One Night: Full Circle

[Dark Gaia]

Introduction

One Night: Full Circle is the final game in Dark Gaia's horror themed One Night series. It serves as the conclusion to the series and resolves the story arc that has been established through the previous games and ties the stories of One Night and One Night 2 together in a cohesive whole.
One Night: Full Circle is a semi-remake of One Night 3: Shadows of Stillwater, widely regarded as the weakest in the series. It is intended to replace the previous game entirely and rectify its flaws. It offers a completely rewritten, more in depth story to improve the flow of the narrative and add a more tangible conclusion to the series. It also includes tweaked gameplay and polished systems so that it is more fun to play through. Best of all, this re-release features two completely new areas, the Sewer and the University, each packed with brand new puzzles, enemies and story details, to significantly extend the length of the game.

Story Outline

The year 2019. A bizarre accident occurs in the bustling mining town of Stillwater.
Contact with the town is mysteriously lost, and the fate of its citizens is unknown. Several rescue groups attempt to investigate the situation, but they never return. Three months quickly pass without any explanation of the event, though Stillwater never leaves the public eye. Speculation runs wild, with everything from the supernatural to aliens having a part in the bizarre proceedings.

Another mysterious event; Tom Hawkins receives a letter in the mail from his sister, a journalist staying in Stillwater on that fateful night. The letter is dated three months previously, though the reason why it has arrived now is as mysterious as its origin. Is there a chance that Tom's sister is somehow still alive, trapped in the nightmare that Stillwater has become? Seeking the truth, Tom packs for a long journey and soon, he himself vanishes without a trace. He has decided to trace the letter back to where it came from, and is headed to Stillwater itself. What awaits him is beyond anyone's comprehension...

Features

- Six eerie locations to explore, each filled with clues to find and terrifying horrors to face.
- Tense event based combat system with multiple equipable weapons and directional based attacks.
- Mysterious storyline which challenges you to find every shred of information you can to unravel the unknown fate of Stillwater.
- Two different endings to discover based on your choices throughout the adventure!
- Links to previous One Night games and resolutions to the unanswered questions of the series.

Screenshots

Download

You can download One Night: Full Circle here: http://rpgmaker.net/games/1577/
* If the download is unavailable when you try, simply wait a few hours - it's still being updated.

 

[mawk]

Warning! This game is stand alone. No RPG Maker VX RTP is required.

uh how is this a warning

Be careful! You might not have to download additional files!

There are also threads on HB games in the Completed Games forum.

can't you just put in the five minutes and link to the threads on here

 

[Dark Gaia]

Sure, I'll do it now. I only had about 5 minutes last night so I just copied and pasted the thread right off RRR.

I also changed "Warning" to "Attention". I know not downloading additional files is not bad thing, I had as a warning as in "this game is about 30MB bigger as a result."

 

[corleonis]

Hi there...

Just like to say Im exteremely psyched about this third instalment I played the other 2 and loved them...

One thing I'd like to say, please please change the dead bodies, it cant take long to make some nice modern downed sprites and I think the only thing thats takes away from the otherwise perfect atmosphere is the fact that the corpses have capes and armour or various other fantasy costumes, even down to the headbands, no one wears headbands like that except rambo... this is coming from a fan so please for the fans, change this last piece thats keeping you inches from perfection

other than this tiny element tho the game looks stuning and if the other two are anything to go by it should keep me up all night.

anyways Im looking forward to this

good luck

 

[Ellie]

It will be interesting seeing how one goes about a horror game in RM*. I've yet to see one that wasn't just really dark scenes + lightning effects + shock images.

I like what you've done with the lighting - especially that the main areas have no tone whatsoever, fading to black. Normally people just turn the colour tone down a hundred notches and call it done.

 

[dolanmayorga]

I'm excited for this project. I like the mapping and visuals, they set a good eerie tone.

 

[Dark Gaia]

Update:

Hi everyone! Thanks for all the kind feedback and anticipation. The game is coming along nicely and now that I've finished my end of year exams, the game development is picking up even more. I just want to add that one plotline in this game ties in heavily to the previous games. You don't have to have played these games, but you'll understand the story better if you do. Also, gameplay wise, the game this is most inspired by is Dino Crisis and for atmosphere look up Silent Hill.

@Commodore_Whynot: If you're interested, check out my other games, particularly One Night 2: The Beyond. This new game basically employs the very same tactics as that game.

@carleonis: I'm in the process of getting some modernized corpses.

 

[Jason]

really dark scenes + lightning effects + shock images.

... If you've got something to say, then say it...

OT:
Well to be honest I wasn't really bothered about the others, I mean, I played the first, and thought... "meh", it wasn't exactly scary, it wasn't a bad attempt or anything, but everything was too expected, I don't think you QUITE caught the atmosphere...
Then I totally ignored the second one...
And for the third one (This), well, the colours seem too bright for such a dark game, the blues, greens and reds are TOO colourful, and the characters look out of place (Well, the fantasy guys, lol, especially the dead guy in the second picture.

