Once Upon A Crime: A Fairytale Whodunnit (new v1.3B)

[Ghost]

This game is really something! Thank you for it, I enjoyed each minute of playing 

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

[guest]

he i played this and it isnt fun because there are no real chars in thie game all you did is rippin stuff and the whole end is stupid too. with some more effort you will make a game but this is not a good one.

[ThreeOhFour]

Mr Guest, I respectfully disagree with your comment, and don't feel it is in anyway useful, funny or interesting. Congratulations on having an opinion.

[guest]

he well it sure needs skillz yes to take chars from kidz tals and put them togehter huh? and yes i have oponin. but i said with some more work he can make good game. so what?

[ThreeOhFour]

Saying things like "The whole end is stupid too" has no actual purpose or point. It doesn't help Ghost improve his game making skills, and I found it quite offensive. I agree with you, it does take skillz (sic) to take characters from children's tales and put them together. I don't agree with you that telling somebody who has invested hours into a game that they allow you to play for free that they need to put more effort into their work is a fair call - remember these games are made by one person, not a team of people - and I am in no way impressed by people such as yourself, hiding behind your anonymity and making such comments.

I sincerely apologise to the moderators and all other forum members for feeding this troll, and, having made my point, refuse to take this discussion any further.

[guest]

huh maybe it is better if ghost says somethin then because he made the game. it is not your fault ben that i dont lik the game. so ghost answer this and also this questions because that is what makes me mad
that there is no speech that the girl has that there is no blood in you "crime"
that there is bad english that ther is no end (viruz? huh fat idea) that you claim all chars bein yours when they are not and why is the boggie gone in the end.
he i thought that ghost would answer quick because i only help and i give good feedback but this is no forumz here calling me troll so goodbye.

[sthomannch]

I fully agree with ben.

It is sad that destructive people like guest talk about "constructive criticism" and "help"

At least, I had a good laugh when I read guests examples of high-class English

[firestarter00]

I feel rather stupid but I have to ask: in this game there is music playing at all scenes or just particular scenes? I've started playing OUAC recently (and I'm loving it so far, by the way) but it pains me not to hear any music!  :'(
In the setup there is a choice between default MCI music device and Win32 MIDI mapper and with none of it I hear music (I hear the footsteps quite alright, so it's a MIDI problem). Does anyone else have this problem? Maybe it's not the appropriate place to ask, sorry about that, but I wanted to make sure there really is music all throughout the game...

[CosmoQueen]

Excellent game!!! Definitely one of the best games I've ever played! The puzzles were quite tricky and the dialog was always interesting!!!

I hope this isn't the last time we'll see Red P.I. *hint, hint*

And one more thing:

Spoiler

Hook never got me my drink!!! That's so not fair! LOL

[close]

[Anym]

I played the game during the forum downtime, after having it recommended to me by bicilotti on IRC, thanks for that BTW (and of course big thanks Ghost for making it and releasing it for free), but didn't get around to submit feedback as neither the game, nor the readme, nor the website seem to include any contact information? Is that intentional? Or did I just overlook it? It just seems kinda strange for a self-declared feedback addict not to provide a means to send him feedback.

While I'm on the topic of the readme.txt, I'd like to add that I didn't like the layout at all. The lines are so long that they didn't on my screen when opening the file in a maximised notepad with the default font at the default size and turning on Word Wrap just makes it look ugly due to the lines not having a uniform length. While this may seem extremely minor and nit-picky, it did give me a less than optimal first impression and I would really appreciate it if you could limit yourself to 72 or 80 characters per line in the future.

The game also crashed on me a couple of times with

Code: ags

Error: run_text_script1: error -6 running in function 'on_mouse_click':
Error: Null pointer referenced

I got several different versions of the crash, all the above message, but different line numbers, namely

Code: ags

in Global script (line 319)
in Global script (line 357)
in Global script (line 371)
in Global script (line 387)

One of them (line 371), I can even reliably reproduce.

Spoiler

Just talk to Mr. Smee and then, on the Three Shells screen, use an inventory item upon another inventory item (which ones doesn't seem to matter). Note that the cursor doesn't change back to the default. Left-clicking on any inventory item now will crash the game.

[close]

The other crashes also seemed to happen while I was interacting with the inventory in some way, but I can't reproduce them. Those crashes were annoying, but I probably got more of them than a player would expect to encounter during a normal playthrough, because I was actively trying to find a way to reproduce the crashes after encountering my first one while still on the scene of the crime.

Partly because of that, I think it would have been nice if there was the possibility to load a saved game (for example by having a button on the title screen or having keyboard shortcut for the system menu) without having to skip through the intro, like Anonymous already suggested.

