I want to share with you a short and very peculiar adventure game that has just been published.
Its name is “All you can eat” and it’s a strange mix between an adventure game and a comic book, meaning that all the actions of the player become an additional comic panel that furthers the story. At the end of the game, the player can even print the comic book that his playthrough has generated.
It’s a comedy game and it’s also quite short, but it costs less than two bucks (1.5 eurs on Steam, right now) and I’ve just purchased it.
Reminds me of a game we used to play at parties. You sat around in a circle and someone starts to tell a story, then stops midsentence then the right or leftmost person continues by adding to the story and everybody has to do that while having to remember everything that came before. When you got something wrong it was over and you…er…I don´t know, had to get drunk or something. I don´t really remember because that´s probably how this would end. But I remember having a lot of fun with this little party game(which I haven´t played it almost 20 years I´m just realising).
It was originally in hardcover book form authored by Jason Shiga. Andrew Plotkin (of modern interactive fiction fame) then helped convert it into an iOS game (currently, only on IOS, it looks like).
It was slightly bothersome, but not enough to keep me from playing. However, I appreciate your point, and I actually provided feedback to the developers just now on their web site about it, to see if they would consider a game option to reduce the affect.
Interestingly, I felt a little weird after playing for about an hour. Then when I went to sleep after that, I did feel a bit nauseous. That’s the first time a game has had that affect on me.
I got this response from the developers, so - who knows - maybe they’ll do something about it.
> Hey, Brian!
> Thanks for the feedback!
> If people really find it difficult to watch the scroll, we will definitely add some kind of panel moving that does not scroll (for example, just jumping to the next panel automatically!)
> Perhaps this should be a checkbox in the Options. We'll see!
> Thanks again for reaching out :)
> Cheers,
> Alex
Thanks, I didn’t know that game. It seems interesting.
I’m sorry to hear this, to me it didn’t have any negative effect.
Just out of curiosity: did you play it on a big screen? How much of your field of vision was covered by the screen? I’m wondering if the size of the moving parts plays a role, here.
I hope the developer will add that option. The game is a short funny ride but this issue should be addressed.
I have a 23’’ wide screen…normal distance from myself. I need to move my head to watch the right and left edges. I can’t see both at once. Come to think of it, that must be the reason.
(btw, I think this is also why I miss bilinear filtering in TWP. )
(I also tried to play “All you Can Eat” in windowed mode, but the option does not work )
I just got an email from the developer indicating they added an option to remove the smooth scrolling affect between scenes. They are interested to get feedback from those who were bothered by the effect to see if this option addresses the issue. Here’s the email text:
We added a feature in the options menu to turn off the camera movement in the latest update.
Because we cannot test ourselves whether or not this in fact helps, we would appreciate it if you could try playing it with the setting on and let us know if our solution has fixed the issue!
thanks for the notice. Now I see the option “still camera”, but I still get smooth scrolling after each click. Is it a bug? I am unsure, because the scrolling behavior did change: it no longer oscillates (first left and then right), but it directly goes right. However, it is still impossible for me to play.
(haven’t tried on a smaller screen yet)
I’m hoping for an option to have no scrolling at all when I click… just a hard transition.
Hi, all. I’m the developer of the game, I just found out about this thread here.
I’m very glad you all liked the game but I see the issue of camera scrolling is bothering many of you, and the newest implementation is not helping much! I’ll have another update tomorrow which will make the “Still camera” option eliminate all movement, so you just see the panels. That should remove all problems. I will alert you here and on the steam page when that’s done. Thanks for all the attention and I’m glad you’re enjoying the game!
Cheers,
Alex from Gamechuck
The new update now has the “still camera” option have no camera movement what-so-ever! Not the smoothest way to play the game, but if it helps, I’m happy!
DRM is a difficult question for me. We’ll put the game on a DRM-free store soon (most probably Itch), but only after this initial Steam-exclusive period. Here’s my reasoning why - if all the initial sales are from the same place, you might just get some sinergy effect and get on the ‘popular’ list (which we were on for two days, I think Saturday and Monday). This is important for obvious reasons And if the crowd is diffused in several stores, the sinergy effect is lost. And Steam is the biggest digital store so that was a no-brainer I think.
Another (minor) topic of contention is that DRM-free is a lot easier to peddle the on torrents and so on. Now, I believe that people who don’t have the means to buy the game should be able to pirate and enjoy it, since they won’t buy it anyway (so you’re just closing out some people from enjoying your game which is not cool). But I had a very uncomfortable experience with the first indie game I worked on showing up on torrents hours before the intended release (because we foolishly sent the drm-free version to some shady press people). Games with Steam DRM can also be broken, but it takes a special skill-set that not all people have.
