Do You Remember My Lullaby

[Reives]

Reivier Wirt
Lunair Naeryns
Vikon Marc
Salory (Song) Marc
Alden Laeril

Thanks guy, that helps.

==
Detailed commentary from me can now be found on http://quintessence-tbv.com/Lullaby/
==

Thank you for watching and the feedbacks everyone; they're much appreciated.

@Delmaschio:
Glad ya enjoyed it. By this kind of storytelling in a game, do you mean using this medium as a non-interactive story? If so, aye, I agree - it certainly does get dull quite easily. I always find myself wishing for effects/angles that are unfit for it, heheh.

@Miss matcha:
[Replied elsewhere - But now the entire commentary thing up. c: Thanks for your time!]

@Zealex:
Heheh, I have a feeling the magic trick will cheer ya up.
Yep, I did have some trouble with the repetitive scenes, or the dependence on them to try to do certain things that didn't end up working well, resulting in just bare repetitiveness. One of the things I still need to work on for things like this. 

@Link & Monkey:
Many thanks for dropping by and watching! Glad to hear that it had some impact. The other projects are very well done as well, and have a great amount of work put into them; I'm sure they'll be up to par as well.

--
vvv

 

[Reives]

*Please embed all posts regarding this little trick is in spoilers.
*See last post if you are stuck on step 5.
*Please do NOT consider the result of this trick in the Winter contest thing - it is completely irrelevant.

Let me show you a magic trick:

1. Finish the short story.

2. Go to your project folder, you should now see 5 new files named Wirt, Naeryns, Marc, Song, and Laeril.

3. Right click each of the 5 files and open all with Notepad.

4. Match up the 5 file phrases to a complete sentence.

5. Figure out and do what the complete sentence says.

After you do that, you're on your own to figure out the last step - should be obvious.

Good luck.  :smile:

Please do not view any spoilers until you've done the above, for your own sake. :~

 

[Racheal]

Spoiler: ...

Nothing to see anymore. Great bonus.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

Spoiler

http://i275.photobucket.com/albums/jj320/dadevster/ded.png[/img]

Heh, pretty cool game there Reives. Took me a while to figure it out though.

 

[Reives]

Spoiler

Oh, about the end: You are actually supposed to die at the very end when the you-know-whos show up in the hundreds; if you do not, it does not trigger the "ending" and you get stuck in that room with a motionless lunair-with-hat forever and ever and ever. A bug on my part; my bad.

And good luck getting through Dadev. c:

P.S. I actually decided to make this literally the day before yesterday, so it was kinda meshed up in a day and very rough, heh.

 

[Delmaschio]

Yes, that's exactly what I meant.
I can only imagine how hard it is to create a short, maybe I'll try it out someday only to see if I'm up to it.

Anyway, getting off-topic, didn't you ever thought about creating something focused on gameplaying? I can only see something amazing as a result, you have the skills.

 

[zealex]

Haha, this is awesome. :D

 

[Pokémaniac]

Wow. To be honest, I wasn't expecting anything great and the intro reinforced that, but I actually got stuck into it. Great job!

Spoiler: Oh, and by the way

I loved how you put a second, rich family for comparison. When you think about it at the end, the rich people had it all, but took it for granted. When the poor person managed to make the cake - after starving herself -everything still fell flat. Sorta sad. =(

Also, Despain, seriously, you're just as bad as the fanboys. You only ever flame and when Reives doesn't change everything on demand(Which he basically did with Quintessence) you flame him some more. Cut him some slack. Suggestions and critisisms should be taken in(which they are with Reives), but you shouldn't expect him to change his games based entirely on your word. Y'know, if fanboys flock and say something shouldn't be changed, it means they like it - and unless Reives thinks it should be changed, or more people think it should be changed then those who don't, it's often best left alone. You can't please everyone.

Anyway, Reives, I loved it. Once again, if you could, speed up the start. Also, I didn't get the magic trick. A heap of symbols showed up. Is that just me?

Also,

Spoiler

I remember somewhere in there something about someone staying over. Was that the poor boy? Because if it was, the irony is painful. Or did I make up the scene? Also, sorry for that little rant. Des just pisses me (Well, most people) off with his arrogant rants about how arrogant everyone is.

