16 Replies
Bruce Graham

Gaming in not "my thing", however, I thoroughly enjoyed that! 

Managed to replace my wooden shield, and LOVED the effect you used to have a "conversation" between the two characters.

I may have a way to use that in one of my own projects in the near future...!

Very well done - some lovely possibilities there.

Bruce the Slayer.

Alexandros Anoyatis

Thank you both.

It all started from an attempt at tackling my "random grab bag" problem within Storyline. When I started with this, I wanted to have the characters appear randomly (and only once) throughout the story (except the last two "Bosses" which would always be 17 & 18). Then I settled for free-flowing region selection (you can conquer any region adjacent to the one you are located at the time) and "static" characters.

Some questions appear twice between "enemies" as I initially used only 10 per bank, and you can only play up to "episode 5" so far,

mainly because writing original AND witty dialog on-the-fly is a much harder task than I originally thought; so I settled for good old-fashioned campiness instead. But the whole logic is there already.

And for the record, I'm buying none of you coffee. You've been far too nice to deserve the "harsh critic" tag I seek... :P

Kerri Drinkwater

I thought it was a great example of gaming using Storyline.  I do agree with Phil that the beginning was slow but I understand the need to build the context for the gamer.

I do have a Storyline question - how did you track the points and tools (like shields) throughout the game?  Did you use variables? 

Overall, I thought it was really creative.  I guess I'm not getting any of that coffee...

Alexandros Anoyatis

Hi Kerry and Dave,


Kerry,

The shields part is based on variables, as is most of the game. The tricky part was how to subtract points from your/the enemy's health, and most of all the restriction of navigation (i.e. you can only move to an adjacent continent and only when you have conquered your current region. So in essence, tracking the progress was probably the most crucial and tricky part.

Dave,

There is a "Press 'S' to skip" appearing briefly in each dialog scene, I wonder why it didn't show... Alternatively, there is also a swipe option if you activate it in slide 1.

Alexandros Anoyatis

Hi Jeffrey,

there's a Region toggle too that you have to press as well to be able to proceed.

Generally speaking, sometimes it takes a little to get to the 2nd slide although all this "data entry" should help with the preloading Storyline does automatically for the next slide. Could you try again?

Thanks,

Alex

Jeffrey Riley

Alex,

I was able to get in this time and played the game. I noticed that when I clicked the Buy Items they were supposed to show information when I did a hover, but that did not work.

I liked a lot of your ideas and want to explore this more. I think that gamification is a good way to present learning and I think my team members will agree we might be able to use this.

Good job and thanks for sharing.

Sara Reller

The variable for the name is off mine came out as Saras'

I was bored early (sorry), some more active audio (crowd sounds, cheers, clanging shield and sword sounds) or potentially a voice over, or a scrolling text would help the beginning. I want to scroll at my own speed, let me. (All of those coming from being a gamer and what I expected from the opening pick your character, which I really liked.)

Veronica Budnikas

Alex, one word: SUPERB!

Love the story, love the nice balance between 'oldish' English and casual expressions, loved the way the music in the intro builds up til the announcement that I am going to save everybody! just loved the whole thing!

If I was to provide any constructive feedback, I would say two things:

- I would have liked some control over the speed of the conversation; maybe on 'click' of the character it goes to the next line, or something like that. At first, I was reading every word, but as I got into it, I just wanted to scan and move on... I like that you offered the option to skip the conversations, but maybe you can leave that option available throughout?

- If you have more time to work on this, you could go crazy medieval times with the buttons and other graphics. Maybe use some old paper bg for the buttons, create a more oldy look for the map, etc. (I'm sure you have thought of this already )

LOVED IT!

Veronica

Alexandros Anoyatis

Hi Veronica,

I understand what you are saying about the conversations and the clicking.

The thing is this though : There's a lot of text in the dialogs. And a lot of triggers. The simplest dialog has about 14 lines (both your character and the friend/enemy). The state change (color / grey out) of the characters are handled by triggers on each textbox (in hindsight, I should've used captions and get a much better effect). Now while the character on the right (friend/enemy) only needs two triggers to make this work, your character (on the left) needs 2x6 (the number of characters you can choose from when you start the game). So that makes 14 triggers per 2 lines. Which means 14x7(couples of lines) = 98 triggers for one scene (which really does nothing but tell a story).

I suppose I could create a pause layer to make this work, but my effort was geared mostly into making the whole base logic just work.

By the time I got to the dialog and the beautification of the whole thing - some slides look way too 1970's B&W tv, as do the dialog scenes - I was way too tangled up with paid projects, the site, feeding the dog and what-have-you...

I'll try to come back and finish it once time allows... This will be on the list.

Thanks,

Alex

By the way, you can skip by pressing 'S' at any time and in any conversation. Or you can swipe (again, at any point) if you enabled it, in the introductory slide.

Joe Deegan

That's awesome Alex! Very creative.  Here's a couple suggestions:

  • In the beginning when you are entering your name and region I would recommend making it look more like an online form with grey fields where you will type your name.  It currently doesn't look like a traditional text entry field users would be accustomed to typing in.  Another thought is to make it look like some kind of old time scribe to fit in with the theme.
  • Agree that the beginning is a little sluggish.  Love the story and everything but I found myself wanting to skip ahead.  Something that would help is to have voice over for the characters instead of captions. 

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