The Photographer by Chaotic

[bqn311]

Anyone have a walkthrough?

[Squeeky]

Anyone have a walkthrough?

S e r i o u s l y ??

[Greebo]

Anyone have a walkthrough?

From what I've seen of the responses of those who have attempted the game it's "paths through the minefield" at this point that are needed, not a "walkthrough"!

[Werehunter]

I actually didn't have many problems when I went through it earlier today. Only ran into one really bad one and was able to fix that with a quick edit to a file name.

However I'm sure there are several more endings that I still need to get to. Only reached three so far.

[Synthus]

Just got through it.

I wonder why I expected anything different. :S

[jfrancois323]

SERIOUSLY, with all i read, i found almost every one cheap. with all the bad comment you give about Chaotic work, do you think he will make great work.

Come on, if you can do better job, do it & we will see !!

personally, i always found Chaotic great !! They always has a great amount of play in it & we always need a great bunch of iq to find the ending.

By the way, im not a programmer, so i check the work needed to do one page, so i appreciate the effort he give for me to get a new game to play with.

[ExLibris]

In the event that anyone's still interested, my walkthrough is available from http://aifsansmystery.blogspot.com/2011/11/walkthrough-photographer.html. If you don't feel like editing the HTML there's a link to the files I modified while creating the walkthrough (mainly because of spelling errors; I only found half a dozen broken links but I neglected to note which files they were in).

Edit: I see that Chaotic has uploaded a corrected version of the game, so you may be okay without the modified files.

Edit 2: In fact, by the look of it he's added a lot of content that was missing from the first release, so ignore everything I've just said.

Edit 3: Walkthrough updated. It was a lot easier than I thought, since the additional sex scenes are carbon copies of each other (right down to the typos). And no, you can't do anything with Kat.

[Bigmanbishop]

For anyone that is interested the new mostly un-bugged version is up. You can now talk to certain girls at the party that you couldn't talk to before. I just have one question is it not possible to do anything with Kat?

[Squeeky]

SERIOUSLY, with all i read, i found almost every one cheap. with all the bad comment you give about Chaotic work, do you think he will make great work.

Come on, if you can do better job, do it & we will see !!

personally, i always found Chaotic great !! They always has a great amount of play in it & we always need a great bunch of iq to find the ending.

By the way, im not a programmer, so i check the work needed to do one page, so i appreciate the effort he give for me to get a new game to play with.

SERIOUSLY, the Lagoon community DO appreciate the work of Chaotic, but I'll not reiterate concerns which are repeatedly raised about issues. I do believe that tlaero made an approach to him with a means to reduce the errors but he chose to follow his own chosen 'solution' to build the gaming arena.

That said, while we may 'harp' about Chaotic's inadequacies he does take some notice of comments passed to him by whatever means, just a pity to see all the recurrent 'flack' for which there are some easy solutions that he might use to minimise.

[ExLibris]

The system Chaotic currently uses is kind of midway between his original system and Tlaero's. Specifically it uses JavaScript instead of having to set a cookie for each variable value. Theoretically that should reduce the number of errors, since it eliminates the clunky system of check files he was using to test variables, but as we've seen that's not always the case.

I personally thought The Photographer was better than Rachel 2 (mainly because the gameplay at least made some kind of sense), but it was always going to struggle to be a truly enjoyable game because there were too many NPCs. Dating games provide a very limited canvas for characterisation. There's typically enough for one NPC, but when the game includes multiple love interests the share of the spotlight each gets becomes less and less. With 14 NPCs the level of characterisation each gets is going to be pretty perfunctory, even if the game is twice normal size.

The depressing thing is that Serge proves that there were people happy to test the game. If Chaotic had just handed it off to them and waited until it had been tested to release it, the tone of this thread would probably be much more positive.

[blaman]

@ jfrancois323
I appreciate his work and I'm sure the others do it as well. It's not about his work that we complain

We are complaining because instead of making proper testing, he releases games that are broken and need a few extra days to be patched up. If you look in this thread Serge and ExLibris provide fixes to the broken files almost immediately. Why then can't Chaotic approach them BEFORE releasing the game to the public ? Why did he deny help offered by Tlaero ?

