Ship it! ... Selectively.

Thanks for your interest in trying out SkyDragon Story, the project that has consumed most of my weekends for a full 9 years. As of April 2, 2022 (11 months after estimating 1 year left from the original core-complete beta), the last of the planned content is in and wired up! All areas, characters, items, bonuses, etc. are where I'm happy with them, which is not to say there's 0% chance of substantive change, but anything beyond cosmetic polish will likely only happen with concrete need.

So what am I looking to get from you, the visitor?

I'm NOT looking for direct recommendations, feature ideas, etc. The design and content are "locked" barring realization of egregious oversights. This game has never been about catering to expectations. With any luck, I WANT the story to be not entirely conclusive, I WANT the gameplay to require re-learning what a 'simple' side-scroller ought to entail, and I WANT players to come away with some of the same '80s-'90s sense of accomplishment of having spent time engaging with, investing in, and mastering a game that plays more complexly than it first looks using only their own wits and a basic manual.

What I need fresh eyes on is what works and what really, unforgivably, doesn't.

I don't mean "working" as in "not broken"- it's certainly good if you find and report bugs, but I can poke my own corners and hammer my own functions as needed. And I don't mean "working" as in "made for 90% of the market." I went in with a starting difficulty target north of the average Zelda, if not quite all the way up to Alundra. You WILL fail some things in this game, and you WILL get a bit frustrated until you work at them for a bit, but no puzzle can't be solved by some combination of ye olde pencil-and-paper notes & maths and successive elimination of approaches, and no boss can't be beaten by cracking the pattern and bringing some A-game execution. (most bosses also have slow-safe and/or cheese strats, and some lategame secrets make entirely casual play of the last area nearly free) This is a virtually RNG-free game (although several spots vary behavior as a function of state that a casual player may not realize they are modifying).

I mean "working" as in I didn't inadvertently leave out intended hints; I didn't phrase anything in ways that give players the wrong idea; I didn't make anywhere entirely too slow for someone who hasn't learned the tricks to learn the tricks, or entirely too easy/fast for someone who knows what they're doing. And that kind of data I can only really get from observation.

Ideally, I'd love to be able to see you playing live; the next best thing would be if you have a Twitch or other game stream I can hang out on while you play, or review VoDs of. Barring that, just play for enjoyment. Screenshots of actual bugs may be useful, screenshots of "I got here and got stuck lol" aren't so much, because I have no sense of what you actually tried or for how long. Descriptions of what you perceived as going on are useful, but only insofar as I can trace them back to where you actually were and what you were actually doing, which can be tricky without some screenshot or video of some sort. Descriptions of this other game that you totally love and wish SkyDragon Story could be more like are VERY probably beside the point, unless I have (a) played said other game and (b) can isolate the specific feature or implementation detail that plays to what I was, in fact, already trying to accomplish in a less successful manner.

Feedback on the narrative and how you relate to it will be respected, but may or may not result in changes to the script. Particularly with respect to the end of Chapter 4 and beyond, the story gets very heavy, and very psychological. I freely acknowledge I have only my own head to go on for building and relating to my own characters and their motivations and reactions, and as a result I'm honestly a bit paranoid about how they will be received (even after adding an alternate branch around the single most distressing point in the plot). As far as source, I have not set out to tell or appropriate any real person's mental health story or dialogue, but I also don't want to ship something that feels simply believable to me, but which a substantial number of players would feel to be encroaching upon their story while at the same time misrepresenting it. As far as impact, I absolutely do not want to put sensitive players in bad places, but if it turns out a videogame is enough to do that, I also don't want to reflexively try to lighten the whole thing to the point where no characters are in a bad place that isn't trivialized; I'd rather take ideas for what a more realistic and productive in-narrative response might be.

Anyway. Here's your aforementioned basic manual (a more thorough manual is also available):

• Up/down/left/right arrows: move. In water, you can move in all directions; out of water, you can only move left/right. When prompted in dialogue, you can select different options.
• z: tail. In water, kick a shockwave. Out of water, jump. Various items may expand what you can do with your tail. This key also confirms choices in dialogues.
• x: hand/inspect. Position yourself over or in front of e.g. doors and characters and press this key to engage with them. Various items may expand how you can interact with certain objects. This key also confirms choices in dialogues.
• w/s/a/d + ,/.: left-handed alternatives to arrows/z/x

Other stuff:

• The Diary: Save. Diary pedestals scattered throughout the world will restore the protagonist to maximum health/power and optionally update the DIARY box with a record of her adventures. This record IS YOUR SAVE FILE. Copy it verbatim where you will (I suggest a basic TextEdit app over an Office suite so you don't pick up any unintended character substitutions, e.g. straight-vs-curly quotes, repeated periods vs ellipses) and paste it back in at the title screen next time you play.
• f: toggle the gameplay canvas to fill the browser window; useful in conjunction with cmd-f, f11, or whatever browser command sends the window fullscreen.
• `: toggle onscreen button controls. Awkward, not well-tested, and largely abandoned at the moment, but in some permutation of theory, the game ought to play on mobile.

One last point: this game is 100% handcoded non-library non-obfuscated javascript. As such, the fact that you can play the game implicitly means you have access to the source and can reverse-engineer and extend it. This is intentional. Growing up, I found nothing got me into technology so much as being able to tear down technology, change it, and see the result. But it also means that there is a wide margin for anyone to rip the whole game and dedicate more time and energy than I have to 'finishing' and publishing it in ways I never intended. This is my biggest concern, and why, previously, I had only sent out packaged test bundles to specific individuals I know well. Stealing is bad. Selling stolen stuff as your own is worse. Don't be an asshole. Content is now officially CC-BY-NC-SA, so any verson someone hacks up and re-releases is officially not the official release, but is perfectly legal so long as it's released free and with credit.

Got everything?

Then... ok, last point, if you didn't already pick up on it: Content warning: Depression, Suicide but things don't get real for a few chapters if you want to just dabble.

That out of the way, click here to play. I strongly suggest playing on Google Chrome or compatible, since other browsers have tended to lag behind in correct implementations of certain graphics, sound, and infrastructural functionality, and the game can only run as correctly as what it has access to.

- Sean