Thanks! I think the minigame was pretty much “how can I make a music-related minigame that I can more or less quickly figure out how to make in Ren’Py”.

If I’d been making it in Godot I would probably have added a keyboard shortcut to each string on the harp, but I didn’t have time to figure out how to do that in Ren’Py. (I avoided using Godot to avoid possible concerns about whether or not I could use tools I had made before the jam, and whether people could think I had used them even if I hadn’t).

And I’m glad you liked the writing. That was the thing I put most effort into, so it’s nice to see that that effort actually made the game better.

Thanks! I think poetry was what I spent most time on, both writing it in English and translating parts of it into Danish and Spanish. I haven’t even released the game in those languages but I’ve translated most of the poetry into them so that I knew it would be reasonably doable (it wouldn’t be fun to release a VN in English and then be unable to release it in the other languages just because I’d written something I couldn’t translate).

Thanks! The harp minigame was my attempt at learning to use imagemaps in Ren’Py and using them for something. And the poetry was my attempt at doing what I seemed to be good at (because I’ve noticed that when I write poetry in my VNs that seems to be what people like the most from them, so obviously I had to include some poetry in this one too). And then I plan to translate the whole thing into Danish and Spanish (I already translated some of it, but I haven’t released the game in those languages, that’ll probably be some time in November or later).

As a translator, I like writing stuff that isn’t easy to translate, and then trying to translate it anyway. So that means things like poetry and comedy. And yeah, I had seen enough poems and VNs about love that I wanted to write a VN with poetry about something else.

I tend to play plenty of jam entries in-browser, so it seemed like a good idea to try and make my own entry browser playable too. I think it might even be possible to play it in a browser on a phone, although I haven’t tested that, so I haven’t marked the game as mobile-friendly.

Yeah, I would have included voice acting and singing if I’d had more time. I also intended to translate the dialogue into Danish and Spanish (hopefully I haven’t made that too hard for myself with all that singing).

I think line 623351 (“I’ve heard stories of a witch going here and hiding a treasure.”) while not a bad line on its own, would definitely have benefitted from a bit more context, such as a line later in the story saying that the witch made the bridge collapse in order to hear the characters sing or something like that.

The shark has one line of dialogue, which you can see if you play a wrong note, but I guess you’ve probably seen it already (but if you do want a quick way to get from the main menu into to the minigame, its password is “33”). I might add a different shark line for those who try to play “DABF” instead of “FEDCBABC”, but the obvious pun to make in that case might be hard to translate into Danish and Spanish (and I don’t want to replace it with a joke about the translation process).