 

[Despain]

ok i played it. i'm a big dick to come in and say that it's pretentious without backing it up. let me clarify: your presentation is pretentious.

and now that i've played the game i can say that the game is pretentious too.

i'm not gonna be a dick about it not having gameplay because you flat out say that it doesn't have gameplay. it's a movie, or a short or whatever, which is good. you're playing to your strengths here. from what little i've played of your other projects, i've always told you that you need to either cut the gameplay or work on it. your strengths are in the cutscenes, and here you embrace that. so good job buddy.

now onto the thing itself. as usual i'll just paste my notes that i took as i was playing (watching, whatever).

toggle full screen was anoying. whenever i start a game i use alt+enter to fullscreen it myself. then i toggled the fullscreen and LOL it went back to windowed. idk, it's just annoying. this point really doesn't matter much at all but whatever. ignore this

right off the bat: from the cretor of "some game" is lame, let THIS GAME stand on its own. this is the biggest reason why your stuff feels so ful of self-important bullshit. "hey guys its me kan [reives] gao play my game because it was made by me i'm internet famous ya fuck y'all!" don't do that shit bro. let the game speak for itself. are you creating ART or are you being an ARTFAG. there's a huge difference. art is art on its own, art created to push your own name makes you an artfag. instead of PLASTERING YOUR NAME EVERYWHERE, leave it sublte, put it at the end or in the beginning or something but not DOMINATING a third of your whole movie. trust me bro, this is why the cool kids dislike you. your game is solid, but your presentation makes you look like a self-centered dick and all you want is your ego stroked.

but hey is all you DO want is your ego stroked then keep going bro- you're doing a great job in that regard.

dont zigzag the screen pan, i found it jarring and annoying when everything else was so smooth

why end a sentence with a comma?

crooked painting is a nice touch, very nice atmospheric details. the definite high point of the game is your creation of atmosphere and tone.

emoticon bubbles don't do anything but annoy, make noise, jar the viewer out of immersion. seriously they are ANNOYING, especially when they MAKE NOISE TO REPRESENT SILENCE... what? in all honesty this thing is VERY NICE, but every once in a while you feel the need to throw in a totally useless emoticon bubble which just SHATTERS the mood. here's an exercise: go back and take out all the emoticon bubbles and then rewatch it. i guarantee that it will do a much better job of keeping the viewer immersed into your world.

what@"lullaby composed by ME". hey this is EXACTLY what i was just talking about. what is the POINT of putting these words on the screen, other than to say "hey everyone I MADE THIS LOL LOOK AT ME". on TOP of that, it further kills the immersion, moreso than the emoticon bubbles. maybe if there were a number of songs with different composers and you did this for each, it would make sense, but putting the name of the song and the composer is just ridiculous. let the story and the music SPEAK FOR ITSELF. it's like you don't TRUST your own work to do its job, bro. your shit is GOOD ENOUGH where you don't have to force it. RELAX AND PUT FAITH INTO YOUR ART AND YOUR AUDIENCE

very nice attention to detail in the character moving objects and stuff. gets boring and repeititve after a while (lol lets watch a woman make a cake, slowly and inefficiently for a very long time), but REALLY NICE job with the character edits nonetheless.

so we can hear one character talk but not the other? this defies logic. either let us in or keep the shopkeepers muted as well as the mother (suggestion: see if you can do this entire thing without any dialog whatsoever; it seems unecessary).

why are you hyphenating "make do"?

you can SHOW SILENCE without making little TICKING NOISES: here's a hint: just have them not say anything (just more about the emoticon bubbles; every time they pop up it just KILLS the scene. you do this in your other game too. have you TRIED it without them? classic writing advice: SHOW DON'T TELL. using emoticon bubbles is the rpgmaker equivalent of telling. your control over the atmospheric ambience is AMAZING, graphicaly, mucially, sound effectically, whatever. why do you feel the need to use the emoticon bubbles? again you're not trusting yourself or your audience: don't FORCE things: let things show themselves. you're good enough to do it. stop limiting yourself with the EASY WAY because it shows man

"thar", "y'rs" - this is just annoying, suddenly he's a pirate?

"more than welcomed"? your grammar is just WEIRD in some places. but you're a foreigner right? or maybe a typo. not a big deal, just pointing it out in case you go back to revise or anything

god the kid's dialogue is annoying. was it supposed to be cute? "nooOoOoOo" "eeet", "etc"

there's plenty more so if you have any specific questions just ask bro


overall the game is INCREDIBLY SOLID but at the same time reeks of that pretentiousness that follows you everywhere. you are potentially among the MOST TALENTED PEOPLE IN THIS COMMUNITY but you need to get over yourself and let the ART BE ART on its own. i hope that makes sense man because if you're able to get over this then you can create some amazing things

EDIT:

Also, Despain, seriously, you're just as bad as the fanboys. etc etc etc

who are you how do you know me?

