There seems to be a bug that prevents someone from finishing the game. It happens when you go downstairs and past your room, your mood is set back to happy and you restart from day one all over again.
Reviews for "Shooting in the Dark"
It's pretty good, but I didn't know what to do after getting on my clothes
Besides the many bugs that I have encountered during game play looks very promising you should enhance it and you really have to work more and more on Flash sorry for being to rude but that's a truth to tell there's lots of bad news and some good news.
For the bad news: As far as I noticed this game is based on buttons, everything you can interact with is basically a flash button. You progress through the game by clicking on the right stuff at the right moment but the game doesn't consider making wrong decisions during game play, once you make one you find yourself stuck and the game doesn't respond anymore, there's no way to recover and you have to restart. Also when you unlock the weapon and it says "You had a choice" or whatever and you have to click on that, the mouse cursor start blinking and you can't click on it. Though it's not hard but I say it's IMPOSSIBLE to get over that checkpoint. As far as I can see, it's a mistake among many flash games makers when they design flash buttons. They forget to add an area for where the user can click on the button. When designing a flash button go for the frame labeled "hit" and define the hit area with the rectangle tool. Now it should be fine and you don't get a blinking mouse cursor as you don't go out of the text borders.
Next is when you turn off the lights, it turns back on itself. Unless this is a part of the game because I was wondering if it's related to the game title "Shooting in the dark" maybe I don't have a clue right now.
For the good news:
The game is somehow realistic and that's a good point about it.
I love the pixelart that was really awesome and your style is kinda original and funny too.
I really enjoyed the game, I played half an hour then I gave up but I've really wished to complete it. Looking forward to see a better release :D
I don't understand your game.
I think it's apparent that you put effort into this project, but it doesn't make any sense to me. It made enough of an impression to get me to review it, though, so don't take this to mean I hated it or anything. There were just a lot of things in here that baffled me. I would organize these into different sections, but it seems like the problems in this are so interwoven with one another that I'm just going to deal with them all at once.
I think it's pretty clear that you were trying to make a statement with this game, but it was lost in the confusion I had with the interface and I guess control in general. The first thing I interacted with was the menu. I pressed "play", then got asked if I was sure. I selected "no", and though that's apparently the "right choice", I have no idea why. In your author comments you ask "Do video games make people violent? Or is it just the things we go through?" so the statement that I "made the right choice" seems to imply that video games do make people violent. Is that right? I guess if your game had a lot less to it I could consider it some sort of meta-message and leave it at that. But there is so much conflicting information in this game. I'll come back to that as I encounter the information in question.
After selecting "no", you have the option to go right back to the choice of whether or not you want to play by clicking on what I'm going to assume is the "play" button behind the text box. I'm pretty sure this wasn't intended, but it really kills what the finality of the decision I think you were going for. It doesn't matter that you didn't put that in there on purpose. It dulls the impact of the choice, and in a game that seems to be all about choice, that's a little off.
I feel like there's a trend throughout this entire game of essentially slapping the player in the face whenever he feels he can make a decision. I selected "yes", and the game told me that I "always had a choice". Well, yeah, I guess I did. But, again, the impact of statements like these is dulled when you can change on a whim. Right after that message appears, you can click the hidden play button and go back to the decision, which I honestly don't think will have an effect on anyone. If the player stops after being told he made the right choice, he doesn't get anything out of that. He doesn't know what your game's about. He doesn't know what just happened. There is no serious impact. If the player just backs out and plays through the whole thing, chances are the message will be even more warped and confusing. I know it was for me.
When the game actually starts (assuming the choice to play doesn't count), there are several objects to click on, none of which have any bearing on the course of the game. Can I sleep? No, I just got up. Can I go through the door? I'm not going anywhere dressed like that. At this point I guess I thought all these messages were to reinforce the idea that you were confined to one path, as the choice to play the game locks you in or something. This became a little harder to believe as I encountered sections of the game where there were arrows leading to different areas which, when clicked, yielded no response at all. This just seems like lazy coding. Maybe I'm wrong, though, because at the beginning, you can walk all around your house and not get trapped in one room, and at the end, there isn't really even the option to do that. Maybe this means that the more you play video games, the more closed your world is? This seems like a horrendous message.
The point where everything felt the most wrong was when you're on the map screen and can click on school or the park. Believe me, I wanted to click on the school. I kept trying and then I realized how annoyingly claustrophobic the whole thing was. It's hard to feel a connection to your onscreen character when you don't understand why he does the things he does. Admittedly, this happens in plenty of cinematic/story-driven games. I feel like it would make the most sense to convey a story development that cannot be changed with some cutscene or even a text box with a description. It's just plain baffling when a game offers you the illusion of choice only to have it come crashing down on you as you discover there is one solitary path. At the park, you can only look at the swings, at which point your character says "they look like fun". Why doesn't he use them then? Why on earth did he come to what is essentially a playground if he didn't intend to do anything? Does he like getting socked in the gut? The point I'm trying to make is that I don't understand why in the world he would skip school, so it feels unfair when my character gets punched for basically following the only path he's allowed to take. Then I go home and my parents yell at me for not going to school and it feels unfair again, because it wasn't me.