FWIW, I was playing v1.3B in windowed mode on Windows XP SP2 and without any mouse wheel emulation software.

I also noticed that at least one of the typos already mentioned in this thread was still present, namely

Spoiler

that there's a "); that shouldn't be there when Granny Smith says: You'll need to keep your eyes peeled, and remember, it must be no larger than 2 inches!");

[close]

While I don't have any experience whatsoever, I think releasing a new versions with improvements, no matter how minor, is always worth it. Sure, a skip key won't make me replay the game immediately, but I will give players that haven't played the game yet even more of a polished experience. And it's not like other games didn't release several versions, each with minor improvement over the last, in quick succession, 5 Days a Stranger or Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, for example.

Now, after so much "preface" some comments about the actual game itself:

The graphics are absolutely gorgeous, the setting was interesting and the game used the borrowed characters in interesting ways and in a respectful manner. I really enjoyed the first two thirds of the game, basically until

Spoiler

the Bogey Man makes his appearance. After which, the game made a turn for the worse IMHO. I found the "resolution" of the original murder mystery and the ultimate ending extremely unsatisfying and having the Bogey Man break the fourth wall and the introduction of modern techonology didn't sit to well with me either. Those seemed very out of character to the game up until that point. Even the graphics seemed to get uglier, especially the altered versions of the pig's home and the world map.

[close]

Most of the puzzles were well done and logical. I was a bit disappointed that most (all?) items in the game only had exactly one use, especially true for those in your PI kit. Even if they had only one proper use, I think it would have been nice had you been able to check all kinds of surfaces for fingerprints, which might have also been a great opportunity for more funny messages.

Spoiler

On a similar note, I feel that the "default" messages were used a bit too frequently. For example, trying to "Get" the molasses yields the default "waste of storage" message rather than something more appropriate considering that Red will happily use the sample glass on the molasses (twice).

[close]

Another thing I didn't like about the puzzles was that some things seemed to happen randomly, witout reason, like

Spoiler

Gepetto's tools only appearing when you need them or the blue cup transforming when you visit a specific location.

[close]

On a positive note, I didn't have any issues with pixel hunting of any kind. Finally, there were two puzzles I found downright illogical and rather frustrating, namely

Spoiler

using the fuse on the cherry and using the muck on the magnet.

[close]

The rest of the puzzles was fine.

Another thing, that's probably just a minor gripe of mine (like the readme.txt thing above), was the use of *asterisks* for highlighting. I think it looked really odd. You wouldn't use *asterisks* in the speech balloons of a comic, would you? Here I think CAPITALS might have been a better choice.

Overall, I enjoyed the game, but would probably had enjoyed it even more if it had ended after the first two thirds as the last third effectively worsened my impression of the game as a whole and if it didn't crash on me so often. The positive did outweigh the negative though, even if I spent more time detailing the stuff I didn't like than the stuff I enjoyed in this message. Sorry about that.

Judging from the parts of the game that I liked, though, I'm confident that you can avoid some of the negatives in future releases and I continue to look forward to Daemons in the Attic.

[CosmoQueen]

Hey what Anym said reminded me that the game crashed on me too. I forgot to mention that earlier. And it had the same messages as the ones he posted.

[Ghost]

@Firestarter: There is music in every scene, so I guess you might need to experiment with the setup settings. Sorry for the inconvenience.

@CosmoQueen: Why, thank you! Ah, you cannot trust pirates with a nice cocktail, Mr. Hook's probably still in the cellar, sippin' rum  As for a sequel, I really see some potential there, so well, yeah, why not 

@Anym: That's the kind of feedback I love most, thank you very much for that. As for the missing contact, well, I was quite confident that, this being an AGS game, available at the AGS site, people would just... find me here. My bad, really.

Re strange crashes- I am a bit puzzled here but think it's some scripting glitch. I have never had any crash, and the corrected version I put up seemed to have solved the issue for some players... I think I have made some error somewhere, and will investigate a bit further. Thanks for mentioning it, though- I was thinking I had solved that...

Re readme - Thanks, I will keep that in mind. Nice to see someone reading the readme 

Re last bit of game - Sorry to hear you didn't like the plot twist, but it was, from the very start, something I wanted to have in the story. With some distance, I still think I made a "good" decision, though I have to admit that  I could have elaborated a bit more.

All the points you made are totally valid, and as once mentioned there will be a new, "polished" version anytime soon- pablo took a huge effort and provided me with an excellent proofread, and hopefully I will be abe to fix these strange crashes, too. Glad to hear that the good outweighted the bad for you!


