The Weight of a Soul Feedback Thread

Competitions Spring Thing
#1

T H E · W E I G H T · O F · A · S O U L

In a world of arcane mysteries, a young doctor’s apprentice unravels a conspiracy most grim.

Hey everyone. The Weight of a Soul is an ambitious mystery/horror parser game featured in Spring Thing 2021, with more than 50,000 words and 5 hours of content in a typical playthrough. I’ve been working on it since an excerpt was shown at Spring Thing 2017, and I’m happy to present it in its entirety for the first time.

The official website for The Weight of a Soul can be found at https://chinkeeyong.wordpress.com/the-weight-of-a-soul/. There you can find more details about the project, my Development Diary, and some tentative plans for a premium version of the game to be released on itch.io and Steam in the future.

This thread is for sharing your thoughts and feedback about The Weight of a Soul. Since this is my first full-length Inform release, I’m a little nervous and looking forward to seeing what everyone has to say. Comments and criticism are all welcome :slight_smile:

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#2

Hey, I remember the original snippet was awesome. Really looking forward to this!

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#3

I’ve just downloaded.

Your work hereby gains the dubious honor of being the first Spring Thing game I will play this year, and by which I will measure all others for eternity to come…

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#4

Hey,

I just started playing and I love the way the intro throws you right in the middle of things from the get-go.
Small remark: The top centimeter or so of the map is obscured by the black statusbar. I can only read the bottom half of the lettering of “Via Terminalis”. It’s a small aesthetic thing, but seeing how you care about polish in the rest of the game, I thought I’d let you know.

By the way: Congrats on the shine on the HELP/ABOUT-menu! A journal, character and places notes, good hints. Wow!

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#5

Thanks, I’m glad you’re enjoying it so far!

It’s a shame about the map being cut off… must have missed something with my CSS. Have you tried scrolling up?

If you can’t view the top half of the map at all, I’ll have to take a look at it and fix it in a future version. In the meantime, you can access the raw image file of the map here.

#6

No no, nothing so dramatic. I’m really just talking about maybe 6 or 7 millimeters. Just enough to obscure the top half of the words “Via Terminalis”.

On your wordpress page about the game you mention that it’s inspired by " classics like Anchorhead, Blue Lacuna , and City of Secrets ."

However, more than any of those, the vibe I’m picking up the strongest is King of Shreds and Patches in the map and the helpful journal. Of course I’m not far enough in to compare content.

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#7

No, wait. You were right. The top of the map I can see is half of “Via Terminalis Junction”. Everything above that is missing. No “Channelworks”, no “Condemned Block”, etc…

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#8

On Chrome on a windows pc using ‘play online’, the map scrolls up and down just fine and shows the top part okay (1366x768 resolution). Hope this helps narrow it down! Having fun so far!

#9

Oh yes, technical context information.

I’m playing the gblorb file I downloaded from Chin Kee Yong’s wordpress page linked above.

No scrolling possible as far as I can find. […he says, while holding his laptop upside down and shaking it.]

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#10

Day 2, just investigated the bodies, wonderful game so far!

Minor… bug report? I’m surprised at the word “animii”, since I would expect it to be “animi” as the nominative plural of “animus”.

As for the map, I’ve made a screenshot (since it’s only shown in full if I make my Gargoyle window really really big). Maybe this is useful to you, Rovarsson? I just keep it open in a separate window.

map
map1424×1106 597 KB

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#11

@VictorGijsbers: Thanks for the grammar catch!

@Rovarsson: I hadn’t considered that the in-game map could be too large for some monitors. I’ll have to distribute a version with a smaller map too then.

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#12

Many thanks. I’ll do the same.

#13

No nitpicks, no criticism, no bug report. Just chiming in to say that creating an action scene is hard and I think you’ve struck the right balance between guidance and interactivity. (The fight scene and treating doctor Cavala’s wound.) I felt engaged without being too spooked to try anything.
Something tells me that this was a training-session for later.

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#14

I’ve just updated my GitHub build of The Weight of a Soul to fix a major bug in the reveal at the end of Day Three. This bug interrupted my lovingly crafted prose with unwanted text, and could, in rare circumstances, kill the player without warning. (I’m surprised nobody caught it! I guess the reveal was just too gripping?)

I’ve also sent the new build to Aaron Reed, so it should be up on the Spring Thing website soon.

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#15

Nah. To tell you the truth, we all gave up after day 1 and wrote mock-reviews. Nobody saw the big reveal…

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#16

It was too good. We couldn’t see our own failures in the face so clearly.

To be honest, if you mean the reveal that Justinian is the bad guy, this was obvious to me from the point where the assassin reveals that she is working together with a doctor. Because of this, it felt a bit forced that I had to reveal myself to Justinian in Act 3, but, you know, it’s not necessarily bad to have a player-character disconnect like that. Although I guess you could implement a different narrative solution, e.g., have our protagonist make a sobbing noise or something instead of revealing themselves on purpose in case the player really keeps choosing not to do so; not sure it would be better, just an idea.

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#17

@VictorGijsbers: Thanks for your feedback. I wasn’t sure how many players would figure out the twist and how many wouldn’t. In this version of the game Marid wants to trust Justinian, but the player can express through dialogue choices that on some level she knows she’s deluding herself. It was a very difficult scene to write and one I’ll definitely look at rewriting.

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#18

FWIW I also guessed the twist early, and thought that the forced choice worked OK but was a little frustrating since it did seem to offer a choice to the player but then had Marid’s decision-making negate the player’s decision-making. So the involuntary sob or something like that might be a good option – or having Marid start to talk herself into trusting Justinian, or at least giving him a chance to explain, after repeated refusals, rather than just have it be lovesick pity that tips the scales.

I will say another time you do this – when Marid refuses to say “I believe in you, Justinian” – made me laugh out loud!

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#19

Spanish CAAD are playing this game with webot, so we really play collaborative. All of us write commands and at the same time chat in the app.
I write this comment to explain that in “day 0” some options in the menus are not shown.
I have played in Android Fabularium and have no issue with map nor with options menus.
Additionally, in IOs Frotz I can see no issue.

Regards

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#20

Now, I want to write a few words about the game.
We like this game very much. I think this will become the best game since A N C H O R H E A D in this kind of story.

I recomend you to play this jewel.

Best regards.

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