Our Darkest Hour: a Call of Cthulhu adventure

[The_Creep]

Well the demo is finished, thanks for all your help and comments everyone, please feel free to post more!

http://www.stateofdecay.net/odh/Odh.rar

Our Darkest Hour tells the story of Derek, a reporter investigating the suicide of his brother and the occult occurences linked with it.

this demo represents about 15% completetion total. What I'd like you to do here is let me know what you think of the graphics, GUI, characters etc, oh and of course any bugs and errors you find

Problems I am aware of:
Safe Keypad Gui will allow you to enter a whole lot more than six digits
The end video is a little abrupt. (work in progress)
the intro sequence cannot be skipped and is replaced by the credits if you view the credits first (I have no idea why)
Status bar text is unaligned.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

As a fan of Cthulhu mythos I had to check this out, and here are a few things I found:

1.  Intro has a few problems, mostly with had'nt (should be hadn't, though I'd recommend just using had not).
1.  The lamp description has a misspelling in it. 
2.  Just looking at the design on the wall tells you that you chipped it away already.
3.  You can add the journal entry about the wedding date more than once.
4.  You can walk through doorways without triggering a room change.  I would suggest putting a region as well as the icon.
The intro is a bit stilted because you go right from the narrative to dialog without any indication of a change.  I would either turn this into a display of the main character's portrait in one corner and the sister in law in the other and play it out with actual dialog, or separate the two sections with some blank space.  Alternatively you could just keep the narrative and explain the conversation without using dialogs.

Also, I think you should make the light source on the closeups consistent.  The main character's lighting is much darker and at a different angle from his sister in law, who has no shadows.

Great work so far and I like the gui, though I think you should make the speech window pattern consistent with the portraits and probably not show the spellbook until you actually have it.

[MarVelo]

I like the demo a lot! Like Progz said you mis-spelled parents in the lamp description in the study.

[The_Creep]

Thanks guys, the new demos up, here is a rough change list

0.  Intro completely revamped, although still work in progress
1.  (I Think) I have fixed all the spelling mistakes
2.  Fixed the basement issues with the wall
3.  The Journal works fine now, each entry can only be entered once
4.  Doorways now have their own cursor icon
5.  GUI tweaked and improved,
6.  More added to the demo (Storyline wise)

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I like the new intro, it fits the story much better now.

[pslim]

This demo is really neat. I like the style of the art and the GUI and I can't wait to see what this looks like as a completed game.

I love  the sanity points and the spells, too. The combination remind sme a little bit of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines in its adventure-RPG goodness and dark theme.

A few things jumped out at me while I was looking at it, though:

--Aside from the entryway room (the one with the stairs), most of the house seems too small for the character models. Derek's head barely clears the doors, for example.

--Derek's shoes are blocky, which I probably wouldn't have noticed except that the footsteps sound effect kind of calls attention to them. Also, his face seems feminine to me (I thought your avatar was female until I realized it was the main character of this game, who is male). Certainly some men do have rather feminine facial structures but I just thought I'd mention it in case it was not intentional.

--The bookshelf in John's study looks out of place... it's 2D, but I don't think that would really be a problem if it weren't light and washed out compared to the rest of the art.

--The intro seemed to me to speed by. There was a lot of information to absorb and it went by so quickly that it was difficult be certain that I'd remember it all. It was intriguing, so I wanted to absorb it, which is cool... I just would have liked a little more breathing room between major concepts (like before the dialogue starts, for example).