The Photographer by Chaotic

[Serge]

Hi every body

The beta version is avaliable on office site.


This version is not playable.

Too much bugs as Chaotic is used to.

I'll try to find all of them and send Chaotic a playable version

[Beherit]

Merci Serge !

J'attends ce jeu avec impatience en espérant qu'il sorte bien samedi et qu'il ne soit pas reporté encore...

[blaman]

Yeah, not playable at all This is really unfortunate and becomes greatly annoying

Chaotic actually delayed the game by a week to focus on fixing the bugs, but there's just sooooo many of them, it's hard to comprehend. The game feels completely untested

I also feel that the basic design is greatly flawed. There's tons of girls you can choose for casting/photographs, but after you get to part 2... Well, I think only 3 of them have special actions there. So you either need to be lucky, play (a broken) game from beginning over and over to find out which are, or just go through the files (which I did)

I honestly am disappointed by this. I know it's not even a job for Chaotic, but if I were him I wouldn't want to release a game that people will find unplayable. I would feel embarassed. And this is not the first time at all. Pretty much every previous game in over a year started with tons, tons of problems

And from the assets department... Chaotic said it would be the biggest game he ever made, and certainly it has the most images and files. But most of them are from same locations, especially in the party part there's hundreds of images of 4-5 different rooms, where different girls either are in or not. But they're still the same images... Texts ? Well, the casting ones are pretty much identical, it's sad to even mention it. You approach tons of different girls with the same dialogues, only to find out that in the party you can't approach them. Unless you chose the proper one

So overall - the game is broken and its structure requires tons of repetition, to achieve a chance for a cool ending

I really don't like criticizing games (especially that I'm game developer myself), and I don't want to be harsh on someone who clearly put a lot of his work into the game. But after so many botched releases I think hard words are deserved, because Chaotic needs to learn from those mistakes. His games used to be top-of-the-crop and everyone played and talked about them. Nowadays the attitude is more like 'meh, are there still bugs in them'? Fast forward a year from now and where will his games be ? Unless something changes quickly, I don't see a future in front of them...

[NightStalker73au]

How can I access the site you mentioned?

[Serge]

How can I access the site you mentioned?

www.vdategames.com but the offsite is not free.

[Beherit]

But can we hope to have the game today?
Or it will be delayed ? Again...

[NightStalker73au]

How can I access the site you mentioned?

http://www.vdategames.com but the offsite is not free.

cheers for that.

[ExLibris]

Disappointing, but not altogether surprising since most of Chaotic's recent games have had those same problems.

I genuinely think that Chaotic's main problem is the Offsite. I don't begrudge him the opportunity to make some money off his hard work, but the pressure of having to churn out a game every couple of months to satisfy his subscribers has ground him down to the point where he doesn't seem to really care how much the quality of his games has decreased.

[tlaero]

I didn't get hit by as many bugs as others did, but it might be that the main path mostly works and I got lucky with that path.

Something I didn't like was the arbitrary nature of the puzzles. Could someone realistically realize that this girl is going to walk out in a huff if you ask her to stick her fingers in her mouth but that she'd be fine with you asking that she take her top off? Etc. To be fair, though, this is something I struggle with in my writing. How do you make it challenging while still making it believable and understandable? When Phreaky's and my next game comes out, you'll have to tell me if I walked the line successfully.

I did like the concept of giving the player 3 ways to ask the same thing and having him choose the best. It's a little coarse in this game (one chance to say it right) but the idea has merit.

I didn't really like the change in characterization of the women, though. Kelly, in particular, has really changed (for the worse), but they're all pretty vanilla now.

I'm interested to see where he goes with his next technology. I'm sort of surprised he's going to flash, though. Flash is on the decline. If I was going to change technologies, HTML5 would be the top of my list.

I'm afraid that the problems with these games, though, really aren't technology ones. What Chaotic really needs is a collaborator. He could also benefit from participating in the discussions here. I know that Phreaky's and my games got better in part due to the advice from people here. Chaotic seems to be making his games in a vaccuum. It's a shame because I know firsthand how much work he puts into them.

Tlaero

[TheBrain]

I would be afraid that once he moves to flash it will only become hard to track bugs. And moreover we couldn't fix some simple ones ourselfs. But I'm gonna check this out in a moment, I'll see if I have something interesting to add afterwards :P.

[tlaero]

Yeah, the fact that I can fix the bugs and continue does help me play his games.

Tlaero

[Super]

Let'see...

1. Massive amount of bugs
2. Repetitive tasks (Asking each girl to model for you... with the same exact order of page numbers)
3. Unrealistically written girls, and writing in general

Yep, it's a Chaotic game. Dunno why I thought it would be any different.

[TheBrain]

I've had a look, couldn't be bothered with it after a few tries. First of I'll reiterate that it's VERY buggy and game-breaking to such a degree that it's impossible that this was even tested slightly...
And then the gameplay. I agree with tlaero about the arbitraty nature of the decisions, even knowing the background of some characters from the previous games I found little clues as to what would be the right choices (so I cheated and looked at the URL firefox shows me when I mouseover a choice...). What's more is that it's essentially the same for every character, choose the right wording of the job, then choose the right actions in the photoshoot. It is almost literally always the same (in same cases the text is even just a copy-paste from another character). Then you come to the party and it's essentially the same problem, a lot of girls with the same basic gameplay mechanic to get them into bed.

The problem there is that the supposedly "big" game only has a small amount of gameplay. There is barely interaction between the characters, in essence this could've been a series of smaller single-character games without any problem. It's what made me stop playing after only a couple of tries because it didn't seem like there would be anything new or interesting.
I've noticed a comparable problem in leonizers games where he'd say a game has 10 endings, which all boil down to a few arbitrary choices (like you'd essentially pick ending A or B right at the end with a single question and it changes one picture in the ending). I think making games that way really just creates an illusion of a "big" game. And there I'd just like to say that I think that's really a shame, the number of pictures or endings don't make a game more interesting. It needs to be backed up with good gameplay and then if you go bigger: variety! And, without that, I feel that this is just a lot of Chaotic's time essentially wasted...

[blaman]

I personally 'fix' the game by turning off javascprit temporarily. This allows you to go to the previously visited page and works wonders in the game (at least under Opera)

Regarding bugs:
1) Good for you Tlaero For me however... I got stuck multiple times on my playthrough. I kept fixing them using the above fix, but they kept coming back...
2) I remember that one of the choices led to a page called kitchen_xx.png or something with kitchen in it. Well, there's no kitchen in the game, there's no kitchen among filenames coming with the game, so where the heck is this from ? Either there was a kitchen somewhere in the script and was removed or... it's a remnant from a previous game, and Chaotic simply didn't change some of the files properly. And I'm quite convinced it's the latter

@ Tlaero - big kudos to you for listening to the crowd. This is one of the biggest and most important things to do when you're a small developer. However, even your first game (meaning - before the comments) was entirely playable and almost bug free. I really wish Chaotic will start putting more effort into making his games playable

[dryheave]

Was it truly posted as a "beta"? If so, then bugs are to be expected and I'll wait until the final version is out there to judge. If it was a beta, sounds like he was asking for help and input. No one is forcing anyone to play it.