Murphy_Renpy

background

Best played with sound

UPDATE 10/19/15:

Unpacked images and .zip for easy play

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B-YvMeeemTlWVkgxQmoxNEgxeG8&usp=sharing

OUTDATED:

Added facial tweaks fixed bugs

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-YvMeeemTlWQ2tlWVVxaWhXb1U/view?usp=sharing

Some animations so don’t be too click heavy, let transitions play out

OUTDATED:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-YvMeeemTlWTm95TzE3RV9udGM/view

9 comments
  1. I think I got stuck in a loop towards the end there, but I wasn’t immediately aware of it. Between the language, the visuals, the sound, and the narrative arc, none of which I completely understood, I found the work to have a huge amount of charm. The atmosphere was great and being dropped into the story after it starts was a great trick for that (positive) narrative disorientation. I felt like I was playing something Adult Swim would have produced. The “epic-ness” directly confronts the “renpy-ness,” in that the scope of the world overpowers the fact that the system used to create the game has a traditionally silly, small purpose. I smiled the whole time.

  2. I didn’t really understand what was going on, and I got into what I think was an infinite loop talking to the turkey. I did like some of the artwork a lot (particularly the turkey) and if all of the art looked more like that it would really add to the aesthetic I think you’re going for.

  3. You’ve put a lot of time into creating your world, but at times you get very exposition-heavy trying to bring it all across. And even with that, It’s confusing. You can tell the exact same story with about half as much background and new ideas.

    juxtaposing a scene about chemical weapons with light jazz is a little weird, and in the same scene the two characters are almost always behind the text, so they’re hard to look at.

    When dealing with the turkey, much of your dialogue tree feels very ‘easy’: There’s often one obvious choice to not die at that point. I’m not sure if this is actually the case, but it gives that impression.

  4. I think everything visually worked together well here, including the sound, but I didn’t understand the story. I got where it was going, about nature, death and genocide but I didn’t get these concepts in conjunction with he story. Like, everyone else, I got into an endless loop with the turkey so I’m not sure about the real ending as well. Also, because I wasn’t sure what was going on narratively, I didn’t know how to best respond (make choices) to effect the story.

  5. This game is so, so weird. I played through it a couple times, trying to understand it, and I still don’t. I also kept running into the same ending–is it purposefully an infinite loop? It seemed like there was another element of the end missing.
    I do like the art. If the style of the backgrounds matched the characters, that’d add to the immersion. Cutting down on the exposition (or maybe just streamlining it? I’m not sure) might also help.

  6. The story line was a bit confusing. Maybe introduce the context and setting slowly and clearly. I also wish the art was more consistent. I did like the use of lighting and movement. I think there was a deeper meaning that I was missing. It made me feel uncomfortable but I’m not sure what was discomforting.

  7. Yeah, there is too much you are trying to tell in too little time. Storytelling is all about making people care about your characters and there’s no hook here for me.
    There is something disturbing about the inconsistent visual style, the penis references, the lounge cocktail bar music and the cryptic world logic. It could be a cult game for 4chan type of players? But do you want it to be unsettling and deeply weird?

  8. Some food for thought:
    – Have you tried putting the characters through the same filters as the background?
    – You can’t actually see the characters…. 🙁
    -The dialogue is so fast paced that you don’t have a great handle on what happens unless you read really carefully.
    – The characters move around somewhat arbitrarily
    – Good use of scale — the Turkey is huge compared to the other characters but I feel like this wouldn’t bug me if I could see the other characters.
    – Is there a reason you always lose to the Turkey? This implies that the Turkey is always right yet this dialogue would be much more interesting if there was a non-BW narrative
    – On the subject of the background, the backgrounds are amazing. They lend themselves incredibly well to the content of your work- Good job! 🙂

  9. Charming and so weird. It’s really unsettling and oddly hilarious, especially with the sound. The juxtapositions with the super-sophisticated backgrounds and the characters really worked for me. I don’t think your game needs consistency, maybe because it’s just so crazy that it doesn’t even matter. Like Paolo says, I agree that the game was too short for what you were trying to express. And there are some pretty serious and disturbing themes that I think that you could have expanded upon even more.

    I think you should work on making the characters more visible in the game (so that they aren’t blocked by the wall of text) and that you should shorten your texts into simpler blocks. Sometimes, they are so long that it’s a little hard to read through. I think that players would be able to focus more with shorter texts.

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