Postmortem news - My Love mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent

So it's been about a month since the Custom Story's release. I figure this is a good time to make a few comments on the feedback I have received, and what's in store for the future.

First of all, I truly appreciate the warm reception "My Love" has received from the community. It was a small project, with most of the effort placed on the writing and the dialog recording over the mapping and programming. Many have commented that the mapping was merely mediocre, the microphones were incredibly varied in their quality, and that the lack of true interactivity would make this better suited as a short film. I would not argue with any of these criticisms, as "My Love" is incredibly flawed in many of its aspects. It was a small project, built almost entirely by one person (except for the dialog recording), with only a TINY amount of testing performed. I ran into many problems in the design phases, especially when the recorded lines started being inserted into the project. How does one keep the natural flow of a video game when creating something more naturally suited for a movie, or a short story? My plan was to allow the player to rush ahead and skip as much filler dialog as possible, but there were moments when I couldn't allow this in order to get the story across, which forced me to lock doors or obstruct the player from straying too far with invisible walls. These, in my book, are gigantic flaws, but ones I was forced to work with in order to get the job done. In the end, however, I'm surprised that things have turned out so well from a design angle.

I do find one thing to be amusing--a lot of people found the lack of NPCs to be exceptionally frustrating when playing, stating that it was (paraphrasing) incredibly stupid for the protagonist to be conversing with nothing but air. Though I made no obvious mention of it throughout the story, I thought the lack of NPCs would be reasonable, as Samuel was in a quasi-dreamstate the entire time, especially due to Amnesia's inability to handle NPCs in any real fashion. I suppose when one plays a videogame, they don't always allow their imagination to fill in the holes like they do with books, which is a shame.

I have also been asked by a few individuals of what I shall be working on in the future.

Well, I do have plans for an Amnesia Total Conversion, but it's still in the planning phase, so I wouldn't expect any media for a while. It is not going to be a 100% story-based project like "My Love", as I do hope to make it a horror-based adventure. Rest assured, however, that the story will be the key focus of this project, but I will incorporate what I learned from "My Love" and take it a step farther by including less storytelling through narrative and more storytelling through interaction.

And yes, I will be assembling a team for this one, to help take the burden off of my shoulders a bit, as this project may be more ambitious than I'm imagining right now. But we shall see, and I shall keep you informed of any major developments.

To conclude this novel, I just wish to thank you all again for your kind words and constructive criticism. Hopefully, I will be able to create a truly engaging experience with my next project, with everything I have learned from this little side-project.