A promising start, but with some mysteries yet to be unraveled.
This adventure began quite intriguingly, with a sudden awakening and amnesia that plunged us into an unknown world. The encounter with the young woman and the subsequent altercation immediately raised questions and created an atmosphere of mystery.
Arriving in town and meeting the sheriff further complicated the situation, leaving us with more questions than answers. The disappearance of the mayor’s daughter adds a layer of suspense and drives us to uncover the truth.
What I like:
The atmosphere: The Western setting creates a captivating and adventurous atmosphere.
The characters: The characters encountered so far are well-developed, each with their own unique qualities.
The mysteries: The numerous puzzles to solve keep us on the edge of our seats.
What I would like to see more of:
More details about the protagonist’s past: Who is he and what was he doing in that town?
Deeper developments of the supporting characters: I would like to know more about the young woman, the sheriff, and the other townspeople.
A faster pace: Some moments could be developed more dynamically to increase tension.
In conclusion, this adventure has all the makings of a captivating experience. I can’t wait to discover what the future holds for the protagonist and to unravel all the mysteries surrounding this story.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to play my game and writing a review. I‘m glad you enjoyed it.
It is likely that you may hear of some of these characters again in the future.
Now that there‘s a dedicated thread for Dust, I hope you don‘t mind me linking other reviews here, again with my heartfelt thanks for playing my game.
I’ll copy-past my own review here then!
Thanks for playing and sharing your thoughts!
Another review, thanks for playing and I’m glad you enjoyed it!
cross-posting my review
interesting! the ending did have a bit of that feel
Thanks a lot for playing and your thorough review!
I’ll be happy to discuss the game and any questions that may have come up after the competition is finished.
Yay, another review!
Thanks a lot for playing, reviewing and being so helpful.
If it wasn’t for your kind review of the original version, I‘d probably never have considered the game to be worthy of a translation and to join this competition. Now I‘m very glad I decided to be part of all this, no matter the final result.
Yay, another review! Thanks for playing.
I’m not sure this deserves its own thread, so I’ll just leave this here for anyone interested. I just wanted to thank everyone playing the game, and I hope you had a good time with it. I really enjoyed the whole IFComp experience and finally seeing my game in 25th place. I’m very grateful for the generous prize that came with it, half of which I will donate to Médecins Sans Frontières.
There’s no interesting personal backstory to this game really. I am a software developer and avid gamer since the late 80s, actually more of a point-and-click adventure fan than into IF. I’m not that big a Western fan either, so how did this game happen? I just wanted to pick a genre that does not seem to be covered much already, and I had not come across many Western games in recent years, so it felt pretty fresh to me.
Even though I’m supposedly a dull computer nerd developing software, I did write pretty good essays in school but never followed up on that, so I thought maybe 25+ years later, I might try using that part of my brain again. Unlike I would do in my job, I just fired up a text editor without much planning ahead, described a room and some items, and just went with the flow from there, not sure where it would take me. A hobby should feel kind of different to the daytime job after all.
I always aimed to create something quite straightforward. Not every story needs to be about a hero saving the world, include a plot twist in the middle, or introduce some fancy new mechanics. Of course, there are many games, much better ones than mine, that do one or all of these things, but that’s not what I had in mind. I wanted something classic, somewhat anachronistic, maybe loaded with cliché but hopefully not too plain.
Being new to Inform, and pretty much to writing prose in general, it was rather challenging bringing it all together - a simple but believable story with a proper start and ending, some rewarding but not too challenging gameplay, and a parser that doesn’t annoy the player too much. With point-and-click in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to make the game solvable with just a few standard verbs and USE X (WITH Y) so you don’t have to play guess the verb. In the end, not that many people used it, but maybe it helps some beginners without an IF background. For the same reason, I chose dialogue to be option based.
Also, I did not want to risk going out of scope and make the game feel rushed. In the end, a working game is better than a game with lots of options and ideas that may fall apart. Some players were annoyed that they had to trigger some action or talk to someone before being able to do what they already had in mind, something which I can totally relate to as a player. However, I needed to keep the game more linear and manageable for my own sanity.
I was rather proud of the writing style in the original German version of the game when it was finished. I would say that German is a rather “dense” language where you can transport a lot of information, emotion, and subtext with just a few sentences, which fit both the medium and the setting quite well. I translated the game sentence by sentence, not really adding anything, and I’m afraid a bit of the flair and atmosphere of the original got lost in the process. I suppose it’s alright since I’m not a native speaker, but still, it hurts a bit, and I could have probably given it some more effort.
So, what else would I do differently next time, if there was a next time? I’m pretty content with how things turned out overall. I think I succeeded in writing a good game and did not fail trying to write an amazing game. The story and characters are nothing to write home about, but they work for the most part. Puzzles need to be less repetitive and allow for alternative solutions. Some more items, events or dialogue options, even if not necessary to solve the game, would make the world more engaging.
Furthermore, and this is nothing new, get some more people to test the game before release. I wanted to create something new for everyone to enjoy, so there was little beta testing before I dropped the game on the German community. I didn’t want to ask half of the potential audience (8-10 players) to beta test so they could enjoy a fresh game. For the English version, I asked some people directly where maybe posting on the forums would have been a better approach to get even more feedback before release.
Wow, now that was a lot more than I previously thought I’d have to say. If you’ve made it down here, better go wash your eyes and read something interesting! Of course, I’m happy to further discuss the game or anything else.
Thanks for the post-mortem, I really enjoy these.
I find it really fascinating to hear about people’s approach to translation–I’m curious if you recall any particular words or phrases that you liked a lot in the original and were sad to lose? (My highschool level recollection of German is that you can form compounds a lot more freely than in English?)
The short anwer would be no, nothing in particular. I could probably pick any random sentence and contemplate about it. It’s more the subtle little things that add up to something bigger, such as the careful choice of an adjective here or there.
I was definitely sad to lose the ability to characterize people by their way of speaking. Marten has a slight North German dialect, giving him a bit of that jolly sailor vibe without overdoing it. Everybody else, like Ella, Bill and Sheriff Dunder, also have a distinct way of speaking. It was impossible for me to bring that across without making it sound ridiculous. Also there’s some faint humor (hopefully) shining through in the original which I found no way to bring across the same way.
You’re probably right about compounds, I suppose my English just isn’t good enough to make an educated comparison. Maybe a small example: After you tell the sheriff what happened to you, I translated “He looks at you disdainfully.”. The original is “Er blickt dich geringschätzig an.” So “gering” is low/small/little and “schätzen” is to value/treasure - simple enough.
However, the slightly old-fashioned adjective “geringschätzig” carries so much more emotion and subtext, not just the sound of the actual word in your head but also what you associate with it, and I know there’s nothing more I need to add. “Disdainfully” may or may not have the same ring to it, or may not be a good fit here at all - I will never know.