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A jam submission

Parenthood PendingView game page

A playable story about the hopes, doubts, and fears surrounding early pregnancy.
Submitted by amnara
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Parenthood Pending's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
This game made me feel an emotion#311.7342.375
Most on theme#321.7342.375
Most not on theme#350.8221.125

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
Amanda Rasmussen

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I liked the thought of it, and the way it was executed, bugs aside. I got stuck after I clicked "Wait" after peeing on the test btw :) 

I hope you manage to fix the bugs and upload a working version, because it's a compelling story and I would love to experience it. It is a perspective I have rarely seen explored in games, and because of that alone it feels like it's more interesting than 99% of the games out there :) keep up the good work!

Developer(+1)

Hi Horatiuromantic,
Thank you so much for your kind feedback. This was my first game jam after giving birth, so the theme "pending" really resonated with me after experiencing the combo of covid and a relatively isolated pregnancy. 
Someone else mentioned the wait bug too... it's not supposed to just stop there, that would be a bit cruel to the player! Never-ending suspense, oh no! 
I feel really motivated to finish the project after reading comments like yours, so I really hope I can fix the technical issues. Seems like a few friendly programmers might be coming to my rescue... :) 

Submitted

Hi Amanda. Same issue. It looks like the audio and waiting macros may not be playing well together. I did some Twine hacking on our project; if you drop me a line through spacetoast.net, I'll bet we can get a version of this running. (Once ratings close, obviously, to be fair to everyone.) We'd all really like to play this.

Developer

Hi Matt,
Thank you so much. Some Twine hacking would really be appreciated! I want to learn more html, but that "unexpected error" drove me nuts for hours. I fiddled with it, read documentation, tried changing the story format, tried different browsers, but in the end I ran out of time... If you can help me make this playable without having to manually remake the whole thing in another format/syntax, that'd be awesome. :) 


Submitted

I can't get the game to run (unexpected error), which persists no matter what browser I use. However reading the story through the html (open in notepad e.g.) is an option and I would definitely say that it fits the theme - reading it through it is somewhat surprising that Covid did not play a role in more of the games submitted for the jam, seeing as how we are all pending a different reality.

I hope that the worries I read about turned out to be unfounded and everything is good for all 3 of you.

Developer(+1)

Thank you so much for sticking to playing through the story, despite that damn error! Yep, living through covid has been so much about pending, waiting, and dealing with uncertainties. There are some weird parallels between those universal feelings and what I experienced during my first pregnancy, so that's what I started writing about. And then I couldn't stop... and then came the deadline, before I reached a satisfying conclusion. Oh well..!
Thankfully, we reached a happy ending - or rather a beginning! The rest of my pregnancy went well, and in October we became parents to a healthy little boy. Now he's seven months old and is just figuring out how to crawl, pull cables, eat grass, and all those wonderful things. Parenting is a crazy ride, but I'm grateful every day. 

Submitted

Glad to hear it and now with that knowledge I can safely say congratulations and hope all the best for the future. He'll be even more of handful later I am sure :D

Submitted

I'm not sure if the waiting time after you click "Wait" is very long or if it's not working but I could not do anything after that.

But being a programmer I took a look at the HTML file and read the story there instead and it's really touching and emotional, too bad I was not able to experience it in the intended way.

Developer

Hi Radu-Constantin,
Thank you so much for the nice feedback. I'm glad you like the story, despite the technical difficulties.
When the game plays as it's supposed to, there are some extra lines of text fading in after a few seconds. Otherwise, the wait gets a lot longer than intended. I'll look into the bug - thanks!

Submitted (1 edit)

Hi Amanda, I think the download might not work correctly, it consists of two HTML files and one of them has some inline javascript with what I imagine is the game code itself but it unfortunately does not run in my Chrome browser. Love the title of the game tho!

Developer

Hi Rasmus,
Thanks for the heads-up. I had a lot of trouble getting the Twine game to work properly after uploading on itch.io
I managed to get the game to work on my own domain, but only when I use Microsoft Edge. It's here: Nordic Game Jam: Pending (amandarasmussen.dk) Not sure what goes wrong in Chrome and Firefox, but I suspect it has to do with the sound macros, as some browsers don't allow websites to play sound unless the user interacts with the page first. I'll try to pick the brain of the friendly programmers and hopefully I'll find a solution! :)