its a cool game
Reviews for "Ender Story: Chapter 1"
TheEnkian responds:
Thanks!
my fave part was in the tutorial when it was like "do you know how to walk and interact and open the menu?" then "i uh...What?"
TheEnkian responds:
Haha, thank you.
Dialogs where portraits of characters are off to the side to show who's speaking are incredibly cringe. Instant turnoff for me.
Additionally, you are using inconsistent art styles. For example Said portraits are at a much higher resolution and level of detail than the sprites and graphics of the game world.
Also the art of those portraits is itself pretty bad. Bad enough that the game would be better off without them. Not to mention it'd be better simply because as I said, having portraits on dialog boxes is extremely childish.
I don't like the grid based movement.
The sprite animations are extremely stiff and awkward.
In world map you can select regions with arrow keys but when you hit enter it takes you to a menu? Whaa...? Yes spacebar works.. but enter bringing up a menu?
Btw, the music matches the art and graphics style of the portraits of the characters when dialog boxes come up. And completely doesn't match the game's graphics. A more chipetunes'ey theme for that would have been appropriate. Though when I first entered the woods.. or whatever they were, the third dot on the map, the music there did fit a bit better.
I get there is only so much you can do with an isometric view, but you could have done a lot better with certain perspective details. Like the back half of a roof could have less vertical length than the front half. Little things like that give it a very amateurish look.
I didn't notice any bugs which is a plus.
Also the narrative was a bit heavier for what the game was. A light more implicit narrative almost always makes for a better game.
Design choices should flow from an underlying fiction understood and planned out by the creator. It doesn't need to be told to the player explicitly.
The game has a pretty good scope which means it definitely took a lot of work. But these are some things that need to change.
Just my opinion. And I'm a professional reviewer for game informer.
TheEnkian responds:
I like the use of portraits when it comes to RPGs, it's a more appealing visual indicator than having to read a name. I will agree though that my art for them isn't great. It probably would have worked better in a smaller, pixelated form.
I tried non-grid-based movement with another one of my games, JUGGERNAUT, and for an RPG it didn't quite feel right.
Enter is always the menu button, it just so happens that it can be used in the world map too. There's no reason not to be able too really.
Yeah, we tried pretty hard to weed out as many bugs as we could before releasing the game. It took a fair few weeks of playtesting, but I think we're near bug-free at the minute :) Hopefully there aren't any more to find, haha.
Thanks for your review, it was quite an interesting read. Glad you still had an overall positive stance on the game, hopefully Chapter 2 can impress you more if you give it a chance.
Great story, Near flawless UI and not bad controls (They dont bother me that much though tbh)
Try to make some of the character designs a bit better though and the music gave me a headache (That could be due to a lack of Red Bull but who knows xD)
TheEnkian responds:
Some of the characters are kind of plain and similar, but my art has improved since designing these about a year and a half ago (yeah, I know, haha). There'll be more interesting and varied characters next time.
Thanks for the review!
Quite similar to Mardek Series. The shop and menu systems need to improve; it is neither easy to use nor to understand. Every function shall be done by mouse clicking, only action games require hotkeys to do on time input. However, I like a game made it this way so I give 4/5, good work.
TheEnkian responds:
The game won't be solely mouse controlled ever, sorry. Can you PM me what you find confusing about the menus and shops? I'm not sure how they can be more straightforward. Maybe if I knew the problem you have, we can make a few tweaks.
Thanks for playing!