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A jam submission

Monospaced LoversView game page

An exploration-driven platformer about closeness and distance
Submitted by Scarlet String Studios (@scarlet_string) — 45 minutes, 52 seconds before the deadline
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Comments

Submitted

Hello, Just checked up on the game and the progress seems great. I didn't run into an obvious issues, but I got stuck in the same quest point as the other person who couldnt get past the slimes. I found some secret area's as well, and love the new cg art. Its coming together really well. More hints on the slime would be helpful. The text guy was repeating a quote about the tanuki harmonica scene. 

Developer

Thanks! Glad you liked it. There will eventually be more tanuki in the town, so I can drop some hints in their dialogue. Right now it's pretty linear, so there's not much to do if you get stuck.

I keep wondering how every new demo, content from previous demos keeps breaking (no offense meant). Here's a list of issues I ran into:

  • Freeze at the cutscene where the hungry slime is supposed to jump off the tower and block your path - it simply never jumps down, used the quest skipper to progress from here
  • After using the steak to open the side room in the underground area, the tanuki wouldn't give me another one (it was the correct dialogue, but a new steak never spawned), reloading the game let me progress again
  • Freeze at the cutscene at the shrine, after the line "Slow down a minute. What did I miss?", this is where I got stuck
  • Quest skipper doesn't work at all for shrine progress, the changes don't get saved and are instantly forgotten after leaving the menu
  • Couldn't find a way to exit the settings menu accessed from the main menu

There were some other issues that are still present as well, like the screen border issue I've mentioned in previous demo comments, but it's not as annoying now that the screen settings actually work (only shows up if you alt+tab out of the game and back in now).

Developer

Sorry about that, QA was definitely lacking this time (submitted 1hr before the deadline). Is the screen border issue still there with both exclusive fullscreen and borderless fullscreen?

Well, I seem to be unable to replicate it now, unless the game is in windowed mode and I force it to fullscreen with my window manager instead. Maybe I did that by accident while testing then.

Also, I can't see any sort of difference in behavior between exclusive and borderless window fullscreen modes, not sure if unity even does that on linux.

Developer

Interesting, good to know. Glad it's (possibly) fixed anyway.

For the other bugs, I couldn't reproduce the slime getting stuck and the shrine cutscene getting stuck. Are there any errors in the output_log.txt file? It should be in the default save directory.

Also, which settings menu are you talking about? Is it the phone menu, or the "paused" screen that pops up when you press escape? You should be able to exit both with escape.

(1 edit)

Actually yeah, there's errors in the log when that happens. Here's the one from the slime encounter: https://pastebin.com/raw/dxPtJVMQ

Since it seems like a text encoding issue, I managed to get around it - by running the game under US English locale (my system is in Finnish, and I've now confirmed that the issue happens on both windows and linux). Probably worth noting that the freezes happen at points where the next  line of text would have a special effect applied to it, although those used to work in past demos without issues. There's also some other stuff in the game that's affected by locale, like the phone chatlog switching "PM" into "ip." which would be the Finnish equivalent if we used 12 hour clock.

As for the menu, I mean the one you can only access on first start, the one that the game starts into before you have save data. I played around with it some more, and pressing esc seems to work at first, but if you hit it a few times while the resolution dropdown menu is open, then it stops working and you'll be unable to exit the settings menu.

Anyway, I'll probably try out the rest of the new stuff later, now that I found a workaround for the cutscenes.

Developer (2 edits)

Wow. That's a new one. Thanks for the find.

Long story short, this happens when I try to parse floats from plain text. If Finnish uses commas instead of periods, then that explains the problem. I tried specifying CultureInfo.InvariantCulture in my ToString and Parse calls for those methods, so maybe that will work in v1.1 of this build. Hopefully there's a better solution out there because it looks like it's affecting other people too.

Anyway, menu and the other stuff is fixed, so I'll push an update soon.

(2 edits)

Well, it looks like the black bars are gone now and I'm playing at full 1920x1200. Not sure if that's intentional, but it's causing a lot of other visual issues now, such as the game being visible behind the title screen / main menu at the top and bottom, the semi-transparent bars for cutscenes just hanging out there at the edges while playing, and during cutscenes they don't cover the top and bottom parts of the screen now.

As for the dialogue issues, the slime dialogue works now but I still get a freeze at the shrine, at least there's a handy popup window for errors now though.

Here's a handful of screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5

Developer (1 edit)

Crap, you're right. I disabled that to test something and forgot to re-enable it. I'm pushing a small update now with that + another attempt at the encoding issue (I might have just missed a ToString the first time). I'm glad the error popup works anyway.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, there's a bug with the glow effect on the sun/moon when the letterbox bars are active. The glow effect is from an asset, so I emailed the devs to try and figure it out.

Nope, still the same freeze with the text. At least the black bars are back now.

Developer

Okay, I was able to reproduce it by switching my locale to Finnish, and it looks like I can hard fix the problem by just forcing the game into English (US) locale in the code. Will include that in the next update.

Seems bizarrely fun, i kinda like this strange humor but I need a walkthrough because i'm stuck on the beginning of chapter 1, controls are super smooth and it seems bug proof, are you gonna change all 8bit sprites to a new style?

Developer

Thanks for playing! Where are you stuck?

Yeah, the placeholders are mostly free vector art from this guy (great resource).  The creatures are still placeholder. You can see examples of the actual art in the cave/grass tiles, torch, red button, other random items.

I found the first chip and the anime dude just went away, i jumped to the right side of the map found a slime blocking my way and found secret passages from the slime guarding at my house, at that point i just jumped around a lot because it was fun.

Developer

Good to know, maybe I'll drop another hint or something. You have to talk to an NPC named Landon in one of the houses. He tells you about how to deal with slimes (which also progresses the quest).