 

[zealex]

lol at the whole ego shit, that's just not true. But I believe when you'd put a lot of work in every detail, like he does, you'd want people to know that it is made by you as well. Because most projects which use rtp, often have most of the edits and such just made by someone else. Music also, you don't see much projects with custom music, at least I don't.

 

[Reives]

@Delmas:
Hm, I don't really have anything like that planned, although I did experiment it with the new intro in my main project. Still need to get more practice in that department, but all I can say is that it is really a lot more fun to make than making cut-scenes; the dullness and headache of keeping track of positions of characters or whatnot takes a toll. Perhaps after finishing my main project I will. c: Good luck if you try making something non-interactive in the future; should be a nice experiment either way.

@Zealex:
Glad you enjoyed it. c: The "magic trick" thing was kind of a last-minute decision, so there were a lot of bugs in there. And thanks, but that's okay, the pretentiousness thing is a valid response, and I did anticipate it when I was making those parts. Will be addressing them later in this post.

@Pokemaniac:
Aye, comparison was one of the major theme I was trying to do here. Sometimes it went overboard, and the scenes became a bit repetitive - Had some trouble managing the pace, heheh. And the start is indeed need of some tuning to pick up the pace.
As for the little "magic trick"; if you couldn't get it working based on the steps I outlined earlier, simply do this:

Spoiler

Go to your project folder and find the newly generated files after you play. Change Wirt.rxdata to Vikon.rxdata/Salory.rxdata or Vikon/Salory. Open Lullaby again.

And no worries, let's just drop the Des and Rex thing from earlier - I want to keep this thread clean.

@Des:
Hey ey, thanks a lot for your time dude! That's very helpful.

I think I'll address the pretentious note first, as it's the major theme. Now, I am certainly not going to deny it just like that, as if I were you I'm sure I'd be feeling the same thing. But I'll just give my original intentions for those two things' presences there. I think it's just the intro mention of "from the creator of blabla", and the "Lullaby composed by blabla" flashes when the music initially starts, right?

Intro ("from the creators of title1, title2"):
Heheh, when I was making this I immediately made a note to myself to embrace for a comment from you, Miek and others about it involving the P word. To be honest, they were made not for places where people do know of me or the other mentioned projects (which would indeed be blatant and rather pointless), but for places where people do not. I have been hoping to extend the viewer bases to areas beyond RM sites and the like; and in doing so, what I am trying to do is to try to tie all my projects together for marketing reasons. When people watch this, if they liked it, the heads-on note would give them a note of some of the other projects from the same producer that they may try to find. But again, my apologies, I really should have made a version to be released here that does not contain these redundant messages in this case. My fault here.

When the music starts ("Lullaby composed by lookatme"):
You know how when you were a kid, you've always wanted to make something you like? I guess now that I'm older and the option is semi-available, I was just trying to do just that. I know you're not a fan of Asian music videos or whatnot, but as I mentioned earlier, I was attempting to create a semi-music video (semi due to the unfit nature of RM for it), hence the little title flash. It was also an attempt to high light the music - as people  usually just let it go as background mood setter, where as in this case, I actually wanted it to be a part of the story. But none the less, in this case, I'm pretty sure that pretentiousness was also indeed present here.

Those are just my original intentions that triggered their existence, and thought I'd just make a note to them. But again, I can perfectly see the major annoyance from them - and if even I myself can see it, I'm sure it's very prominent to someone like you. It's definitely something I have to be careful of in the future. That being said, I hope you do know that I am truthfully open to criticisms, and that things remaking an hour of content in light of constructive criticisms from people like you puts some concrete on that claim. And of course, I'll always be, as it's a suicidal move on one's progressive nature to be ignorant in that department.

Anyway, that's that. Yeah, that's true with the emote thing. I think they kind of grown on me and I've became reliant on using some of them to fill awkward lack of motion that aren't necessarily awkward to begin with. I have thought of doing the whole thing without a single dialogue, but ended up cheating and having some dialogues in there anyhow as an easy way out. Which made me run into a lot of dialogue-expressing problems of course, heheh. Yeah, I was really having some trouble with trying to distinguish the children's speeches or whatnot - ended up with the sound-oriented spellings which didn't exactly flow well. As for the muting only the mother, what I was 'attempting' to do was outlining the silent-giver nature of the protagonist, where she never has a dialogue box over her head. I can certainly see how it was awkward for some.

