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Fan Mission: Thief's Remorse by Airship Ballet (2015/10/30)


Airship Ballet

Thief's Remorse  

31 members have voted

  1. 1. Appearance

    • 1 (Poor)
      0
    • 2 (Could be better)
      0
    • 3 (Average)
      2
    • 4 (Good)
      16
    • 5 (Great)
      13
  2. 2. Gameplay

    • 1 (Poor)
      0
    • 2 (Could be better)
      1
    • 3 (Average)
      8
    • 4 (Good)
      16
    • 5 (Great)
      6
  3. 3. Halloween

    • 1 (Poor)
      0
    • 2 (Could be better)
      1
    • 3 (Average)
      2
    • 4 (Good)
      10
    • 5 (Great)
      18


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I seem to have a problem with mine. After i set the crown back on the broken crypt and a kinda fade out happens i come back and i am holding the crown out in front of me and can not frob it to take it again after it falls to the ground and i can not frob the slab behind the broken crypt either ??. Not sure to do now. I have re'down loaded the mission twice not works.

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Oops, I misread your problem, so editing this post.

 

It seems the teleport glitched for some reason. Maybe someone can send you a savegame after that point or you could noclip your way to the next area if it's not being fixed.

 

Did you really drop the crown into the crypt, pushing 'r' twice, not just holding it over the crypt? Still holding it might bork the teleport.

 

-----------

 

Incidentally, I finished this. Nice little story, like a little moral tale. I got the 'good ending', which I was expecting, but nice to see the game didn't disappoint. The style of the whole mission was very nice, the realistic and fantastic parts both.

 

For as surreal as this was, I personally would like a bit more subversion, or potential for it, but maybe there is. I'm thinking to make an FM with elements like this too, so thank you for an FM with so many interesting ideas.

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What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Putting the crown back is one way to end the mission. All you need to do is leave once you do.

 

Thanks Dema. I was obviously going for something that was categorically un-thiefy in places, so I got a few gameplay complaints. I felt that it would be a wasted opportunity to create a normal mission with undead AI, so I went with something different. I'm glad that the majority of people enjoyed it regardless.

 

I reckon that with a few more weeks to work on it, it would have ended up a bit more defiant of expectations. My initial plan was to use non-Euclidian space to get around, but found it would take far too long to figure out. Teleports were a solution I didn't want to use, but had to given the time frame. That said, there are actually very few teleports: most of the cuts to black are just lights turning out and popping up elsewhere to lead the player on.

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My pick for second place.

 

Elaboration on scores:

Apperance: 3

Nice lighting and solid building, but I find catacombs and other such indoor locations to be among my least favorite settings. Also, the kitchen floor cube map effect just looks plain bad in my opinion.

 

Gameplay: 3

Solid enough - what there is of it. As you said, this is more of a on rails type of experience, but the ride isn't quite wild enough to make up for the linearity. Also, some noticeable bugs such as

the headless dude humping the wall light, and the unintentionally hilarious death pose of the inventor guy. Fen's LP shows the same issues, so I don't think that was a rare glitch on my end.

 

 

Halloween: 3

Not gonna lie, I was expecting far more to be made of the Jacob's Ladder twitching, and was unable to prevent that disappointment from coloring the rest of my experience. Also, a bit more Christmas Carol than Halloween, to my mind. Still, some well put together scenarios.

 

Finally, gotta say,

the sigh of relief that can be heard when you return the wedding ring is a nice touch which is subtle, yet for some reason very memorable to me. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

No, that does not make up for what I had to do in Chase Mercantile. Pulling at heartstrings/emotional manipulation seems to be one of the strong suits of your missions. :P

 

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It was difficult to do this:

 

 

 

 

I would've scored this perfectly and probably should've given the time constraints, but since I also made some

relative criticism to the other entrants I felt I needed to ding you on the game-play aspect of this mission.

 

This is one contest where I really wish there were values between 4 and 5.

 

While the dark areas have a dramatic effect on the psychology and story-telling, too much blind wandering goes

from being suspenseful to monotonous or annoying. In scenes where there was some sort of light at the end of the

tunnel, the mechanic worked well because you could target a direction all the while fearing what you could not see

on the way there. Too bad there were too many places where navigability was completely stolen to unsettle the player

to the utmost. I'm sure if I had played it exactly as you had designed it I would have had all the magnificent impact you

intended but such is the risk when you make a narrative in a dynamic game system.