 

[Dark Gaia]

Release Day!

Hi everyone! It's here! One Night 3 is finally finished and the fully tested, completely playable finished version is now uploaded for your playing pleasure. Enjoy, and don't forget to give me some feedback!

I haven't really focused on making it scary this time around. I just wanted to weave a story. This game may be as scary as One Night 2, but who knows?

 

[Smooth]

Hi there.. im a bit confused, is this game related to "The beyond" in some way? :S
anyways, it looks promising and i can almost feel the atmosphere when i look at the screenshots.. the story reminds me of RE little but its still ecxiting, i think almost everybody likes survival games, im gonna try it and will make a quick review about it ok? =)

 

[Cait]

I just wanted to say that I love your games, but I have a little problem with the torn paper in the motel. I found the first two, but when I translated them.. is the mis-spelling on purpose or accidental? Because three of the words have the wrong letters..

 

[Dark Gaia]

It's intentional. You should be able to figure out the words even with the mistakes but even so it's another little riddle for you to solve. If you can't figure out the three keywords though, they are Life, Man and Time.

 

[acrox999]

Downloading!

 

[Dark Gaia]

Cool! Let me know what you think of it.

 

[mawk]

Spoiler: first impressions

first off, menu effects and myriad others are ripped straight from various silent hill games. I know that those sounds are muted and quite effective in a horror setting, but anyone who's marginally familiar with the horror genre will recognize them instantly. that's a bad thing.

plot is, at the outset, a direct export of silent hill 2. just replace "wife" with "sister," make the dude ten years younger, and make the sister not explicitly dead at this juncture, and you have the premise for this game. right down to the letter and his "I guess I don't care what happens to me" thing. there's ~*~homage~*~ and then there's just not bothering to come up with something new, mister g.

(and if you try to pretend that it is in fact not all that similar to silent hill 2 via some mumbo jumbo about "WELL IT'S THE STANDARD SURVIVAL HORROR PLOT" then you are pre-emptively wrong and also sort of thick for making that point even after you read this sentence.)

if you were going to steal all this from silent hill, I wish you'd also steal their concept of ambiance. the generic "scary" soundtracks with their sudden cymbal flares and their deep pads are not as effective as you'd think at establishing atmosphere, especially when nothing scary's been revealed yet. it's sort of disappointing to have the guy be all "WELP let's go" and have the scary music start up immediately in its full glory. learn about silence. learn how silence can be effective. learn about making the player's expectations do the work for them, instead of constantly stuffing their ears with "HEY YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE SCARED OKAY" material.

so, there's apparently a car blocking the narrow footpath which is the only possible way to town. those wacky civic engineers. I open a door, there's an RTP monster howl, and first thing I see is a slash of blood on the wall. this supposed to be spooky?

I followed the trail of blood and it doesn't seem to actually go anywhere, unless the donor's corpse is in the cardboard box and our hero is just the most jaded man ever with his "nothing useful here" bit. I'm guessing this is gonna be relevant later? especially since I can examine everything but the picture on the wall. if this does turn out to be part of a puzzle, you really need to think of ways to enforce proper sequence better than "okay it will just be totally invisible to the player character until he goes in a completely different direction and comes back.

turning it onto fullscreen now. might as well. I can imagine the cries of dissent if I were to diss this game's capacity for spooky without something like fullscreen.

my man doesn't seem to have a lot to say about the blood. I guess the structural integrity of shelves is just more immediately appealing to intellectual types.

I think now I should mention the annoying and flow-breaking full-second pauses that occur whenever the dialogue reaches a comma, a period, or anything similar. simply not a good idea. if you don't know why, then





































hopefully that illustrated my point.

go upstairs. more logical placement of blood trail here`. I can't walk over one of the smudges. pay attention to object passability when you're testing. go into the bathroom. nothing. leave. nothing. lots of fluff text, but no sign of this "steel key" that's hinted at. in most survival horror games worth their salt, significant items aren't a pixel hunt. why? because it isn't fun to run the circumference of everwhere you've covered, feverishly dry humping the walls in the hopes of finding something you've missed. the resident evil series had shiny sparks. silent hill pointed them out by camera position and juxtaposition; that is, people will be drawn to things based on their placement and how well they fit. when you stack a place with lots of unnecessary things that look promising, you're sending mixed signals.

done with this for now. maybe if I can get myself excited to rifle through everything I've already examined, I'll come back to this.

so far, though, this, like all your other releases, is hardly the visionary whirlwind you pitch it as.

