A Night to Remember

[Ethan D]

My name is Nathan Carter.  
Though... My current associates know me only as Arthur Barrington.
I'm a con artist and the person I am working on now could be my biggest job yet. After this I hope to retire.
You see Victor Sammuels a rich entrepreneur is having a dinner party with his closest friends tonight and I happen to be among that company.
As far as I can tell there is a decent chance that something illegal is going on at his company and blackmail is my specialty.
I should be able to search the house tonight when the opportunity presents itself and hopefully it wont be long till I get my reward.  
This may sound corny but this should be a night to remember.




Nathan may have understated just how much of a night to remember this will be but then he doesn't know whats going to happen does he?  Everything goes well and then something goes horribly wrong that puts the lives of Nathan and all the other party guests in danger (and perhaps a few others) and he has to rely on his (or rather your) wits to make it through the night.




I would like to ask those who play the game to comment and vote on the games quality as this will help me understand what I need to improve on for the next game I make.

Here is a link to the game:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/games.php?action=detail&id=1189

[arj0n]

Yes! Congrats with your release.
But: are you also gonna place it in the game database? (Or was my question to quickly?)

[Galen]

You have to rename the .exe to The Trials.exe in order for the setup program to work, you should probably fix that.

[Ethan D]

Oops.  The Trials was the original name of the game I guess it still reads it that way..
It will be fixed soon.

[Ethan D]

Sorry for the delays, I am having trouble figuring out how to add it to the database correctly.

[Ethan D]

Alright, I've got everything figured out. Thanks again everybody.

[Retrobot]

Congratulations on the completion and release of your game. I have only given the game a few minutes of attention, enough to reach the first puzzle, and so far not a bad start. However I do have some concerns over certain colors you have used for a couple of the characters, namely the art dealer. His darkish gray text is rather hard on the eyes. I also find the speed at which the text changes rather fast. Maybe slowing the speed or allowing the player to choose when to advance the dialogue would be a better option? I do not think graphics make the game and rarely comment on such issues but the graphics in your game are decent enough. Since my speakers are being a pain at the time I can not comment on any music or sounds that may or may not be in the game. I will include more feedback if I find time to explore your game more in depth. Again, congratulations.

[sthomannch]

Nice game and good puzzles! Just finished it. Reminded me a bit of 5 days a stranger...

[Snake]

Nice to see this done! Do you plan on re-releasing this at any time? If you plan on it, I think I'll wait until then.

[Ethan D]

I see no reason to re-release it any time soon.  I want to start working on a sequel which will be much better since this is my first game. 

As far as the speech goes I never changed the speed of it so it should go by at a normal rate, I will however keep that in mind for future projects.

[IndieBoy]

Downloading now. I have this in my head after reading the title.

[Nlogax]

A neat little game, or maybe more like interactive fiction as there's quite a lot of dialogue and scenes where the player isn't in control. Obviously very beholden to 5DAS, but then that's not necessarily a bad thing.

There's not a lot of backstory to make us feel any empathy with Nathan, and also I think more of the "furniture" could have had dialogue when you click on it. But these are minor points, and I'm sure you'll go on to make some great games.

[Ethan D]

Thanks for all the feedback so far everybody, it will greatly help in my next game.

[Snake]

Ethan, just finished!

Very well done, especially for a first game I enjoyed it very much.

Although there were some things I would have liked to see a little more of, such as;
More descriptions and animations.
More objects to look at in every room (the scenes were WAY too scarce... walls blank, etc)
A larger inventory. I remember having only 5 things in my inventory and I still had to scroll...

I would have also liked to know a little more about Nathan, but that can be achieved with a next game

Thank you for this game, I enjoyed it very much and am looking forward to another. Hopefully you'll continue these games. It was, like previously mentioned, reminiscent of 5Days, but different enough to avoid being called a rip-off. I will definately play the next one.

[Ethan D]

Thanks to everyone who has given me feedback.  It has already helped greatly for the development of the sequel.

[Helme]

Good to read, that you're working on a sequel.

[Snake]

Good to read, that you're working on a sequel.

Indeed. Any info yet?

[Ethan D]

Indeed. Any info yet?

I'm going to hold back on giving out any information on the story until I am ready to post in the Games in Production section, but I can say that the new game will

-Be done in 640x400. (Mainly so I can make it easier to differentiate between the  characters and to add more details and objects to the rooms.)
-Have smaller rooms (None like the main room in A Night to remember)
-Give more information about Nathan.
-Have a more complex story.
-Will be about 3x longer than "A Night to Remember." (This doesn't mean it will take 3x longer to make )
-Will take into account all criticisms and feedback that I have gotten so far and all of he criticism I will get.

The production of this game is going much more smoothly than that of the last one, I will be posting in the Games in production section as soon as possible.  However, I will probably not do so for at least a month or two.

[Snake]

-Be done in 640x400. (Mainly so I can make it easier to differentiate between the characters and to add more details and objects to the rooms.)

Ahh, be careful. You do not NEED 640x400 for ANY of what you described. Going to a higher resolution will actually make it harder to fill in with details - unless you plan on drawing high-detailed backgrounds on paper and then scanning them into the computer (ie; not using PaintBrush).
It will be what you decide, but I urge you, if you plan on making the backgrounds like you did for ANTR, stick with 320x200.

This is only my opinion, but I would prefer 320x200(240) over 640x400(480) any day anyway.

Sorry to get off topic.

[Ultra Magnus]

That was pretty good.

There were a couple of technical issues...

Spoiler

*Click detection was a bit squiffy, and the lack of feedback for most things meant that I never knew if something was not clickable or if I just missed the mark. A simple status line would help with this a lot.
*The cursor kept going back to the basic pointer, which would sometimes work, but just as often not. And after selecting an item from the inventory, it was quite annoying that I then had to cycle through the cursors to use it.

[close]

And I found a couple of bugs...

Spoiler

*When walking down the stairs on the right-side of the screen I hit the inside-edge and got stuck. Couldn't move at all, had to restart the game.
*At the end, in the kitchen after using the knife on the wood, I clicked on the wrong door. The text box popped up, and the game froze completely. I had to ctrl+alt+del it.

[close]

But overall a good, solid game. Well written and quite enjoyable. Well done, and good luck on the sequel.