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  1. Sup! My name's riot! I'm an artisty writey/drawy type what goes around consuming a lot of media. I recently played your game OneShot and, upon completion of the true end, I got some feedback for you if you're interested in making more games in the future!
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  3. I try to be constructive with it, but not everyone is able to handle seeing things they create kinda... bit-by-bit dismantled like I do. So if that would bother you, feel free to skip this and ignore.
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  5. (Also, there may be frequent allusions to Undertale since it has a similar narrative structure and EXEMPLIFIES some great habits.)
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  7. WITH THAT SAID, though, let's dive right in:
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  9. OneShot was a very pounded 7/10 for me. Hammered in, solid, unmoving. There's a lot of reasons for those missing points I'll go into, but biggest of them all I'd have to say is the music.
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  11. MUSIC:
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  13. A lack of melody, rhythm, and occasionally some samey-sounding tracks all kind of coalesced into an unappealing mess that made it hard to play the game for any extended period of time. Harsh, perhaps, but it's a very real barrier I faced towards enjoying the game personally.
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  15. I know only a little about music production but it may behoove you to look into some music theory or expand some of the music you listen to for more ideas.
  16. Other suggestions would be to do things like Leitmotifs, songs that exemplify the personalities of certain characters.
  17. Undertale and Cave Story both use these to excellent effect selling the personalities and atmospheres of their games, just look at Balrog's bombastic silly entrances or the aura of finality and melancholy present in the "final" battle against Asgore.
  18. In your game, music feels kind of seperate from a lot of the areas, settling into a kind of alienist melancholy across the whole game. And while that works for the game as a whole, it sounds very samey. Suggestions on improving that would include a more ominous sound for the dangerous Barrens, or a more hip-hop vibe for the Refuge, etc.
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  20. Music is a hard one and I can't fault this much on a solo dev, but it's something to explore.
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  22. GAMEPLAY:
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  24. You did a LOT of interesting ideas concepts here. I like it when games faff about with metanarratives like you've done, and there's lots of space for you to improve that.
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  26. To lead this: You did pretty good with them, apart from the code film there was never anything to obscure for me to figure out.
  27. On the other hand though, it feels like you ran out of ideas fairly quickly and many of these metapuzzles boiled down to "Go to the documents folder, dummy."
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  29. While those are interesting the first time, it might have been neat to have more obscure puzzle solutions dealing directly with the code. Hand-patching text documents, dealing with aggressive popups, PERHAPS NOT RELYING ON DESKTOP CHANGES (sorry that one kind of caught me off guard and I can't find the old desktop anymore, haha)... There's a lot of different ideas you could explore if you pursue more metanarrative ideas like that.
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  31. Again I bring up undertale, a game that wove the story into its meta faffery quite well. Grimdark flowey closing the game on you, the story literally saying "No, you're done" on certain endings, etc.
  32. It takes a bunch of codework sometimes but it's worth exploring more nuanced ideas if you plan on continuing with that concept.
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  34. CHARACTERS:
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  36. While acceptable, many of the characters fell down as... one note. The robot lady was Morose, the brother/sister pair were responsible/excitable, Niko is just "A good kid." There's not a lot of nuance to the characters, or even other characteristics. This wouldn't normally be a huge problem but in the end it made the ending feel slightly pushed because it'd assumed I'd formed a deeper attachment to these characters than I had.
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  38. There's a LOT involved in writing characters, but ideally you want to invest in character arcs of some sort for everyone. You even seem to have set those up with a couple characters already.
  39. Lamplighter guy seemed pretty upset with his own intelligence, and it would have been excellent to have him develop during the ending by going "Huh. I guess I am helpful!" to show he's not as static.
  40. Robogirl could also have done something similar with her apparent depression, some more details on what she did as a rogue might have lent more weight to her actions in the finale when she redeemed herself through that self-sacrifice.
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  42. OTHER times, characters appear out of nowhere and with little time to really grow attached. Pretty much all of the "Key" characters at the end fall under this, unfortunately. Only prototype really stuck around long enough to grow that attached to.
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  44. There's other examples, but so many characters fail to really hit home with even those base traits that it might help to start practicing more.
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  46. One exercise I do is writing dialogue examples for characters to nail down some unique mannerisms and "voices" for them before I commit them to the page. A lot of this even helps evolve their roles in stories more, as I've had several initial side-characters jump up in importance along plotlines.
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  48. Now, this percieved shallowness of character COULD be part of the point given the NATURE of the characters, but it's worth bringing up.
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  50. STORY:
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  52. Eh. It's alright. That's kind of a repeating feeling I got across this whole thing, is "it's just alright." The worldbuilding was interesting enough when you found it, but the limited nature of it made it feel not so strong as it could have been. More concepts and fun ideas to play with in your world make it feel livelier.
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  54. There's already alternative technologies in play like robots and shrimp-based electricity, but there's also more mundane recognizable things like skyscrapers. It makes the world feel less like its own unique entity and more like a pale echo of ours, which if intentional wasn't played up nearly enough to make sense.
  55. Try finding people you can bounce ideas off of, collaborating with people can help really drum up interesting ideas for alien landscapes which may have helped the atmosphere in the game a lot more to have.
  56. NIKO:
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  58. Kid's adorable, and the interactions with him are all plenty endearing. Unfortunately, he isn't played up too well as a real kid and that makes it harder to believe him as an intruder on the world. Kids can be sweet but they're also naive and occasionally troublesome, seeing him be mischievous sometimes or interact in less overtly wholesome ways with the world may have imbued just that extra shade of depth to him as a child character. This is a pretty small nitpick though as overall Niko was a sweet kid who formed a good attachment with the world and player.
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  60. OVERALL:
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  62. Despite this feedback, the game absolutely deserves that above-average 7/10 rating. Despite the limited scope (HIGHLY reccomend you learn a program besides rpg maker in the future), the game hits enough notes well enough to be worth the price of admission and stick around in my mind well enough for me to actually want to send this enormous hunk of text.
  63. There's things you could improve, but if you learn from this and continue to make games I'm gonna keep following you to see how you evolve as an author, composer, and game creator. I see tons of potential in what you've done so far and I want to see you really crack at it.
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