A Dark and Eldritch Hockystick.
I've spent way to much of this weekend looking at google analytics. Since Thursday night's link on indiegames.com, I've had a bunch of links and reviews and my hits have been steadily rising. For the curious:
Thursday - 63
Friday - 245
Saturday - 1400
Sunday - 1496 so far... so could be as high as 3000 given it's noonish when I last checked.
Here's the totally weird thing. While indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun.com and gamesetwatch.com are contributing a good chunk, Things really blew up when cepholopodophile and famous pro-evolution scientist blogger P.Z. Myers blogged on Pharyngula about how he wouldn't play the game because it was windows only. 1279 hits and counting from that post, more then the gaming blogs combined. The post is followed by a bunch of comments telling him how he could emulate it, and general mac,pc, linux holy waring. My favorite quote in the comments: "So you do belong to a religion after all!" (he's also a famous athiest)
There have been a lot of very nice reviews and comments and the two major critisisms are the same one's I have with this version that I plan to fix in a bigger release: that some narrative repeats too often, and that the game is too short.
"Oo, Artsy Game Incubator plus Lovecraftian goodness equals an awesome-looking PC indie freeware game, downloadable now, good folks.."-GameSetWatch
What I should be doing right now is playing Tomb Raider: Underworld for a last minute slightly behind-the-pack review, but I nevertheless find myself distracted by indie game fancies. Night of the Cephalopods is one such entertainment that takes my attention. While the game itself - one of shooting floating octopi and running for your life - is a little underwhelming, it’s the presentation that really makes this an interesting oddity: your actions are fully narrated by the protagonist’s voiceover. The poor fellow is, it seems, trapped in a Lovecraftian fiction, and he tells you all about it, from your failure to reload, to missing your shots. He’s going mad, and you have to hear about his plight. Well worth playing, if just for those bleak comedic utterances. - Rock,Paper,Shotgun
A really nice one from the Comment thread after that post:
It’s quite surprising how a proper context-driven narrative with (somewhat) random comments on all actions can add to the gameplay experience. I mean - the game is as simple as games get and yet I was strangely compelled to play it through several times.
The system reminds me a bit of the random dialog generator that Valve boasts about in games like TF2 or L4D - apparently other talented people have no problem with replicating that. ^^
Subscribed to your mailing list to see how you’ll be faring in future. Indeed you need some additional dialog because from what I see you have two voice-over variations at most and many actions, e.g. entering a new area, are repeated more often than others and that could become annoying with time.
I guess this freeware title is something of an advertisement and a test of how your other promising project, Guerilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution, would be received? If it is so then I congratulate you on the marketing campaign since I will closely follow what you’re up to from now on. ^^
A nice one from someone's personal blog:
i’m currently taking a break from my day-long coding session and have found something (a game!) that i simply must share…
night of the cephalopods! a self-described “terrifying experiment in narrative excess” is a work of sheer brilliance! in its current version, the game-world is a bit small, but that is far besides the point. as you play through this tale, the narrator/protagonist is recounting what happened to him on that fateful night in the typical lovecraftian style. the effect truly must be experienced to be properly understood… so go play it! its free!! windows only unfortunately, but there is no installer to run which is especially nice when you’re stuck at school with no administrator priviledges.
i personally cannot wait for the next terrifyingly hilarious installment
Portion of an email from musician who also sent his amazing porfolio of game and film scores:
Hello! I just wanted to get in touch say how much I am digging Night
of the Cephalopods!
NOFC bears a kind of lineage that spans some of the early LucasArts
games on through the best 16-bit adventures (Earthbound and
particularly)
It's just really nice to see the art style and creativity being put
into this project. I wish you the best of luck with it.
What's that I'm feeling, could that be abject terror and nausea about hitting expectations for the larger version?
I promise I'm not going to just post endlessly about this sort of stuff... but I've never had any of my projects get this much attention and I'm super excited about it... once this dies down I'll shut up. Promise!
Thursday - 63
Friday - 245
Saturday - 1400
Sunday - 1496 so far... so could be as high as 3000 given it's noonish when I last checked.
Here's the totally weird thing. While indiegames.com, rockpapershotgun.com and gamesetwatch.com are contributing a good chunk, Things really blew up when cepholopodophile and famous pro-evolution scientist blogger P.Z. Myers blogged on Pharyngula about how he wouldn't play the game because it was windows only. 1279 hits and counting from that post, more then the gaming blogs combined. The post is followed by a bunch of comments telling him how he could emulate it, and general mac,pc, linux holy waring. My favorite quote in the comments: "So you do belong to a religion after all!" (he's also a famous athiest)
There have been a lot of very nice reviews and comments and the two major critisisms are the same one's I have with this version that I plan to fix in a bigger release: that some narrative repeats too often, and that the game is too short.
"Oo, Artsy Game Incubator plus Lovecraftian goodness equals an awesome-looking PC indie freeware game, downloadable now, good folks.."-GameSetWatch
What I should be doing right now is playing Tomb Raider: Underworld for a last minute slightly behind-the-pack review, but I nevertheless find myself distracted by indie game fancies. Night of the Cephalopods is one such entertainment that takes my attention. While the game itself - one of shooting floating octopi and running for your life - is a little underwhelming, it’s the presentation that really makes this an interesting oddity: your actions are fully narrated by the protagonist’s voiceover. The poor fellow is, it seems, trapped in a Lovecraftian fiction, and he tells you all about it, from your failure to reload, to missing your shots. He’s going mad, and you have to hear about his plight. Well worth playing, if just for those bleak comedic utterances. - Rock,Paper,Shotgun
A really nice one from the Comment thread after that post:
It’s quite surprising how a proper context-driven narrative with (somewhat) random comments on all actions can add to the gameplay experience. I mean - the game is as simple as games get and yet I was strangely compelled to play it through several times.
The system reminds me a bit of the random dialog generator that Valve boasts about in games like TF2 or L4D - apparently other talented people have no problem with replicating that. ^^
Subscribed to your mailing list to see how you’ll be faring in future. Indeed you need some additional dialog because from what I see you have two voice-over variations at most and many actions, e.g. entering a new area, are repeated more often than others and that could become annoying with time.
I guess this freeware title is something of an advertisement and a test of how your other promising project, Guerilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution, would be received? If it is so then I congratulate you on the marketing campaign since I will closely follow what you’re up to from now on. ^^
A nice one from someone's personal blog:
i’m currently taking a break from my day-long coding session and have found something (a game!) that i simply must share…
night of the cephalopods! a self-described “terrifying experiment in narrative excess” is a work of sheer brilliance! in its current version, the game-world is a bit small, but that is far besides the point. as you play through this tale, the narrator/protagonist is recounting what happened to him on that fateful night in the typical lovecraftian style. the effect truly must be experienced to be properly understood… so go play it! its free!! windows only unfortunately, but there is no installer to run which is especially nice when you’re stuck at school with no administrator priviledges.
i personally cannot wait for the next terrifyingly hilarious installment
Portion of an email from musician who also sent his amazing porfolio of game and film scores:
Hello! I just wanted to get in touch say how much I am digging Night
of the Cephalopods!
NOFC bears a kind of lineage that spans some of the early LucasArts
games on through the best 16-bit adventures (Earthbound and
particularly)
It's just really nice to see the art style and creativity being put
into this project. I wish you the best of luck with it.
What's that I'm feeling, could that be abject terror and nausea about hitting expectations for the larger version?
I promise I'm not going to just post endlessly about this sort of stuff... but I've never had any of my projects get this much attention and I'm super excited about it... once this dies down I'll shut up. Promise!