 

[$t3v0]

Spoiler: quick thoughts

Why would a person say that? From the beginning he's confused as to whats really going on with the place yet when he first walks into the building containing this bed, he's not shocked to see pools of blood all over the floor. If I was in an area that I wasn't familiar with, I wouldn't say "I would never sleep in that, ever" when I see blood all over the sheets. I'd shit myself then investigate.

Also passability issues as or so you'd think stated above. Noticed you use the opening door sound effect from Counterstrike too. Seems a lot of the sound effects upto now are pretty much ripped from other, commercial sources.

 

[Guest]

;D

 

[mawk]

Spoiler: second impressions

so, I had a thought. there is a fork in the road that my man wouldn't go down before. now that I've been in the house, maybe it'd open.

nah, that's impossible. no way you'd fall back on artificially lengthening the gameplay like that. you'd reserve such blatant hand-holding for things that are absolutely necessary to the story, rather than just forcing a side-trip to a house with a generic "STRANGE THINGS ARE GOING ON" notepad and some consumables.

...

okay, fuck you.

that trip to the house added absolutely nothing to the player's or the character's understanding of the situation. one of the cornerstones of survival horror is the exploration, so just arbitrarily forcing the player to make a completely inane pit stop is very bad design. ideally, the house would be something you'd encounter on the way to remind you to come back later, rather than the fair-sized sidetrek it requires.

now I get the silver key. there is absolutely no reason this couldn't have simply been somewhere in the house itself. now I walk there and back again for a second time. this is fulfilling gameplay. there's also a dead treeblocking the way literally two steps from where he is.

see, this is my problem. the survival horror genre is about exploration. in a series that is mainly limited in its gameplay innovations to number puzzles and finding keys, a degree of freedom is quite important to break the monotony. what you have here is a perfectly straight path with a series of locked doors. the first locked door will give you a key to open the locked compartment a few steps back, which will unlock the door itself. it's incredibly dull.

I walk down a path and there's a generic "hey you're supposed to be very scared now" track of a woman singing. do you use cliches for nutrition or something?

anyway, the silver key unlocks a cabinet back in the boring house, which grants me a Steel Pipe[/b] Bat to... knock down the dead tree with? okay, chief.

I do that and suddenly, I shit you not, is the "guard's spotted you" noise from Metal Gear fucking Solid. apparently some white thing saw me, got a cartoon exclamation point over its head, and ran. that MGS noise has absolutely no reason to be there, and if this game had managed to build up any atmosphere so far, it would had utterly broken it. it's obviously only there to give the player a cheap shock and make him jump once. this is seeming utterly familiar.

there's a mine. I enter it.

what's that, game? you're going to start putting Approach Player events around the place and pass it off as gameplay? okay.

yeah, there are literally APPROACH PLAYER EVENTS. at set intervals they will approach you with incredibly poor pathfinding. I wasn't aware you were making a Benny Hill fangame. this is, however, quite run of the mill. this is fucking Crepusculum, only with marginally less blue. the things themselves are poorly sprited and quite far from "fearsome," but this is the RTP style and it's probably very hard to make anything in the style that isn't a surprised-looking pillsbury doughboy

save room. loud RTP monster noise and a flash. fuck this shit.

not scary. not interesting. not groundbreaking or even particularly noteworthy. makes several perfunctory attempts to copy the big boys of the horror genre, but totally does not detect the larger patterns that characterize them or the reasoning behind the characteristic gameplay mechanics. this does nothing to change the longstanding conception that it's impossible to create truly effective atmospheric horror, or even a decent shot at the survival horror genre. if anything, it reinforces it.

I'm gonna give the mine a try, since it promises to be a little less terribly linear, but you've already got a huge stack of gammaking faux pas against you.

 

[acrox999]

Uhh... I can't download the game. Upload it to Mediafire please?

 

[Dark Gaia]

It seems to be working fine when I try but as you wish when I have a spare minute I'll get a mirror, though judging by the reviews above you probably don't want to touch this game now.

@Everyone else: Note that I've never said this game is meant to be groundbreaking or notable or whatever, in fact I've said it's probably one of the weaker titles in the series. I've also stated that I wasn't particularly trying to make it scary this time either.
You can say what you want. I understand your criticisms but I don't really care anymore. Some people like this game, others don't. Big deal. This was my last release in any case. I made the game how I wanted it to be. As I've stated, I was actually intending to make something that would bring to mind Silent Hill. I deliberately made a very similar opening premise for that purpose, plus the sound effects. The story does admittedly change drastically later and is about as far from Silent Hill as possible, but the opening parts are designed to bring to mind SH2.

Also, I ENJOYED Crepesculum.

@Mawk: Don't summarize all of my releases based on your actual playing knowledge of TWO of them. For your information the previous One Night games as well as Taltarus did very well. They all had Let's Play videos made on YoutTube in either case, by people who neither asked my permission nor are connected with me in any way.