You must agree that if he were to agree for proper testing, then the released games would be a lot, a lot better. Nowadays most of the people look at the games thinking "meh, is it patched already?". And that's the problem

He used to release truly good games where only a few files would be broken. Nowadays with each new release you have to resort to fixes/cheats just to beat them

Also - Chaotic has absolutely no problem delaying a game by a week. He's done it in the past and there's nothing wrong with it. If he is unsatisfied with quality - he can and should delay the game until he finds it satisfying. But if he delays a game to focus on removing bugs and releases something that is a mess, then something has obviously gone really wrong

[Salamandastron]

If you look in this thread Serge and ExLibris provide fixes to the broken files almost immediately. Why then can't Chaotic approach them BEFORE releasing the game to the public ? Why did he deny help offered by Tlaero ?

If he were still releasing free games, enlisting people for help prior to release would have been an easy option. But considering that they are now commercial products, things get a little more complicated. Even if Serge, ExLibris or Tlaero do not want monetary compensation for their services, he might just consider that it is more convenient to get the job done on his own.

Problem is, if you are a one-man/woman team, then you have to be a perfectionist for your product to be 'tight', and that doesn't appear to be the case here.

[TheBrain]

SERIOUSLY, with all i read, i found almost every one cheap. with all the bad comment you give about Chaotic work, do you think he will make great work.

From the start he has had a lot of praise and constructive feedback, and yet in the long run his work has had a significant decline in quality. And I don't think there are much "bad comments" here. Yes, there are comments that point out things that are bad, that doesn't make it a bad comment. In fact, at this point those comments would seem more useful to me than mindless praise because we shouldn't criticize something that is free.
But lately Chaotic has been using as as beta testers to weed out the initial bugs. You can ask yourself, is it still really free then? Sure you're still not paying anything, but you are putting time into playing a buggy game which will give a lot less enjoyment than playing a non-buggy game (and this is even without Chaotic saying that it is untested and may still be buggy). And besides that there's the argument that the free games are advertising for his offsite, so personally I don't think his games are as free as everyone likes to think.

But in the end what I personally do when I comment is that I'm honest, first and foremost. If I don't like something, I will say so, free or not. And where possible I would suggest something to make it better. I remember the early threads about Chaotics games turned into elaborate discussions about how things in these sort of games could be better. And you can look at phreaky and tlaero's games to see what it would be like if a developer uses those discussions to improve games (and in one particular case I've noticed a gameplay mechanic that I almost literally suggested).
Anyway, long story short, we are the players. If we don't voice our concerns, how is Chaotic (or anyone else) ever going to know how to improve on his games (which, in the end, are made for the players)?

[blaman]

@Salamandastron
I think you are contradicting yourself a bit. I think it should go the other way. If he were to release free games only, then bugs would be easier to accept. But since he is releasing paid games - they should be tested, polished and perfected. That's what he gets money from, at least in theory

As I've said countless times - I, as a developer, do not want to just criticize, I want to give a constructive opinion. I make games myself and I've read literally thousands of reviews of my game, some really really harsh. But I always tried to find why someone had a problem with the game and tried to respond to those arguments by making the games better. It's all up to Chaotic - if he is truely interested in user feedback then he will swallow that pill and learn from it

[bob_mahoney]

In the event that anyone's still interested, my walkthrough is available from http://aifsansmystery.blogspot.com/2011/11/walkthrough-photographer.html. If you don't feel like editing the HTML there's a link to the files I modified while creating the walkthrough (mainly because of spelling errors; I only found half a dozen broken links but I neglected to note which files they were in).

Edit: I see that Chaotic has uploaded a corrected version of the game, so you may be okay without the modified files.

Edit 2: In fact, by the look of it he's added a lot of content that was missing from the first release, so ignore everything I've just said.

Edit 3: Walkthrough updated. It was a lot easier than I thought, since the additional sex scenes are carbon copies of each other (right down to the typos). And no, you can't do anything with Kat.

How exactly do you get the threesome? Every time I come back to the room with Ellie, Maddison is gone? How do you leave Maddison in the room to go get Ellie?