The next in-game day, my path is again laid out for me, only this time, I have to go to school. I can't go to the park at all, because I "really should go to school". That kid from the park hits me again, and another kid picks me up. I guess I'll talk about that kid again later. My player goes home and reads some obnoxious post on Facebook and gets really angry. Which I can half understand, but the following events destroy my understanding almost completely.
At the end of the few in-game days there are, I must click the video game console to finish that day. The player character just stares blankly as the room fades to black. He hardly seems affected by playing games, much less moved to violence. I guess you don't have to appear affected to be disturbed, but as he reads the Facebook post, he is visibly angry. What's he thinking when he's playing his games? Nothing? It seems like he's just killing time or clearing his mind. Is he relaxed by the thought of violence? I guess that could be a plausible explanation for the time being.
The end of this game just completely blows my mind. By this I mean I can't hope to understand it. For whatever reason, the character gets dressed, goes into the bathroom (where there is, of all things, a key), takes the key, goes to his parents' room (I guess his parents are downstairs), opens a locked gun case, and takes the gun. Then it just ends. "You always had a choice."
At this point my head just explodes from the stubborn repetition of a phrase that no longer means anything to me. I just spent three in-game days doing the only things I could do. The one dialogue choice I had had no discernible effect on anything. I chose to play the video game. Was that the choice that led me down this spiral into...whatever that was? There is no depiction of any following events, which confounds me. What the heck happened? Again, there is no impact here, because nothing happened, because nothing mattered.
Summary: Really happy kid skips school and gets punched in the gut at a playground, comes home and gets chewed out, plays games, wakes up, goes to school, gets punched, goes home, is laughed at online, plays games, wakes up, gets gun.
There were a couple things that bugged me about the story.
-I find it hard to believe that such a happy kid could turn to violence in the span of maybe two days. He must not have been very happy.
-The redheaded kid is Satan incarnate. He turns up everywhere the player goes just to punch him and call him names. Maybe I'm just ignorant, but I have never encountered a bully quite like this one. He doesn't seem to hang out with anyone and seems to exist just to make the player's life miserable. Which is why I don't believe the main character was completely happy to start.
-The kid who helped the player up is completely forgotten. Is my character a jerk? I guess so, as it's implied he turns to violence, but this is really just another example of me not being able to understand my character. Instead of befriending this kid, my character goes home and gets a gun. I don't understand it. Apart from this one kid, the game is just wholly depressing. My character's parents call the player a disappointment, the bully keeps punching him, and...that's it, actually. So many factors of a typical day at school are blatantly disregarded here to keep the narrative as unforgiving and sad as possible, but in the process, all humanity and realism is lost. Does my character wander the park for seven hours? What the heck does he do when he's out of the house? The game seems to just throw in video games as just another thing the character does, but it neglects everything else he does outside of his house. Surely other factors impacted the final decision at the end of the game?
Overall, I feel like your game just cuts out significant portions of this kid's life to serve its own purposes and to support its own message, whatever that may be. The game seems to simultaneously argue that games are just another time waster and that games restrict you to a terrible, miserable, even violent life.
Is the game supposed to be frustrating and unfair? Is that the point? Is it mimicking life and its sometimes unfair misfortunes? Wait, but no. It's a video game. I chose to play it from the main menu, remember? I always had that choice, between games and life, and now I'm in the game world. Maybe that's why things don't make sense at all. Maybe you're saying that the argument that games would even make someone violent is ridiculous. Maybe the whole thing is a parody that just flew way over my head. It doesn't feel like that, though.
I'm going to guess that you got your username (and the design for your character facing forward) from Earthbound. I really liked Earthbound. I actually thought it was moving and I think it's one of the games least likely to turn someone on to violence. I'm going to guess you appreciate video games. This assumption makes your game all the more confusing. Nothing adds up at all to me. I can't wrap my head around what you possibly hoped to convey with this game. I mean, it's playable, and it's got decent visuals and sound, but whatever wisdom you were trying to impart is completely lost on me.
Good luck with whatever you choose to make in the future.
NessSuccess responds:
Haha I appreciate the review, i'll respond in a pm.
I like the graphical style, here...but I can't really comment on the message behind the game.
I cannot comment on the message behind the game because the event scripting is messed up. The game often reverts back to day 1 or day 2 without warning,and this is so problematic that progressing through the game is virtually impossible. Thankfully this is something that you should be able to fix.
NessSuccess responds:
I updated the .swf and I fixed I believe every bug. Thanks for the review.