We just spent the last day redoing the prologue for The Peacenet using new Peace Engine features such as the multicolored terminal and better audio and cutscene system. I like how it turned out, but I’d like to hear your opinions. Are there any things I could improve? Anything that needs changing? Let me know! 
Funny thing is, at the end of the video, the abrupt ending is caused by the fact that Peace Engine actually crashed because the Peacenet Backend Protocol is multithreaded and two threads tried to touch the same thing on the server-side which causes problems. Pretty much an instant death sentence in C#. But that’s what you get for doing Minecraft-like blended multiplayer where the singleplayer component is just a multiplayer server without an authentication layer and with additional singleplayer only features. We’ll be redoing the protocol in the May 2018 Week 3 release though. 
I think this is a great question. First impressions are very important if anything should be tweeked to a micro level, to be super cool in your game… Its the first 5 minutes.
Negatives. (this is probably all you should want to hear or care about)
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That opening music (30 seconds in) has a audible skip in it, that drove me crazy by two minutes in i stoped the video. It was to distracting to read anymore. This would of been number 2 but it lasted so long and repeatedly it got bumped up to #1.
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Text is way to small. Those two combined made me realize i would have to re-read it again to really critique the story which i already failed to get into.
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What i did read seemed a little repetitive you don’t want the user to feel like you think he can’t get it the first time or insult his intelligence you have a whole game to elaborate. Redo the sound then ask again and ill read it.
Positives
I love the blinking cursor and green scrolling text, very cool had a military professional quality feel.
Making it bigger cant be bad because it looks cool show it off.
Notes taken
The audio is a bug we’re aware of already. We have to tweak our Vorbis loader a bit - we don’t use the content pipeline for audio. The audio clip itself is fine, the loader just glitches and seems to insert the last few samples twice causing the audible skip.
As for text, yeah, I could make it bigger in the cutscene. Though as far as UI goes, I prefer to let the user set their GUI scale if the text is too small or UI elements don’t fit. That’s, of course, why we implemented that feature.
Anyway, I’m at school right now so I won’t be able to fix the issues til I get home, but I will as soon as I do get home . I’ll update the original post with a new video once I make the adjustments.
As promised, I made another video showing the adjustments I made based on feedback here. https://youtu.be/cK6E5IiqahQ
My creative juices are starting to flow with this one. Now I’m wishing I had the money to afford to hire the voice actor who did the voice of Matty from the 2016 MacGyver reboot…her voice would be perfect for the mission briefing cutscene. But…this game’s got a $0 budget as a challenge. That ain’t gonna happen.
Anyway, I increased the font size, added a little countdown timer as the music in the cutscene fades out (and made it more gradual of a fade so it isn’t as awkward), Declan altered thelma’s chat messages a bit, and I made the intro cutscene play the FULL song instead of just a single repeating clip until we can figure out the bug that casused the awful audio skip.
No showcase of anything beyond the GUI setup yet, I’ll save that for after we implement the Mission Complete screen. I haven’t touched any of the GUI stuff since last night. Let me know what you guys think!
It’s looking much better.
Though im a little clueless as to what the game is about…
Is this a text game ? Seemed like it ended just as it was grabbing my curiousity.
What was up with the second set of loading things from pacman ?
If your looking for something to do word wrapping i think a couple other peole have some word wrap classes on github or you can use the one i made a while back.
the MgTextBounder class.
You have to set a spritefont at least once first to use it. Then you can wrap the text to a screen rectangle, it takes the spritefont and uses it to measure things. If your not scaling text just pass (1f,1f) for the text scale.
It’s basically a class with two methods they do the same thing in different ways.They add linebreaks one does the work on a stringbuilder and returns it the other makes a copy works on that and returns it.
The methods themselves are basically the old monogame drawstring methods my own that i modified i just redid them to wrap text. (i did some inital work on ripping apart the old drawstrings matrice code and simplifying them), I kinda felt i could of improved this wordwrap method a bit more when the line length is super small i don’t like how it breaks it up, but i ussually do stuff like that when i actually need to. I sort of made it for when i would its ok though.
The game is GUI-based, but there’s a strong emphasis on terminals in the game. As for those pacman things, I wanted to make it look like an OS’s base packages were actually being installed from within a live environment, just like Linux. pacman is the Arch Linux package manager and does exactly that when you install Arch on a real system. I could’ve named it anything - apt, yum, rpm, etc, but pacman self-explains exactly what it does.
As for wordwrapping, I have a functional word wrapper already. But in real life, terminals don’t word-wrap. They letter-wrap. Hence why I did letter wrapping in the in-game Terminal
Hey there,
I thought it was pretty cool, nicely done! My only notes are:
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I personally felt that the opening music having lyrics was distracting. It’s difficult to read text and process lyrics in music at the same time, for me. This may not be the case for everybody, just something I noted. The second music came in and was great.
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The scrollbar flashing in and out during the intro was kind of distracting.
Hope that helps!
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Thanks for the feedback
Not much I can do about the intro music yet, Anders Jensen never composed an instrumental of that track. The most I can do is either use a different track that fits just as well or better, or stick with the non-instrumental and get him to compose a new song for the intro when he has time. Do note that he provided us with music for free as part of this challenge to see if we can make an awesome game with as little money put into it as possible, preferrably no money at all. So it may not be on his top priorities
As for the scrollbar, I’ll introduce a quick patch to the terminal program to hide the scrollbar if the window is fullscreen.
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