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While the feedback we have received from general players has been extremely helpful and welcomed, I also wanted to get some educational-based feedback about the narrative. For example, feedback about the grammatical accuracy, the clarity, and story structure.
So, I reached out to an English professor at the University of Southampton for this exact reason. He provided some really helpful feedback so a huge thank you to him!
Unfortunately, a lot of time had passed between when I initially reached out to when I received a reply. However, on the plus side, I had already addressed a lot of the points he had raised which is extremely reassuring.
Starting with the positives; he said he could definitely see the Lovecraftian influences and that includes fun and enticing worldbuilding - which I am thrilled to hear.
Some of his points concern things that cannot be helped within this context - a fact he also mentioned. For example, the fact that having everything in the form of dialogue means that this is the only way to convey elaborate exposition - which inevitably leads to times of clunky info-dumping. Again, while this cannot be helped at the start, once the setting/backstory had been established I was able to move the focus away from the exposition and into the current events and dynamics between characters.
Another helpful piece of feedback I was able to address was regarding a lack of varied responses. As the game progresses and the Keeper’s mental state deteriorates and he becomes crueller, the professor’s advice of starting with two distinct adjectives to base the different options on became very helpful. When I was stuck on what to write as the Keeper’s responses, I followed his advice and first figured out the feelings I wanted to evoke - for example, ‘callous’ or ‘cautious’ - and was able to continue from those prompts.
We also got our first-ever comment on Itch.io on our demo release of Keeper’s Veil! We had a look at our analytics and noticed that whenever I posted to our Twitter and linked to the current version of the game, there was a huge influx of traffic to our Itch page. That is when we discovered this comment which we were overjoyed by.
A comment left on the Keeper’s Veil demo on Itch.io
Receiving such a positive compliment from a complete stranger was so reassuring and completely made our day. We had also addressed the issues this player brought up by the time we read their comment which is more than encouraging.