Terror Within Hawk Manor

[StarLite Moon]

I'm removing this game. It isn't good enough. I've no intentions of working on it any further. Other people managed to play it, save, load get through the into, play it a bit without any problems. So it stays as is. It's too bad considering I have 3 more stories but since I suck at it why bother making anymore games

[Mandle]

Terror Within Hawk Manor is a 1st person point and click supernatural thriller.

I'm sold!!! I'll be trying it out for sure in a couple of days!

[StarLite Moon]

Hi Mandle, thank you for downloading Hawk Manor. I hope you enjoy playing it as much I did creating it. I'm anxious to get started on my next game. Have fun

[Gurok]

Congrats on your completed game! Why not make a game page for this?

http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/

(Add your game at the bottom of the page)

[StarLite Moon]

Thank you Gurok for that info. I will do that for sure, been so busy trying to get this game around. Needed a break last night. Today I'm going to sit down with AGS and learn a few more things about it. Hope you enjoy the game

[Mandle]

I gave the game a try and:

Pros: It is obvious that a lot of time, effort, and love went into creating this game. I like the story and the characters. I find the lack of polish on the backgrounds, sprites, and voice acting actually very charming and I really enjoy playing such games as it shows there are new developers out there with great vision and ideas which they will eventually be able to bring into the world once they have learnt their craft fully. And there is no other way to master the craft of game making except to make games: understand what worked and what did not work.

Cons:

Spoiler

I could not understand the game's navigation system. It was too disorientating and I realy had to work hard at it to figure out where I was and which way I was facing. And I still don't understand in a lot of cases the layout of certain rooms.

The interface of having the hotspots' labels pop up as you move the eye cursor over them is really nice, but not consistant enough: In many rooms I had to just randomly spam click everywhere to figure out what was usuable. If you make that eye-over mechanic work consistantly then you've got some really cool gameplay.

There were too many bugs for me to be able to continue on with the game:

The ripped-up note in the closet with the baseball bat just disappeared when I clicked on it. I got no puzzle screen and it was not in my inventory.

On the blurry-text ripped note puzzle screen I tried to drop a piece I was holding by clicking on another piece. This worked, but the piece I was carrying vanished and I couldn't finish the puzzle or exit the screen...

There were quite a few others as well, as well as minor glitches that affect gameplay like, for example:

If you have a cursor that is a pointing hand then the cursor's hotspot must be at the tip of the pointing finger, not somewhere in the middle of the hand. This is easily done in AGS: Just go to the cursor screen and click manually where you want the click-point to be located on the cursor.

Especially with a 600MB download (did you select Compress Sprites in the general options menu before compiling?) you really should try to fully test the game before releasing it. This means you don't just speed-run the game by doing all the right things, you also have to try every wrong thing you can think of and make sure they do not break the game.

Also you need testers who do not know how to win the game to try it and give you their feedback.

[close]

A very nice effort though and I would really like to play it in the future when a lot of issues have been worked out...

Cheers!

[Shadow1000]

I downloaded the game and put in about 25 minutes playing. To kind of echo what Mandle said with a few differences:

- The strength of the game is the art. I really like the backgrounds and animations.
- It looks like the backstory is well-developed and unfolds nicely as you play.

It's clear that a lot of work went into this game.

However, the voice acting did not do it for me. Jemma's voice did not match the character at all. Her cadence might have matched a nursery teacher better than a real estate agent.

In general, I do not like the first person view. When you have an animated sprite navigating a room, you have a sense of where the character is in the room. While I did not find it disorienting, I did find the general gameplay consisting of pointing all over a picture waiting to hit a hotspot. Additionally, as Mandle said, I did not find the hotspots to be consistent as to when and where they would pop up. The navigation is more of a personal taste and took getting used to but the hotspots made the gameplay quite cumbersome.

Spoiler

I had the same problems as Mandle. Whatever it was in the closet next to the baseball bat disappeared. I stopped playing when I got to a puzzle where you put the pieces on a frame but there was one piece missing! I thought that maybe you had to keep searching the house to find the missing piece but I could not X out of this screen

[close]

At that point I wanted to save the game but there is no obvious way to save. I ended up pressing F5 hoping that it would work and I saved but really any game that lasts more than 10-20 minutes should have a proper save in the menu. To reload the game I had to wait for the game to start and I pressed F7. I couldn't read the buttons on the screen so I clicked the first one which happened to be "Delete" so I lost my progress.

