[WIP] In Lucy's Eyes - Full Conversion Mod

[Zatchie]

Just finished the demo !
There is quite a lot of things to say, so I'll try to organize this sorta review the best I can.

First of all, congratulations with the custom models and the overall mapping quality, both are really impressive ! We can see that the detailing is complex, and the atmosphere of the mod feels great.

The puzzles are well scripted, and I think you guys are doing a good job at being creative with them.

There are also a lot of things that I think can be improved. First of all, level design doesn't feel well thought-out. In the map you begin in, I just walked backwards because I like to look at things, and i just reached the end of the map. I could see the skybox clearly, I simply reached the end of the map without even glitching through anything.
The lighting is also really weird, at first it's a thunderstorm with lots of rain, and that's great. But then it's all sunny and shiny, and one door later it's rainy and dark again. The overall layout of the levels feels a bit weird-ish as well, we go freely from medieval castle to fairly modern mansion, to medieval cellars again, without any transition. Also what Robosprog said, the layout of the windows is illogical.

Also, the hub is a castle hall that has a level door to guest rooms right ? I haven't played TDD in a while but I'm pretty sure it's exactly the same thing. Anyway, let's move on to the last thing that really annoyed me.

The pace of the demo isn't logical. We are slowly wandering around, not bothering too much about what is going on. Meanwhile our daughter is gone ! I mean, at no point I had the impression of being in any sort of hurry. I don't know, but if you want to make us feel like finding our daughter is the main idea behind the mod, maybe having a demo with a bit of a faster pace wouldn't have been a bad idea.
On this point I agree with Robosprog once more, the demo doesn't make you feel like you have to do anything. I was just wandering around trying to find the next puzzle to solve.

So. From my point of view the artistic work in the mod is impressive. I think that when this is released, it will probably be one of the prettiest finished mods I've seen so far. The puzzles are fairly original, and that's always cool to see. But the level design feels a bit underwhelming. The demo also doesn't feel like it has the correct pace, it feels a lot more like we are exploring a castle, than being terrified about the fate of what a father should love the most.

Overall, this still looks kick-ass and of high quality !!

When this will come out I will definitely play it, and I wish you guys good luck with the end of the work on this project !

I agree on most of the points you're bringing up here. There are some things that you guys said that we have already decided to change. Due to heavy optimisation we had to reduce all of the textures because the texture memory was way to high for a low end computer.

We have put a lot of time and effort into making the detailing of the maps. I can assure you that all of our maps are original and made by our own hands. Map design is an area where we are a bit unpolished when push comes to shove but we're trying as hard as we can. As for the exterior, we didn't want to make some random blockbox in the way when you tried to go back cause it just doesn't make sense. But we are probably going to fix that problem somehow since you mentioned it. The idea behind the chandelier falling on your head is to make the player (faint) and being unconscious for several hours before waking up and that's why it's morning. We thought that the weather had changed and went from morning to midday and it's cloudy and rainy.

We haven't made the player stress through the levels cause what kind of mod would it be if you ran through all of the maps without experiencing all of the aspects. I can understand why you feel like the character is slowly wandering around, we will look into that since that's not really what we're aiming for. But you should keep in mind that this is a more like a teaser than a separate experience. It's the first maps of the entire mod, this is just the build up phase of our mod this section doesn't have a peak because the it's meant to build up what comes next.

We REALLY appreciate that you also pay attention to the good things we've done and not only the things we have to improve on. Your feedback was really good and gives us another perspective on how we can improve our mod and your experience.

Thank you daoritr.