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Let's Watch Steamboat Willie!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Voice Acting | #10 | 4.600 | 4.600 |
| Overall | #27 | 4.373 | 4.373 |
| Visuals | #58 | 4.662 | 4.662 |
| Music | #67 | 4.169 | 4.169 |
| Story | #103 | 4.062 | 4.062 |
Ranked from 65 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Content Warnings
Crude humor, alcohol consumption, silhouetted violence
Log Line
Two film nerds sit down for a comfy evening watching old movies. Next up is Steamboat Willie, and they quickly take to bickering. By the time the cartoon is over, one of them will be dead.
If you'd like to share your submission's devlog, you can do so here (URL)
http://A VN that lasts the seven minutes and forty-seven seconds it takes to watch one classic cartoon.
Team Credits & Cast
Cast & Crew
Voice of Lee - Juniper Lee Thalia Watkins
Voice of Niles - Josh Wells
Team Lead, Writing, Coding - Alexis Royce
Sprite & Concept Artist - May Sparrow / queenburd
Audio Director - Floweramon
Composer, Piano, Voice - Kayla Price / Rainbow_Cookies
Bass, Horns - Jade Decker / twigxcabaret
Drums, percussion - Adair Greysen
Mixing intro/outro music - Sophie Hissen
Copywriter - Victor Lownie / windienine
Coded in Ren'Py
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Comments
Really cool idea! The cinematography and animation were awesome! You really nailed the aesthetic! I popped for the Ouya lol Great job!
This is such a short, sweet, and to the point game with a really fun "time glitch" mechanic! The visual storytelling was wonderful, and the voice acting added so much to the mood and connection between the two characters! It caught me off guard my first play-through because I didn't notice the "quick time event" to answer the prompt, but it was fun trying to figure out what phrases would get me to the next route. Great work!
If you're interested, I did a play through/reaction on stream which you can view here! Thank you again for sharing your work (it's the first game in the set) :
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2288797684
Such a unique game!
Amazing voice acting! You went really hard on the music. I am just in awe.
Thank you for making this game!
Echoing the others here but this is honestly the first time I've played a VN with such deliberate game design choices! The efforts that the team put in here really shine through, so thank you for this fun experience!
Also as a musician myself, can I just chuck my biggest compliments to the entire band + audio team? They did not have to go so hard on the music but I'M SO SO SO GLAD THEY DID (i won't lie i kinda lost myself in the music and had to do another round to read the story lol)
Thank you so much! And I gotta brag on Kayla and the other musicians here; the soundtrack is dynamic, which means that for the bulk of the game, there are four separate tracks running! There’s a comedic baseline, two different semi-improv jazz tracks for varying levels of horror, and a track just for those killer horns! All of them were composed to work in time with the existing Steamboat Willie audio, and the game’s coding shifts the levels frequently in response to context and the player choices! Kayla one hundred percent vibed with the idea and listening to the music while working was such a treat each time. It’s great when you don’t even get tired of the music while bug testing!
If you’re interested in checking out the individual tracks, or want the soundtrack for easy listening, I encouraged her to put the soundtrack up on Bandcamp. Please consider supporting her over here: https://kaylaprice.bandcamp.com/album/lets-watch-steamboat-willie-ost
Oh goodness bandcamp with all the goodies!! Y'all are really out here blessing us with these gems >:3c
I've noticed too how seamlessly it just swaps as the route kinda changes and it's super fun to be able to notice it real time. This is an audio peep's (me) treat tbh, this is amazing work <3
What an uniquely cinematic experience, I liked it a lot! It actually took me several rewatch to get the good ending because I thought i picked the wrong choice the first playthrough and ended up keep picking the other choices the subsequel playthrought. But getting all the extra unlocked was totally worth it!
This game has a really wonderful, unsettling atmosphere. Well done to everyone involved.
Cheeky, fun, and incredibly stylish--really enjoyed this! Fantastic work, team!
Wow, I'm honestly very impressed with how well all the assets work together. The character interactions are fluid and full of witty sarcastic banter.
