i'm really anime-inspired, and i think i want everything i do for these narratives to have a hefty sliver of that in there. i'm definitely going to be taking it further, and i hope that the story i tell with it resonates and sticks with people. :'3

aw dude, that's so awesome coming from the other atmospheric story dev😭 i really want to see how your game evolves if you keep going with it, because it sucks you had so little time. still, you accomplished showing off that you know what you're doing, and that's the most important part! i hope you enjoy the direction i take Teleco too! here's hoping for both of us placing well!!!!!

tysm 🙀 i'm so glad people enjoy the weird stuff i do. but yea! i tried to make something that was tightly focused and felt like a complete package that lasts with the player, and i had a lot of ideas and concepts being funneled down into the final result. seriously considering developing it into a full release that does a lot more with the concepts, but particularly with the story.

yea, unfortunately i didn't have enough time to make the dialogue progress based on input, so i knew some people would miss some of it :p funny thing though, i actually threw together all the dialogue and ending cinematic in the last 48 hours.  but it was honestly the most important part! i'm just glad it didn't break.

thanks so much! i put a lot of thought into it, like for instance, of course Teleco speaks through static, but the Channeler's speech is based on the way old movies used to subtitle foreign media with yellow Helvetica font on big black bars. if i had more time, i would've made the Channeler's speech come in per word and in multiple lines in 4:3 like those movies too. i could've gone a little crazier with the mechanic, like there are parts where the volume pushing requires you to start low and bring it up (naturally letting you do a low pass filter sweep with the audio in time with the music) but without disjoints it doesn't have much depth, so i was planning on making a Sleep Mode/Timer ability where you can put the creatures to sleep to time some things. or they'd be riding in on conveyors at regular intervals or something. 

i was also unsure of how the creatures (gaomono) should trigger their audio waves, i thought it would be mean to have to coerce them to roar, but while listening to what my audio person made, i thought it would be cool if they just naturally sang every other bar with the background. i ended up editing the original composition just a little bit to fit the concept.

thanks so much!!! i really wanted to try subverting expectations with this one.

in theming, we're all used to haunted media tropes. my original draft was that Teleco would be in a cursed tape about to kill you, but then the Channeler would turn their console on at the last second and trap her in the cart. then they'd feel bad about it and then offer to help her escape. i still think it would be funnier to put the player in a situation like that, but i was pressed  for time, so the VHS TV models were relegated to the TV tower, which is another very anime trope. (i've seen it in more, but off the top of my head Nier Automata and Persona 4 use the idea) in the west we have TV walls, anime have garbage TV towers. 

i'm also just always looking for a chance to make things more aesthetically interesting, so splitting mono/stereo and using lots of CRT filters was definitely in the plan. i actually had a segment early on where i hooked up sidechain compression to the TV static on the game cart, so that the TV static white noise would naturally morph into the game percussion and the static would "duck" under it as the audio cleared until the game was running as normal. i had it working, but figured i didn't want to add more unplayable runtime to such a short game.

you're too kind dude, thanks for the energy 😭 i tried really hard to sell the idea in a tightly focused package that looked and felt good. i had the late realization that this actually counts as a 2nd-person perspective game because you're playing from the perspective of someone who is watching the character you're controlling. the reason I have a wrapped-up wired controller in front is to show that nobody's actually playing the game, it's being haunted. but one of the things i didn't have time for was the D-pad and buttons moving on their own while the Channeler uses a remote to change the volume. or even better, their fingers pressing buttons on the TV.

i thought it would be funny if the game were rigged to a Satellaview SNES module to justify bridging between a TV antenna CRT and a SNES, but i don't actually know how that thing works so i didn't want to mess it up. i had to make at least one checkpoint and figured to make it so Teleco crawls out of a TV because i thought that would be funny. and then of course at the end the "gaomono" (the name of the creatures) comes out of the TV it'd be like hey yea, this isn't only Teleco's trick.

Yeah, I actually had a lot of ideas, one of which I wanted to add for the very end, but I ran out of time. 😫 I was working 100 hours a week on this learning Godot, tweaking, and managing the team. I figured I should keep it focused to the three gimmicks I proposed (fiddling with TV antennae, a haunted cart, and going to windowed) to keep it more tightly focused. Plus I had to justify the actual events, and I saved making the intro cinematic and the very end of the game for the very last day. Barely made it!