I do think that this game has potential and I have to ask why this kind of thing did not surface during testing. What was the testing process?

I hope this didn't sound critical. I don't generally comment on games I don't like and I hope that some of these issues get ironed out and the game released again!

Good luck

SHADOW

[Mandle]

- It looks like the backstory is well-developed and unfolds nicely as you play.

YES!!!

I totally forgot to mention that:

SPOILERS:

Spoiler

The whole Norman Bates/Red Dragon/etc feel of the backstory was incredibly well done...

I cringed when the mother said "I'll shove your arm in the fire"...Also the scene where the mother appears to the teenaged ghost and tells him that she agrees they aren't right for "us"...

[close]

All of that was amazing! And all of that made me want to know more about where the story was going!

But the bugs where I just could not complete puzzles cooled all of those good feelings off to the point where I had to give up (with regret)...

[Joe]

I'm removing this game. It isn't good enough. I've no intentions of working on it any further. Other people managed to play it, save, load get through the into, play it a bit without any problems. So it stays as is. It's too bad considering I have 3 more stories but since I suck at it why bother making anymore games

Come on! This is a very childish attitude. You posted your game and got nice feedback from users! You should feel encouraged to correct the reported bugs and improve your game!

[Shadow1000]

I'm removing this game. It isn't good enough. I've no intentions of working on it any further. Other people managed to play it, save, load get through the into, play it a bit without any problems. So it stays as is. It's too bad considering I have 3 more stories but since I suck at it why bother making anymore games

Starlite:

I don't know how you concluded this. Everyone who commented on the game said that the game has great potential but requires a bit of tweaking for the scripting and interface so people can enjoy your efforts. I hope you reconsider and release it in the improved version.

SHADOW

[Cassiebsg]

All you need is a team of beta testers, and there are plenty here that will volunteer, just go on to the recruitment section of the forum and ask.

I'm looking forward to try your game, but want to play a game that is as free for bugs as possible. Solve those and you'll have a great game on your hands.

[Mandle]

I'm removing this game. It isn't good enough. I've no intentions of working on it any further. Other people managed to play it, save, load get through the into, play it a bit without any problems. So it stays as is. It's too bad considering I have 3 more stories but since I suck at it why bother making anymore games

I would not spend 30 minutes writing a serious post about a game just to troll someone. And I would not bother to spend that time either unless I really believed the game has great potential.

I believe my posts were positive, even when mentioning points that were issues for me. And most of my "Cons" section was mentioning bugs and glitches that should be quickly fixable. Personally, I thank people for finding bugs and issues with my projects, and I'm grateful that they had enough interest to spend their time helping me out.

I had to stop playing as, like Shadow said also, I hit a bug that made continuing impossible: Stuck on a screen there was no way to exit from. Otherwise I would have continued.

I'm honestly shocked by your reaction and the truth is that if you react so extremely to constructive criticism from somebody honestly trying to help out then you are going to have a very rough ride through this world.

I hope you continue to develop the game as, like I said in my other posts: The game has so many strengths and could be something truly great with a little work.

Also, at the end of the day, who the hell am I anyway? What I say is just my opinion and my opinion is not going to make or break your game. But if you do hear the same issues from several people it's probably not because they are ganging up on you. It's more likely that there is an actual issue.

Cheers, and best of luck with the project!

[lakerz]

Starlite Moon - I hope you reconsider your decision to just remove the game and say the heck with it.  There were lots of folks (me included!) that were looking forward to the finished product.

It sounds like you are/were pretty burned out with developing the game.  I can *totally* understand that feeling.  It is/was your baby, and you poured an ungodly amount of time and effort into it just to get to this point.  My 2 cents is to keep the game up as is for now and take some time off to get away from it.  Come back when you are feeling more positive and start tackling the bug fixes.  Just remember, this is your game and your timeline, so no pressure to fix anything until you are ready.  As others said, there is a nice beta testing community here that will work with you to identify any problems (especially the game breaking ones). 

[sthomannch]

Why give up?
Storyline is good and so are the graphics. The navigation was something I had to get used to, but after some time it worked ok for me without disturbing the flow of the game. I would like to see more.