(Gee, it's so nice to have the forums back!)

[miguel]

Just want to say it's a great game, you are a pixel-artist! Hope to see more!

[Snarky]

Hey Ghost, just played your game on a Saturday morning while waiting for the technician from Comcast. 

The graphics are obviously very good, though I think you can do even better if you don't rush the backgrounds. I particularly enjoyed the Parodise (ha ha, very clever) setting; I'm always a sucker for fairy tale mashups. Have you read Fables, by any chance?

I didn't come across any bugs, but I did notice quite a few niggling mistakes in the text, a lot of them having to do with verb tense or English idiom (it's "Queen of Hearts", not "Heart Queen", for example). Glad you're making a polished, proofread version.

However, I'm afraid I can't say I enjoyed the game. This is because I found the puzzles extremely arbitrary. Not illogical, precisely, because they usually made sense in retrospect (the cherry bomb and slop on magnet puzzles excepted), but with solutions that were essentially impossible to anticipate.

For instance, finding "the smallest amount of time":

Spoiler

You solve this puzzle by essentially a sequence of random actions (even if you think of a cherry bomb, why are you blowing up the witch's oven... and why doesn't she tell you to get lost afterwards?), which ends with you digging in the dirt (with your bare hands... I was looking all over the place for a shovel, and I would never have expected "Use marks on ground" to mean "dig") and getting a completely non-sequitur gift from a ghost. Meanwhile, there's a red herring with Mr Smee's incredible speed, and a short fuse that doesn't turn out to be the item you need either.

[close]

Another example from the end of the game:

Spoiler

In making your "magic sword", it is not at all obvious that the copper rods are suitable for a blade (I don't even think you can make copper swords, the metal is too soft), it doesn't really make sense to use the log as a handle, the item name "dull sword" is something of a red herring since there is no need to sharpen it (and weren't the rods sharp a second ago?), I still have no idea why you need to electrify it, and most importantly: Why do I even need a sword?! It doesn't turn out to be particularly useful, does it? It merely advances the game one more step.

[close]

So, yeah. Too many red herrings, not enough connection between the actions you had to do and the objective you were trying to reach. The honorable exception is the dusted honeycomb quest, which made sense pretty much every step of the way (except for the previously mentioned bomb) without ever being too easy. I ended up having to use a walkthrough, and the "WTF?" tasks it prescribed made me stick to it all the way through. It's a shame, because had the game been better balanced, it would have been very cool.

Finally, if you haven't seen this video ("Hello World" by students in CMU's Building Virtual Worlds class) I thought you might enjoy it as a possible take on what would have happened if Red hadn't prevailed.

[Ghost]

@Snarky:

Thank you for the honest, and very constructive, crits, Snarky- and also for playing

I could easily go into defensive now and tell you that games are always a matter of taste, and you can't suit anyone, and so on, but you put your finger on an imporant spot: With the "distance" I now have towards OUAC I agree that the puzzle setup is far from perfect. I was a bit too sure about, for example, the bomb puzzle to be "obvious", and have learned that it is considered one of the most obscure ones.

I will also agree that some things are a bit forced and just make sense in retrospective, probably due to some glitchy design on my part.

But, to enter some discussion, I do not think that OUAC is choke-full of red herrings. There are several ones, all right, and some objects that do not have the function that seems obvious (I was told from quite a few players that they thought the machine in Red's attic would be used to make the blue candy, for example). I think a game where each item has one and only one function and the puzzles line up to a string sequence is quite boring, so I tried to break the mould a bit. Surely I didn't do so "perfectly" (it is, after all, my first game), but I think I'm on the right path at least.

Let me assure you I've learned some valuable lessons from OUAC, and you've given me some points to ponder for upcoming projects- thank you for that!

(I enjoyed the video link a lot BTW- thankies!)

[Kaelem Gaen]

I just finished the game and enjoyed it.   Though I felt once you got the answer for the bomb quest,  everything got solved very easily.  (Granted that might be because I used the hint forum and the WT to figure it out, which meant reading a portion of the Spoilers.)

That being said,  any plans to make another  OUAC?

[SuperDre]

Also just finished the game (I had to use the walkthrough sadly for some parts), and I enjoyed it from start to finish.. Hope to see another game soon.. goodluck and thanx for creating this wonderfull adventure..

[Ultra Magnus]

I just finished this game, too.
I did have to use the walkthrough at points, because I just couldn't get my head around some of the puzzles.
For instance, I assumed you'd have to use the file on the copper pipes to make them less pointy, or something.
I pretty much agree with Snarky in that sense.

But I did really enjoy the ending, once I actually got to it.