I love the new layout for this series! And, in my opinion, this is the best episode in the series. Keep up the good work!
Reviews for "Chronicle Bulletin #4"
JackAstral responds:
Thanks! It's a little bare bones right now, but with the next two episodes I'm going to experiment with it a bit - adding things like a visible inventory and stuff like that
I have the final two episodes all planned out, so I think they'll come out pretty cool :-)
Always liked your series, but I must say that this episode showed so much progress and neat in every aspect, gameplay, drawing etc... Congratulations !
JackAstral responds:
Thanks very much!
While this wasn't bad, I can't say it was quite that good either. This episode continues to stick to its theme quite well, but it didn't feel nearly as dark as the first two episodes, both of which were among your best stuff (if not THE best). Watching things happen from Atom's point of view and walking around as him was an unexpected change (leaning towards mostly a good thing), but I feel what's really missing here is that most of the scenes involve staring at people staring back at you rather than the traditional swapping between characters as they talked, making them stiff rather than animated. If you want to stick with this style, that's fine as long as the story's good (and there are some creepy scenes in Chronicle Bulletin's case), but having more frames of art would add to the quality, and I wouldn't mind waiting for a quality episode one bit (whereas seeing something slapped together too quickly would disappoint on multiple levels).
The new play style got me wondering, any plans for doing anything JRPG-ish? Combining that exploration style with occasional RPG battles/microgames could have an epic result (though the microgames part isn't required, not having them here didn't hurt the quality). Another thought I had is having point and click adventure elements like Riddle School, The Walking Dead or those "escape the room" type games, that could also spice things up. Having an inventory menu might be nice too since there were "stuff added to inventory" messages but no inventory menu.
JackAstral responds:
Totally. This is my first time working in this format, so I think it'll just take me an episode or two to get it where it needs to be (Kinda like how I do with my other series, I keep adding little bits each episode that improve the design)
Right now I'm planning to add both a mini map and an inventory to the next episode, as well as more frames of art work
The story of this episode was a little simple just because I needed to realign the series, and work out where it was going. I have the next two episodes planned out - and I'm really happy with their stories. I think they'll come really cool , I hope :p
Thanks for the detailed review - it really helps me improve :)
Well now, this one was certainly an interesting spin on the Chronicle bulletin series thus far.
The new game play style was interesting and not too bad. First person is kind of hard to pull off, but it does remind me a lot of visual novels such as Steins Gater or the Umineko series, as well as games like 9 hours, 9 persons, 9 doors.
For the future, a few more animated frames for other characters with slightly different facial expressions would go a long way to adding spice to the various scenes.
Now for the story perspective; I really like what you did with the week-by-week timeline of events that have occurred in the Chronicle Bulletin at New Heart High. This helps state how close we are to much later events. It seems is measured by the scale of how open Clear Moon is operating at has been pulled way back.
If the bit that was added in the school news paper was reporting accurately about Star and Alula at all, and wasn't just a shout out, then that should mean that Death's Game is happening around the same time.
Although, now that I think on it, after the events of Dead Detention season 1, Sora and Naomi left for Japan with their father. Then Sora attended New Heart High. What was Naomi doing all this time? It wasn't like she fell into a coma or was suddenly home schooled for a while.
Also, not that this has much bearing over anything but will we ever see Sora, Naomi, and Haru's mother? It was just a fluke of a thing but I went back to read over something in Dead Detention season 2 episode 1 and Naomi mentioned that her parents said she could come back. Not just her father. Was this a mistake in word play, or do we just not get to see their mother?
omg that was amazing dude you are really getting better and better
i like how you are improving things, this system gives more sense to this to be called a game (before, you could just seen it has a story) keep it up like that, i really enjoyed this one
funny part the one with "oooga booga" (something like that) xD she is crazy
the only mistake i could seem is that when the vampire is burning you can't really feel she is, she is like "whatever" like saying those things when they are not even true (they are true, is just i cant *see* it is) maybe some smoke or something like that would work like that, maybe yellow shading
I love it, can't wait for next episode