Though I have tried to find the good ending. But from the options given, I couldn't find a pathway. Unless I haven't found the right pattern of choice, so I may be wrong
In the first loop you always get the bad end, then you get the chance to get the good end every loop going forward. Always be defiant, argumentative, and oppositional to Niles when given choices.
oh thank you. That helps a lot
This is wonderful! I must admit I don’t really get where it goes initially, but the slow zoom out draws you in and you can’t stop watching. Excellent work all around (like anything you have released, truly).
Bro, it was so well executed *_* I was still wondering why they used the black and white color palette for Mickey instead of purple, haha. By the way, I like pizza with pineapple on it. lol. GG! ❤
This was fantastic! I watched it with my daughter and she loved it too! Everything worked so well together, the gui was crisp and clean cut, the video in the background going was super cool! Great job!!
YOU CAN DO THIS IN RENPY???
This game was soooo impressive, I truly loved seeing how versatile the ren'py engine is. You crafted basically a short movie in this game engine and it was so excellent. The visuals, the cinematography, the music and voice acting was absolutely superb! Loved the creepy unsettling feeling waiting for the punchline gah. I only played through once but i think i gotta go back for more and see if anything happens differently. So intrigued by this concept too, bravo!!
Thank you! I had a lot of trouble with the first draft of the script, and I had to refer to some troubleshooting on how to write a short film, which had some different storytelling rules from what I used to with games and prose.
And yeah, Ren’Py is amazing. There were so many places where I wasn’t sure before starting that the coding would be possible. And then when the jam started and I was actually able to get going, it was so much simpler than expected. 😆 I love this engine.
It's always a bold choice to make dialogue unskippable, but I can respect that it's tied to the movie in this game. I think you nailed some modern character archetypes in your two main guys, for sure. Also, respect that your game pulls from the public domain. We might share more than a striking similarity in that regard. ;)
Thank you! I broke a lot of my own personal rules for VNs while making this, including taking away so much interactivity from the player. I lost a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement a pause menu too, and it’s easily my one big regret. I’m fairly certain that none of this would work if the game were longer than eight minutes; even this is pushing it. But it was fun to get to experiment and see if the idea would fly at all.
And heck yeah, I’m getting yours downloaded now; I’m looking forward to seeing your adaptation work! 😁
Well, I let it simmer and have come back to it for another go, and I think doing it this way was really brave in an awesome way. Also, completely overlooked the MS3K vibe with the silhouettes before morphing into its own thing with a more unsettling vibe. The 100-year NDA joke about Mickey Mousing was really good too.
Thanks for the download and I hope you enjoy it!
Wow! This is so... cool! Amazing! The voice acting is superb too!
To think you can do that with silhouettes...
Thank you! I think that having strong silhouettes is really important for a visual novel. Our sprite artist, May, is really incredible with body language, and so we focused on having lots of poses, rather than lots of facial expressions. Though they did really impress me by adding mouths and eyes anyway! 😁
Amazing how they are talking about steamboat willie in real time (I can't skip as intended) and the screen moves as I move my mouse... Love the reveal at the end tho!
Thank you! One-location games are great for jams, and I liked the idea of doing something Mystery Science Theater-Style with these characters.
This is one of the most creative games I've seen. Never in a million years would I think to use steamboat willie like this!!! VO work and art is super beautiful! Definitely felt like i was watching a show myself too!
Thank you so much! The voice actors were both a joy to work with, and I felt so lucky that they understood the characters so well!
Awesome!! I love the art and the voice acting, a fun little play. Also I love Niles a normal amount.
Thank you! Niles is such a little terror to write, and I was astonished that Josh Wells was able to wrangle the bulk of Niles' puffed-up blatherings in a single take! That dialogue tends to end up being a mouthful.
yes yes yes i love him... he is so very handsome and a darling <3 :]
Excellent use of Steamboat Willie, and I loved the silhouettes.
You also get bonus points for the Ouya lol
Liam needs to get to work freeing those games, they won't free themselves!
I didn't expect to see steamboat willie this way. It's prob the coolest used of public domain i see and the voice acting is great.