 

It does work brilliantly as a foil for Let's Play folk like Fen so if I could give you extra points for the long tail of seeing

others freaked out by this thing I would. It's probably one of the best tuned missions for social experiences like Let's Play.

As a mod promoter, I couldn't be happier about that!

 

As others have stated, the sneaking areas were well laid-out and had pretty good balance where they also were not victim

of navigation issues.

 

I don't know if all the Christmas Carol comments were an after effect of my first impression but I genuinely enjoyed this strange

morality play. I will only suggest that this mission like Sotha and Melan's feels too large and ambitious to be something finished

within the time-frame and the Christmas-like them gives me the impression that this was being kept on file like a spare Christmas Card

in case "Holiday X Contest" were to arrive somehow. Though, again, I can hardly lobby that accusation without adding

Sotha and Melan to your company. I guess my moral concerns about "contest integrity" stop where they would somehow impede

awesome missions like this one from arriving :P so I leave it to someone else to gossip or fashion conspiracy theories.

Like the protagonist of your own mission, only you can decide to come clean if there's something wrong here :D :D :D

 

 

 

 

All in all, nearly top marks and this mission easily goes toe-to-toe with or exceeds missions created for 3 month long contests!

  • Like 1

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I'm innocent! You can see me build the whole thing here, other than messing about with triggers and targets. I used my own prefabs in places, and I'll probably re-use parts of this jazzed up for any builder mission I decide to finish. Otherwise, all new, all started for the contest.

 

As for Christmas Carol, that's entirely your own connection. While I know the story, I've never actually read it or seen any films. I saw a production of it years ago, but that's it. The premise basically just arose from me wondering how best to unsettle the player. I could have relied solely on jump scares or undead AI, but I wanted to do something different. I ended up focusing on player agency, making it about the person at the controls rather than the person being controlled. I wanted the player to have the reason they booted up the game questioned, to be called out on turning it on to steal things and kill people. "I don't blame you, it's what you do, it's why you're here, what else should I expect of someone who booted up a game about sneaking and stealing?" I wanted to tell people off for what came naturally, question and subvert what they understood about the game.

 

It's a bit artsy fartsy, but I think subversion of expectations is a brilliant way to knock people off balance. It's a bit undeveloped, meaning I only ever really poked at the fourth wall rather than breaking it entirely, but through chastising the character, I had a go at the player. Even the character is a much more morally upstanding person than the player: they don't want to steal, don't want to rob the dead, but the player's like "oo! easy gratification!", and obviously booted up the game to get their fix of shiny stealing in the first place. By the end, I wanted the very essence of TDM to be questioned; I wanted to have confused and questioned the player enough that they'd think twice about stealing all the loot, turn their expectations on their head and have them go from someone ready to steal to someone ready to be a better person. It had that effect on a lot of people, so whatever the scoring I'm really happy with it! So no, not Christmas Carol, but I can see the connections.

 

Like I say, rather than the contest itself, I'm simply glad that people had fun with it, and on a secondary note, that it had the intended effect.

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I guess I'm going to be the major detractor of this mission than, or more specifically its writing. :P It's true indeed that the mission's premise is somewhat unique, and it does set an oppressive atmosphere in some scenes, particularly the one in the foundry. However, I found the writing to be very hammy about its message. I get that you want to point out that the character is doing something wrong by stealing, but you don't need to hammer it in by repeating it in three readables. Furthermore, the scenes themselves end up being a bit silly or dull for the sake of some gameplay/story decisions, like the pointless long corridor in the foundry, or the absurd amount of wealth lying around in an inventor's house. I think with some restraint and subtlety in the writing, this would have been a much better mission. The gameplay could be polished up a bit more too, but this mission wasn't gameplay centric anyway so it isn't that important.

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It's a question of tone, one that I chose intentionally. I can do subtle! I just went for something weirder, because a fortnight is nowhere near enough time to construct a locale and premise that can support a serious tone while also drip-feeding it to a player over the course of a huge mission. I couldn't do what I wanted to do with a serious tone, so I did it as a bunch of openly campy vignettes instead. It's supposed to be weird, supposed to be puzzling the player, supposed to be this short, sweet, carnivalesque trip through nowhere, because two weeks wasn't enough to do it justice otherwise. Pretty much everything written is ironically hyperbolic and openly cliché. You're supposed to be aware that you're playing a game, that this is weird, that the person writing to you is a bit off. It's not supposed to be immersive, or outright scary, rather it's meant to be weird and confusing, same goes for the Silent Hillish industrial corridor that couldn't and shouldn't exist, and the mansion at the bottom of a mine shaft. If it didn't work for you, it's a shame, but it was done intentionally. You didn't like the tone, that's fine, not for everyone, but a lack of restraint and subtlety isn't the result of incompetence in this case, nor is it absolutely necessary for every mission to take itself seriously.

