That was so much fun and so unique and layered, loved it!
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Writer's Block Deblock's itch.io pageNames and Email Addresses of Team Members
Mandy J Watson
Categories Your Team is Eligible For
Overall, hobbyist, technical excellence, best narrative (72 hours)
Comments
Awesome! Had a great time with this one. I'm also doing a lot of writing these days, so a lot of this hit really close to home, especially the constant "You need to write" in the start.
Really enjoyed the writing and humour across the whole thing. Had a good laugh at the short version - great that you can unlock an ending with only 2 choices! This also felt like an excellent take on the theme! the generative bits were a joy, and feels like something that'd be great to explore further. Well done!
That short ending option is because no one should be a writer. I am doing my due diligence and offering my wisdom, derived from life experience, for the greater good of mankind.
I'm absolutely going to experiment further with versions of the generators. I really enjoy trying out things with those kinds of mechanics.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad it hit home with so many people.
Fun and quick game that you can definitely relate to during a GameJam experience. The narrative was on point! I also liked the color scheme providing a paper feel to the experience.
Submitted
Escaping with ElonI hugely enjoyed the humour in this experience. Some of the procrastination antics reminded me of my university years and trying to bang out assignments at the last moment.
I thought the fantasy story generator was a really nice touch, and fit the theme well. I was impressed by what you got done in the limited time.
The clock animations were also effective at conveying the sense of time and panic.
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CaptionsThank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I was far more disciplined when I was studying. It's just gotten worse the longer I've been a writer. Then again, when I first started in journalism there was no YouTube and no social media except SixDegrees.com and the Internet was very precious and expensive (well, it still is for a lot of people) so there was very little online to distract people. Now it's all designed to stop us from getting anything done.
I didn't realise art people went through this as well, although now that I think about it it makes sense. It's always felt like a writer thing to me because that's what I do but, of course, the thing that you are the best at and most focussed on is the thing that always takes you out, whether it's writing or art or music or even, I'm guessing, coding.
My plan for the beginning of the game, before I got hit by the last-minute unsolvable bug that made me change what I was doing, was a lot more randomised (but with some choice by the player), which would have resulted in the unbillable hour count being a lot more varied and completely unpredictable. (I think it always works out now to 12 hours but that wasn't the plan - I was fully expecting some people to end up with a much higher count, which is even more true to life.)
I'm glad you all enjoyed making the story. Thank you for playing around with it!
Ha! I'm so glad it's resonating with people because as a writer I work alone most of the time and sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who goes through this stuff, although, over the years, I have seen people on Twitter make comments that have made me go "Yeah... that's hitting home...".
Today I crawled into bed without the coffee. I was working, it was going well (I thought), and then I suddenly got hit by a weird exhaustion thing, which sometimes happens when I am thinking a lot, that flipped off my mind (I think it might also have been that I hadn't quite recovered from the jam) and I ended up in bed for hours, frustrated because I was on a deadline but a total goner. So I feel you. Today was clearly a day for us both!
Awesome concept!
Technically the only issues I found were that it took a bit of time between the pages, and I'd probably have removed all the options to change your decision, it just blocks the flow of the story.
Overall you get 5/5 post office letters for the theme!
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CiviliNaytionThat time delay between pages is a Twine thing that I haven't figured out how to remove. It drives me mental. It's somewhere in the build CSS and I haven't been able to kill it.
I also found the options block the flow in some cases (I would keep the tavern name generator as is) but I intentionally kept it in to see if people would say anything and because part of what I was experimenting with in the generators was UI/UX. There are three(?) different methods I was experimenting with for presenting info and choices and wanted to see what worked best.
Thank you for the 5/5 post office letters!
Identified very much with this Totally Accurate Simulation, particularly the "tab you've left open for eight months and never got to" part.
A very good fit for the theme, and the generators were amusing, especially when the sunlight of the evening streamed into the tavern. Speaking of, the tavern names were really quite good. Might need to keep this on hand for DnD games, ha.
I imagine that Twine doesn't have the functionality, but some ambient music would have been nice. I also would have liked to see an expanded version of the generators where you can more severely affect the story (like the happy or sad ending option) on multiple points. And maybe a failure state? (I don't think there was one, but I didn't try all the options.) I.e. that some options lead you to a "didn't manage to write something in time" state, to introduce more mechanics? (If I recall correctly, Twine supports variables and stuff, right?)
Anyway, cool game.
Submitted
Therap-easyI have a tab abomination that stretches at least three computers back in time....
You can do music in Twine (https://mandyjwatson.itch.io/the-mischievous-thievery-of-jessica-the-cat) but I did not have time to do any audio. I had intended to, and even recorded some sound effects, but audio goes in the ambitious part of the dev plan, along with more art and not being waylaid at the last minute by a weird, inconsistent bug.
Sunlight of the evening, to me, was sunset - that last golden hour bit or if you've ever driven straight into a sunset (it's not fun, especially if it's also raining) - but I take your point. There's no failure state because the theme of the jam was to make things easier (and being a writer essentially is a failure state and any time you actually finish something in real life it's a miracle, including this game, because the bulk of it was writing stories - I really know how to shoot myself in the foot!).
Ideally the generators would have been more complex but as I noted in comments on the game page they were proof of concepts of some ideas I've been thinking about that I haven't had time to play with, so this is an early start on some potential mechanics for projects in the future. It gets very difficult and very unwieldy very quickly (I have some complex - in a different way - systems in Jessica The Cat, linked above) so my aim was just to try out some things and make sure that the basics worked. I'm particularly pleased with the tavern-name mini generator so I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm definitely keeping that as a side project to expand on.
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