Potbelly Hill Mystery

[miguel]

Just want to show you a casual point&click game, free to play, made by Silver Castle Games:
Potbelly Hill Mystery

Background art and story by yours truly!

Some shots:

[Mandle]

Just took a peek and it looks great!

Love the Middle Eastern score and the main character's boppy walkcycle! Background are wonderful!

I will be playing this one tonight when I have the time to fully enjoy it!

[Stupot]

Looks great Miguel, I'll check this out tonight :-)

[miguel]

Cheers guys! Don't expect any amazing features or deep story, it's just a casual point&click.

[CaptainD]

Looks cool Miguel, despite my distrust of French onion sellers, I will take a look at this when I get time.

[AprilSkies]

Congrats Miguel.
I like it! Great Work!

[Mandle]

Just finished it...

Nice game to spend an hour or so playing!

A few issues I noticed:

Spoiler

It is a bit too easy to brute force your way through the door combination lock. I literally just clicked at random on the buttons for 20 seconds and got it open twice in this way. Maybe it should be impossible to open it at all until you have read the book as it goes to the last cutscene and the game ends which is really confusing to the player, especially if they have just gone there right at the start of the game without visiting anywhere else.

For the brute-forcers I would suggest either that the door opens and this leads to a cutscene where they go in and find the room empty and leave and the door closes and locks behind them. If they are random clicking as I did there is no possible way to remember in time what the last combination was anyway before the door opened so they will have to brute force it again only to be disappointed again with an empty room...Or you just have the game tell them that they "have no idea yet how to operate this mechanism" and cut through the whole brute force issue right there.

Another issue is the generic "This doesn't work" comment pretty much whenever you use anything on anything or anyone. Most players will get that when an inv item is highlighted it means you can use it on something in the scene, but the generic comment with no further explanation gets a bit frustrating.

Which brings me to: Using inv items on inv items...This could be the fatal flaw that will make 95% of your player-base just give up on the game and never recommend it to anyone. There is no hint anywhere that inv items can be used on each other. But every "adventure game"/"point and click"/"escape the room" player knows that it's a given right? But if they don't get a message saying something like "Those two items do not fit together.", even if it is generic, they will assume that using inv items on each other is not possible in this game. The way it works at the moment is just that nothing at all happens. Once the player reaches this dead-end (as they cannot proceed without using inv on inv) they will assume that the only thing they are missing is opening the door and then they will go there and brute force it open which leads again to the confusing ending.

Last issue: The ending is a bit too abrupt. We see the aliens arriving and then it cuts to a dead-end screen with some credits and some ads for the game site. There is not even a REPLAY button there. You literally have to refresh the whole page and reload the game. This might be a template that the site requires and that you cannot change. In that case I understand. But still...the ending is abrupt and jolts the player and leaves them wondering "Ermm...so was that it?". Maybe a little bit of dialogue between the two alien figures like:

Right Alien: "Ahhh, a foolish human has activated the beacon after all these millenia! We have at last rediscovered the promised land!"

Left Alien: "Let us enslave them and make them wear their underpants on their heads. Ohhh YES!!!"

Right Alien: "What was that??? That is not a punishment a proper slave-master would order! We are clever slave-master!"

Left Alien: "SHUT UP! Your plan is stupid! Wait! What is that big yellow thing in sky???"

Right Alien: "It is the star of this solar system you idiot!"

etc. etc. Well you get the point...

Anyways though mate...Thanks for the game! It was a spot of fun!

[close]

[miguel]

Thanks everybody!

Mandle, thanks for your considerations, but in my "defence" I think you should acknowledge that I was asked to cut down all dialogues and hotspot comments to less than half that I had originally written. Flash games, well casual games are very striped out of content.
It was very different than writing for an AGS game.
Although I didn't code the game I think the lock puzzle combination wasn't really that difficult and some minutes would be enough to figure it out.

Hopefully when the guys over at Silver Castle make up some money they'll continue Thomas Schmidt's adventures!

P.S: CaptainD, there's nothing dishonest about french onion sellers, in fact they have deep interesting personalities because they have layers.

[Mandle]

Thanks everybody!

Mandle, thanks for your considerations, but in my "defence" I think you should acknowledge that I was asked to cut down all dialogues and hotspot comments to less than half that I had originally written. Flash games, well casual games are very striped out of content.
It was very different than writing for an AGS game.
Although I didn't code the game I think the lock puzzle combination wasn't really that difficult and some minutes would be enough to figure it out.

Hopefully when the guys over at Silver Castle make up some money they'll continue Thomas Schmidt's adventures!

P.S: CaptainD, there's nothing dishonest about french onion sellers, in fact they have deep interesting personalities because they have layers.

Hehe....layers...

I get jokes...

Sorry mate, I did not mean to put you on the defensive with my comments. Now that I understand you were developing the game by supplying story and artwork without actually being at the helm and coding it I feel for you. That must be hard. And cutting half your story to satisfy the maker(s)...That's known as "Killing your darlings" in editors' lingo...I'm sure you know why now...

Still, if you want the developers to get successful please pass on the main problem I mentioned with the:

Spoiler

Inv item to inv item usage...THIS will lose them 95% of their player base. If the game does not let the player  understand that they can use items on items even when those combinations don't work, and yet finishing the game properly depends on inv to inv interaction, the player will give up in frustration assuming that inv to inv does not work at all.

[close]

Sorry to be pedantic about that but it was a major issue for me, and a simple fix could solve it and make the difference between a failed game and a hit.

Anyways:

Get back to work on Ancient Aliens Chapter 2: The Root Of The World's Largest Penis!!!

[miguel]

Get back to work on Ancient Aliens Chapter 2: The Root Of The World's Largest Penis!!!

Now that would be a killer title, no?

As for the guys who produced the game I'm sure they'll be reading this thread and hopefully improve. I have nothing bad to say about them and they did what they could to "fit" my way of doing things. It takes a big deal of tolerance to lead a team and they did it really well.