Edited by Airship Ballet
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I knew there was a humor element in there because I'm familiar with your humor style here on the forums.

 

I don't know if there's a good solution to making players aware of the satire here without spoiling the unfolding of it before them...

 

Discovering the satire is part of the fun...

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Even the character is a much more morally upstanding person than the player: they don't want to steal, don't want to rob the dead, but the player's like "oo! easy gratification!", and obviously booted up the game to get their fix of shiny stealing in the first place.

Hmm, no harm done without harming someone who actually is alive. Beware of the implications of equalizing doing something in a game to a virtual person and doing something in physical space to real humans.

 

But as you can read in my review: i nevertheless liked watching this art-house film.

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Thank you for this mission, Merry. I just finished it last night. I love weird and surreal missions, as I've said on these boards before, and this one did not fail to draw me in to its story. The feeling of being led by the nose by a dead spirit wishing to correct my ways was intriguing, to say the least.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I liked this mission quite a lot! It managed to be quite scary in places, but at the same time pretty happy. It's also somewhat choice based, which is something I seek more often in TDM.

 

 

I actually had to play the game two times: During the first run I looted the last house and got the bad ending, despite having a hunch that the game would know and judge my action :) In the second run I didn't steal anything and got the good end.

 

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I've found this mission really enjoyable. B)

 

Last year's spooky contest mission was certainly cool and intense, but I liked the slower pace, greater lenghth and much more focused storytelling of this FM even better. Like last year, you've delivered oodles of atmosphere with relatively minimalist means. Even moreso, I think. I also liked the presence of multiple endings. A nice touch. :smile:

 

I'm growing increasingly fond of your missions, Merry, and I haven't even played the larger ones you've made so far. These smaller FMs have convinced me I'll be in for really interesting experiences once I get to play those bigger FMs.

 

Unfortunately, I also came across something of a bug in this mission:

 

 

It occured in the elevator shaft. Apparently, the player shouldn't take carryable objects with him into the elevator, e.g. a lit candlestick. If he/she does so, the elevator will get stuck shortly after it starts descending, making it unable to arrive to the furnace's entrance area. I had to reload from a previous save and retread a chunk of the level to the elevator room in order to get rid of the bug.

 

As a minor bit of oversight, I also accidentally triggered the elevator controls before I was standing inside, leaving me with no choice but to reload, since I apparently couldn't call the elevator back. Not a bug, obviously, but still something that the player could get stuck on if he's not careful.

 

 

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  • 3 months later...

I like to record difficult stealth games, and right now you wonderful people are the only ones delivering on that front.

Click here for the crappy channel where that happens.

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  • 6 months later...

I hate to revive an old thread, but I'm having an issue in the first area.

 

 

How do you get that key out of the chest? I've been crawling all over it trying to grab it, but I keep frobbing the dang chest instead. Is there some event flag I need to hit? Some certain position I need to stand in?

 

Edited by The Dark One

Because in mystery novels, the first suspect is almost certainly never the murderer. No matter how much unmovable evidence there is, it will all be smashed in pieces by the wrath of the remaining number of pages of the story.

 

-"The Evil Spirit of the Zushi Clan" from Virtual Carnal Pleasure by Yamada Fuutarou

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  • 1 year later...

It would seem there is a bug.

 

 

If you simply return the crown at the beginning, the lamp falls from the darkness and the first gate opens... But the mission simply doesn't complete.

 

 

Both The Dark One (on the TDM discord) and I have this same issue, is a save necessary for recreation?

 

Otherwise a great level.

 

Edited by V-Man339

I like to record difficult stealth games, and right now you wonderful people are the only ones delivering on that front.

Click here for the crappy channel where that happens.

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  • 4 years later...

Heh, interesting to finish a mission with

Spoiler

0/7145 loot


XD

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                The Wizard's Treasure                             A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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