MV - Sainte-Vibrisse — RPG Maker Forum Archive

Trailer:
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Synopsis:
A father and daughter set out for a peaceful camping holiday in the deep woods of rural Quebec. But when their car dies on a deserted road, their dream trip turns into a nightmare! No cell signal. No sign of life. Just an empty village, overrun with cats, strange happenings, and a supermarket that somehow… remains open despite no one inside. Are they truly alone? Or have they wandered into the heart of a dark and twisted cult? Sainte-Vibrisse awaits you… if you dare!

Screenshots:

Spoiler

Downloads:
Itch.io:

https://napostriouf.itch.io/sainte-vibrisse

Additional link:
English: https://napostriouf.com/SainteVibrisse/index.html
French: https://napostriouf.com/SainteVibrisse/indexfr.html

I played your game for the forum’s Web Feedback Festival. I recognize the effort it takes to get a game in a playable state and released for people to try, so if you don’t care to read constructive criticism, all of my thoughts are in spoilers. If you do read it, I hope some of it provides you useful thoughts when working on this or future projects.

Spoiler

That face in the splash screen is kinda scary

I’m immediately put off by the very opening, when there’s huge font, all capital letters cursing. He could have been just as angry with a “Damn it!” and it would make me think better of him as a father with his child in the car.

The choice of font is pretty weird. All of the curves with sharp corners jutting out make it look medieval, but the game is taking place in modern time.

How does not filling the motor oil make you burn yourself?

Just the opening scene really makes me not want to play. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny, but the dad and girl yelling at each other the entire time - and the mom just died last month?! - makes me hope they’ll both get run over by a truck going by. They’re both thoroughly unlikable.

This is particularly important because the description of the game makes me think it’s supposed to be a horror game. Sympathy for the main character is an important part of a horror story, so that you feel upset if something bad happens or could happen to them.

I stopped once I got to the village and met all the cats.

The language is generally poor. I know English is not your first language, so I’m not trying to make you feel bad in that regard. But there are a lot of basic, low-effort things you could do that would improve it immensely.

Just typing all of your dialogue into Microsoft Word or Google Docs and running the spell check and grammar check would help a ton - there are a lot of misspelled words and completely wrong words.

Even if the grammar check didn’t fix all of the sentences and I thought to myself, “This reads like a non-native English speaker wrote it,” if they were the right words and spelled correctly, it would have helped me play more of the game.

I thought the character sprites were pretty fine for the size of the screen and the art style you were going for. I do think things like the cars looked weird next to them, you have these big, pixelated characters next to much smaller, smoothly-drawn cars. Even just using an image editor to make the cars twice as big would have made them fit in better next to the characters and look a bit more pixelated.