 Safari/535.11
Load time: 133 18 2 9299949
Persist: whatwg_db

{name:“paul”,surname:“horwood”,gender:“Male”,speciality:“none”,gun:“Silver-plated Revolver”,bullets:6,physical:50,mental:75,unarmed:2,melee:0,firearms:0,stealth:0,awareness:1,health:4,spirit:35,ammo:“Silver”,partner:“Craig”,rapport:50,monster:“Werewolf”,bully_name:“Craig”,bully_gender:“he”,srt:true,trainer:“Victor”,trainer_gender:“he”,vampirefact:2,werewolffact:3,lycanthropefact:0,zombiefact:2,ghostfact:2,wraithfact:0,ghoulfact:0,utvarafact:0,faeryfact:2,golemfact:0,gargoylefact:2,guardian:“Lupus”,ability1:“Aura”,ability2:“none”,ability3:“none”,ability4:“none”,soul:100,consequentialism:40,deontology:50,clue:4,himher:“her”,heshe:“she”,hisher:“her”,sceneName:“Episode one”}

version=UNKNOWN

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@Paul

What was you doing when you got the error?

@everyone

Having an issue with a bit of code can anyone tell me whats wrong with this…

[please note this isn’t the exact code as I don’t want to spoil the actual option but this is how the code is set out.

*choice
__#Option1
____you do this

__#Option2
____you do that

*if (statA < 1)#Option3
__________________you do both

[What I’m trying to do is so that Option3 only appears if StatA is greater than 1]

EDIT:

Update - I think I’ve fixed the errors now and everyone should be able to get to the end of the demo now. I’ll leave it up but am currently working on revising it from the beginning some new things I want to add and other things I’d like to do differently.

So play the game and tell me which bits you liked/disliked and I will try and make the next version a much better game :slight_smile:

link: http://nocturnalstillnesscog.webs.com/Unnatural/my%20game/index.html

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*if (statA > 1)#Option3

< less than

greater than

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@Vendetta

Doh!

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Going to start revising the pilot and episode one.

Before I start with the rewrite I’m considering changing the character creation part and replacing it with the option of several backgrounds instead.

I would like opinions on the current version and whether people would prefer to have a choice of backgrounds to set the initial stats? The backgrounds would cover what happened to the character before losing his/her family

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Played your game today, it was great! I choose the werewolf path.

Some small points: the situation with the bully who turns into a friend (as mentioned earlier) is somewhat jarring for lack of explanation.

In the dialogs, you are a bit sparse with punctuation, for example:

“He is fine he was just caught out by a lucky punch” could use a comma of could be split in two sentences.

For more background on Craig/Alice, here is a list why kids bully others:

Family risk factors for bullying:
    A lack of warmth and involvement on the part of parents.
    Overly-permissive parenting (including a lack of limits for children’s behavior).
    A lack of supervision by parents.
    Harsh, physical discipline.
    Parent modeling of bullying behavior.
    Victimization by older brothers.

Peer risk factors for bullying:
    Friends who bully.
    Friends who have positive attitudes about violence.
    Some aggressive children who take on high status roles may use bullying as a way to enhance their social power and protect their prestige with peers.
    Some children with low social status may use bullying as a way to deflect taunting and aggression that is directed towards them, or to enhance their social position with higher status peers.

Other Factors:
    Bullying thrives in schools where faculty and staff do not address bullying, where there is no policy against bullying, and where there is little supervision of students—especially during lunch, bathroom breaks, and recess.
    Models of bullying behavior are prevalent throughout society, especially in television, movies, and video games.
    When children are aggregated together, they associate with others who are similar to them or who have qualities or characteristics that in some way support their own behaviors.
    For teenage girls, social aggression can be a way of creating excitement or alleviating boredom. It is also used as a method of gaining attention from other girls in order to secure friendships.
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Question do people like the character creation choices or are they TOO obvious?

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It is a BIT obvious (physical vs intelligence), but “run or fight” is, while obvious, expected and hard to pass over. I liked the philosophy questions. (though I had to look it up to know what the heck I was reading). I like the “episodic” style of the game, and I look forward to future updates.

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I think the character creation options are fine. Do you have plans to expand the text or are you keeping it as-is? My own opinion is to expand it a bit. The background just seems light to me.

I will say this game is shaping up well. You use feedback from these forums well, and I can clearly see in-game the impact of discussions. It also has an endless depth, since you are making it episodic. You can one day have a full catalog of episodes attached to the game in the app stores.

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I will be revising the text at some point really need to sort out the bully-friend change also want to incorporate some more ideas from this topic.

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I think the character is ok too, maybe with more text/background surrounding. Most games have an initial phase of setting stats anyway. I personally prefer customization than set backgrounds.

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Finally working on the revision. There will hopefully be an update by the end of the week.

I need more members for the S.R.T so if you want a character in the game post a description here mention appearance, skills, background and also say whether you mind if they can die in game.

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A character eh? Well. . .

I imagine you could make a member of the S.R.T who’s a complete and utter sadist, but he’s too good at his job to be fired. Nothing redeemable about him, it’d add some layers to the story by showing that humans can be just as monstrous if not moreseo than the monsters that are being hunted.