I personally really liked the dynamic of the diagonal screen pans though, aw. But yeah, did get some complaints about them from others as well.


Edit:
Hah, I tried to haste-post this post before I finished it so I can get on the top of the second page before you reply again. :p
But aye, I forgot what else I was gonna say so, thanks again for your time.

 

[miss matcha]

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with zealex.  I don't think Reives is an egomaniac, hehe, at least from my interactions with him.  Although I can see a couple valid points (the thought bubble can be distracting, the long-windedness, etc.), the points are hidden within a sea of unnecessary bashing of a guy who has never been anything but nice and receptive to constructive criticism.  I think if Reives is putting his name a lot in the credits, it's probably because he's trying to emulate movies and well, there aren't a lot of credits to go around in a one-person development team  I agree that it seems a bit silly, but I just find it humorous that seeing these things makes certain people so caustic... when I noticed Kan's name being repeated a lot, I just chuckled because I know it's tough to emulate a cinema-style when you have so few people working on a project.  But I guess we all react differently  

And sorry but...

trust me bro, this is why the cool kids dislike you. your game is solid, but your presentation makes you look like a self-centered dick and all you want is your ego stroked.

LOL.  It's just too funny using the term "cool kids" in reference to members of an internet forum.   

 

[Injury]

I've always been a fan of your work Revies...I can say it isn't because it's hyped up either. You truly have some great concepts to bring to the table. I'm certain there are extremely jealous parties out there though...Downloading now...Could this be it?

 

[Zekallinos]

Lol, this is just all about point of view/way to interpret things. You usually see more what you want to see then the full cover (and you never liked Reives to begin with). It's not like I'm very fond of that 5 minutes of "Made by Mister Someone" (actually it annoys me)(see how I exaggerated the 5 minutes? It must be like 20 seconds), but I wouldn't have called it pretentious. That's very edgy. Same when you say the presentation is pretentious (I'm assuming you mean the topic). Where did I see that "nice presentation thing with no use of spoiler or something" topic already?. Is it pretentious for it to be actually attractive? Also, "Cool kids" is like, the most "point of view" thing you can say.

And no, while I appreciated the work, no saliva was dropping from my mouth.

But isn't this supposed to be a nice, fun, warm & fuzzy contest to make our hearts lighter?

 

[Dr. Funk]

Wow, that was sad. really good job but the ending made me cry. 

 

[Reives]

Glad it had some impact, my fellow Canadian. By the way, the magic trick should make ya feel better:

*Please embed all posts regarding this little trick is in spoilers.
*See last post if you are stuck on step 5.
*Please do NOT consider the result of this trick in the Winter contest thing - it is completely irrelevant.

Let me show you a magic trick:

1. Finish the short story.

2. Go to your project folder, you should now see 5 new files named Wirt, Naeryns, Marc, Song, and Laeril.

3. Right click each of the 5 files and open all with Notepad.

4. Match up the 5 file phrases to a complete sentence.

5. Figure out and do what the complete sentence says.

After you do that, you're on your own to figure out the last step - should be obvious.

Good luck.  :smile:

Reivier Wirt
Lunair Naeryns
Vikon Marc
Salory (Song) Marc
Alden Laeril

 

[Despain]

lol quintessence easter eggs

god you disgust me sometimes

 

[Reives]

god you disgust me sometimes

No worries, I thought you might say that, so I got ya the perfect Christmas gift.
http://cache.gifts.com/photos/B/6/E/Q/B ... MRXD_L.jpg[/img]
Wash after hurl. :smile:

---

Oh guys, the songs in the soundtrack are available for public use, by the way.
I'll be breaking the main song into instrumental and vocal versions in the future for easier utilization.

 

[Acezon]

OMG!!!
I think you'll win the contest..
I almost cried in the ending..

Very, very excellent job, Reives!!

 

[Reives]

Thanks Acezon, glad you enjoyed it. I wouldn't be so sure though, there are many great projects out there for this contest, many of which have some very interesting components. Either way, good luck to all, and you never know with things like this.

But aye, whatever happens, I'll be absent for 2 days starting from tomorrow, so congratulations to whoever in advance if I miss it. Happy holidays guys, enjoy the rest of the break! :smile: