hedgefield

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Posts posted by hedgefield


  1. Spent some time with the game again today, and after putting in some QTE keyboard prompts on the various buttons and panels yesterday, I wrestled with getting them to recognize the correct key input and translate that into your plane either freaking out more or less.

     

    I've got it working pretty okay now, it picks a keyboard key at random to display, and if you press the correct key before the time runs out your plane stabilizes a little bit. And conversely if you press the wrong key it starts shaking more and more and eventually spins out of control. Tomorrow I want to look into making the situation escalate when you miss a keypress as well, I suspect that will be tricky.

     

    cockpitfreakout2.jpg


  2. Looking through the episode titles I got the most vivid game idea from this one, and imagined a Top-Gun-esque scenario where the pilot is pressing buttons and flipping switches in rapid succession to save his failing plane. Also this seemed like the game idea that required the least effort, which is nice as I'm working on three other projects at the same time as a freelancer -_-  (although I might have to revisit Osama's Dog and Layer Jake at a later date).

     

    Anyway I figured first things first and get a cockpit in there (placeholder photo that I nicked off the internet) and make it FLY.

     

    cockpitfreakout1.gif

     

     


  3.  guess it's a pretty straightforward interpretation of the episode title! I mean, I sort of had Justin Smith's Enviro-Bear 2000 in mind when I came up with the initial idea. Are you going to make yours as well? You should!

     

    Looks good! I didn't know about Enviro-bear but that looks super fun, looking forward to your take on it. So it's cool with you if I make my interpretation as well? Then I think I will!


  4. Very happy to have more Deus Ex. I was just thinking the other day that I really wanted another good stealth action game again after finishing MGS Ground Zeroes, though it looks from the trailer like they went bonkers on offensive augmentations with which to fuck dudes up with. A little more Raiden than Snake, say. But I must say I like Jensen because he is a character totally in the same vein as JC Denton, who was a ridiculous brooding leather-clad man in retrospect too, but back then that was fine and cool and God help me I dig that Matrix-y stuff.

     

    I suppose they will retcon one of the multiple endings, as they did from DX1 to DX2, where Paul Denton was alive and well as opposed to murdered by me.


  5. It looks so darn good, and even that seems like nothing once you get the

    death-rewind pocket watch and see actual people models with amazing shading on them.

     

    I also really like the concept of the game, trying to find out how everybody died. And the manifest is HUGE. There were like 40 people on that boat.

     

    B0jXsBECIAAZxsY.png


  6. One problem I think I might have with this game, and which I've had with other horror games in the past, is that getting killed immediately dissolves all of that built up tension. I hope I'm...not shit at avoiding the alien, or I think I'll get frustrated re-doing sections.

     

    It didn't bother me that much in this game, maybe it's some form of relief from long stretches of tension. It's almost Flappy Bird-esque, you go "aw shit! woofff, good one, let's try again." One recommendation: play on easy. You're in for a long haul. (you can change it in the options menu)

     

    That said, finished it tonight! It's really quite long (took me 18 hours) and could have done with some mid-section trimming (I don't know how many times I had to restore power to something), but after 

    the intense alien nest / reactor overload section, things really picked up in tension and pace. I like the last part quite a bit, it felt really hectic like the ends of Alien movies usually are. It was maybe a tad too long, that final generator crapping out on you and getting knocked back down into a semi-nest, but all in all I was very immersed the last hour or two.


  7. I'm a good few hours in now and I'm starting to loosen up and get used to dying. Listening is key, when I hear him bonk around in the vents I can relax a little bit. Before that I spent about two hours getting some keycard from some doctor because it was fucking terrifying and it was like every turn I made the Alien could come stomping down the hall again. I think I spent 15 minutes sitting in a vent while I made a sandwich. Having the motion tracker glitch up in vents is a good choice I think, forces you to peek and slither around like a crazy person. I just have a small heart attack every time Ripley slams a locker door shut when she jumps out.

     

    I had my best Alien moment so far in that time I described above where I just went back and forth down the same hallway for hours, until the Alien caught wind of me and I jumped into one of those shutter vents and crawled halfway. Then I thought "wait, but what if the Alien walked around the corridor and is waiting at the other end?" and right then the vent exit opened in front of me, I heard a hiss, and I just closed my eyes and freaked out. I don't think I've ever done that in a horror game (the past five years).

     

    The most frustrating was probably

    escaping the medbay after evacuation was triggered. I kept walking under a drooling vent, or one of the guards was blocking my way. One time I waited under a bed long enough for the Alien to appear and eat him, and I figured I could sprint past. Nope. He was already done with the guy once I stood up. But wow the lighting in that part.

     

    The game runs really well for me too on max settings. After Shadow of Mordor I had kind of forgotten what a well-optimized game looked like.


  8.  

    Since you need to wander around the forest, looking for the five traps, I got the impression that the whole game would require me to scour every inch of available terrain to find all of the available story stuff. This led me to go off the main path repeatedly, looking for side-content that wasn't really there. Since the game is built off of small areas you need to explore to complete puzzles, the areas in between them are mostly just empty (but very pretty) passages. That kind of close attention to detail does pay off, but only in the puzzle areas, not in the rest of the world. Had I just followed the main roads, I would have found all of the necessary areas eventually, without stressing myself out so much about missing stuff.

     

    I completely missed that first puzzle with the traps until I reached the final house, so the first murder case was my first contact with the game mechanics. I intentionally didn't want to veer too far off track for fear of getting lost for real.

     

    Loved the game. The ending was sort of weird/unearned for me though. Anyone else find it a little strange that this guy was fantasizing about the brutal murders of all his family members?

     

    From the flashbacks I gather Ethan felt out of place in his family, like no one appreciated him, and they all sound pretty mean, so it didn't strike me as too strange that he would imagine them taken over by some dark force.

     

    I didn't have much issues except for the last bit

    where you need to cross the river.

    That wasn't really obvious to me.

     

    Me neither, I figured

    I'd have to walk along the other bank, which you can do for quite some distance. It wasn't clear you had to turn off the generator, and I quit the game right when I had to and when I came back they were already off, so I missed that bit entirely.


  9. I finished the game yesterday, and I would say that in terms of scares,

    anything outside of the mine (so 80% of the game) is quite fine. Nothing will fuck you up out there. And you don't have to do the scary bit until the very end if you don't want to. But if you can't stomach such things, when you descend down that long-ass mine staircase and encounter the warning sign - you'll know it - don't go in there. I'm pretty good about horror games but jesus fucking christ.

     

    Ha Lu you jumped down the elevator shaft? You survived? Wow. I looked at the shaft but figured I'd be able to summon the elevator later so I continued to the graveyard and then followed the downhill path to the entrance of the mine, and up to the right of that is a hole where you can enter.

     

    Overall I really enjoyed the game. I think that watching the commented gameplay vid before playing the game really gave me a leg up (like I knew how the floaty word mechanic worked and that I had to arrange the scene first). I also liked how despite being a fairly open environment they still guide you to the right places, and I think I progressed in the intended way (except for most of the side quests which they do a good job of informing you about once you get to the 'end'.

     

    I especially liked

    the foreshadowing at the start that prospero was really just a figment of Ethan's imagination. The timestamp versus the clock at the end where Ethan is found, him knowing it's his last case before he enters the town, it's pretty solid.

     

    I did have some stuttering, but I lowered the draw distance and tweaked the smoothed framerate and other optimizations in the config ini to a satisfying degree.

     

    Some screenshots:

    http://steamcommunity.com/id/hedgefield/screenshots/?appid=0&sort=newestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall