"A Fire Darkly" - a psychological horror game

Hawkmoth

Hello,

After some intensive work, I finished my first IF game, A Fire Darkly: Chapter 1. The blurb is as follows:

You must have gotten lost.

​Explore a bizarre dark forest. Solve puzzles. Begin to piece together the fragments of your past. Who are you? What are you doing here?

​Be careful with the choices you make in this text-based psychological horror game.

I'll be announcing this and making it easily available on my website tomorrow, but until then you can find it here:
http://www.louisrakovich.com/games.html

I would be tremendously grateful if you checked it out and told me what you think (and of course, let me know about any bugs or typos, if I haven't managed to eradicate all of them).

PLAY

Here's the cover:


There's an issue with Safari, where if you have cookies disabled, you get an error message when you try to open the game. I noticed the same thing happening with other Twine games, but I don't know whether this is fixable. The game seems to work properly in Chrome, Mozilla and Internet Explorer (and Safari when cookies are at least partially enabled). I'll be posting about this problem separately in the forum, but if anyone has any tips on fixing this, please let me know.

Anyway, thanks a ton to anyone who checks this out. I hope you enjoy it!
—Louis

TheMadExile

The story was serviceable and I liked the style. Perhaps I was merely lucky in my playthrough, however, it seems free of the inane bad-end syndrome that plagues so many of these kind of things, so kudos for that. I'd play the next chapter.

One thing I did notice. On the learn more page, linked from the ending, you have various nice illustrations of some of the elements from the story. Working the occasional illustration like those in here and there might be a nice addition.

Hawkmoth

Thanks for playing! Very glad to hear you liked the style and would play the next chapter. I appreciate it.

TheMadExile wrote: »

Perhaps I was merely lucky in my playthrough, however, it seems free of the inane bad-end syndrome that plagues so many of these kind of things, so kudos for that.

Bad-end as in "oops wrong choice now you're dead, start over"? Yeah, there's none of that. You can't die. The only way for the story not to advance is if you get stuck on a puzzle, but the few puzzles in this chapter are so light I doubt that's possible. Your comment did however make me realize that my phrasing of the blurb made it sound as though perhaps it's possible to die in the game, so I changed the "be careful" part to avoid that confusion.

TheMadExile wrote: »

One thing I did notice. On the learn more page, linked from the ending, you have various nice illustrations of some of the elements from the story. Working the occasional illustration like those in here and there might be a nice addition.

Yeah, I thought of doing that initially, but if I illustrated some findable elements I'd have to illustrate all of them or the game would feel inconsistent to me personally, so I decided to settle on a purely text-made experience, except one atmospheric background per chapter.

Melyanna

Hi!
I love the game's title and really liked the game itself: I love the mood and descriptions.

One thing that gets a bit cumbersome in this type of games is navigating an invisible map with the only option of clicking on the north-west-east-south directions.
It is quite easy to get lost and to lose track of those areas you haven't yet visited.

Would you consider implementing some kind of map or any other mean to help users finding their way?
It's not the easiest thing to do and it can take away from exploration, but I think it might help preventing some frustration.

Hawkmoth

Melyanna wrote: »

Hi!
I love the game's title and really liked the game itself: I love the mood and descriptions.

Thank you! That's great to hear.

Melyanna wrote: »

One thing that gets a bit cumbersome in this type of games is navigating an invisible map with the only option of clicking on the north-west-east-south directions.
It is quite easy to get lost and to lose track of those areas you haven't yet visited.

Would you consider implementing some kind of map or any other mean to help users finding their way?
It's not the easiest thing to do and it can take away from exploration, but I think it might help preventing some frustration.

If you're talking about the area with the tree, I'm sorry to hear it was frustrating. I tried to keep that area relatively simple -- there's only one intersection; for instance if you choose to go north, you can only go north (forward) or south (backward). You can't switch an axis until you go back to the starting point.
I don't think a map fits the style and spirit of the game, but I'll definitely try to keep the frustration-inducement of such elements to a minimum in the next chapter. Thank you for the input, I really appreciate it.

Hawkmoth

The game is now listed on IFDB. If anyone could give it a go and an honest rating or review, I'd be eternally grateful.

http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=6zje3enfwgb6s4kf

Melyanna

Hawkmoth wrote: »

If you're talking about the area with the tree, I'm sorry to hear it was frustrating. I tried to keep that area relatively simple -- there's only one intersection; for instance if you choose to go north, you can only go north (forward) or south (backward). You can't switch an axis until you go back to the starting point.
I don't think a map fits the style and spirit of the game, but I'll definitely try to keep the frustration-inducement of such elements to a minimum in the next chapter. Thank you for the input, I really appreciate it.

As you say, the area itself is relatively simple, so it's not as frustrating as other games where you end up in a maze of links you can't navigate.
However, I think with Twine it is very easy to end up doing that, so even if a map doesn't fit, I still suggest finding a way to give some hints.
I am going to quote a bit from a reivew you got in IFDB - I think the review itself is quite harsh, but the author explained what I meant much better than I did, so here it is:

It's a bit disappointing in Twine to read a block of text followed by a list of bare choices "Go North" "Go East" "Go West", especially when the setting is a dreamscape that one might not expect to conform to a map grid, and when Twine makes it an easy matter to make any words in the prose a hyperlink which might give an indication of where the click might lead.

It also does the thing where the map doesn't just require you to go "west", it requires you to go west three or four times to reach a destination with no descriptive reward for doing so except a sentence-fragment description at each click: "a hollow log" "a mossy rock".

Hawkmoth

Melyanna wrote: »

As you say, the area itself is relatively simple, so it's not as frustrating as other games where you end up in a maze of links you can't navigate.
However, I think with Twine it is very easy to end up doing that, so even if a map doesn't fit, I still suggest finding a way to give some hints.

You're right, I mulled over this some more and realized that part wasn't done right. The compass directions were too much.

So I changed it. Could you please take a look at it again and tell me if you think that area is better now? I'd really appreciate it.

Melyanna

Hawkmoth wrote: »

So I changed it. Could you please take a look at it again and tell me if you think that area is better now? I'd really appreciate it.

Hi!
I gave it a try and I think it's a lot better.
It fits nicely with the rest of the prose and helps painting a picture of the environment.

Hawkmoth

Melyanna wrote: »

Hi!
I gave it a try and I think it's a lot better.
It fits nicely with the rest of the prose and helps painting a picture of the environment.

Awesome! Thank you very much.