Oxy!!! Thank you for playing it and for these words!!! Your attention to detail never fails to amaze me haha. Out of everything you said I love that you noticed the "I'm here!" note on the wall haha. There's so many silly things we add in as devs when it's late and we're tired and I'm just trying to fill a damn wall with apocalypse scribbles and thinking about the real world people who would write these things and it feels SO cool that these things are noticed in some way.
Stacy.O was so nice to work with!! I feel so grateful he reached out, he does like really professional stuff haha. It's pretty cool. I'd throw feelings and vibes and plot outlines at him and he come back with the coolest sci-fi noises I'd ever heard and I vividly remember like sitting up at my desk and being like "ah shit I gotta up my game" haha. Time to step it up!! And I feel fairly chuffed with how it turned out. This one was a doozy and WILDLLLLLDDDDDDDD to program. You know it's all one ONE map?? with just events? I had 0 tilesets in the game which was so strange haha. Just a blank map with a few rows of events I had stacked up to keep track of the different chapters (Also - so funny, I 100% also called it a bunker, bunker is perfect word haha that's the word I used to label all the pics from that area, literally couldn't be more correct in your assumption). It felt so strange every time I opened the project I'd have this quiet moment of panic that it looked like nothing was done but it was of course, a whole ass game. Just rows and rows of show image and move images haha. Felt very inspired by you actually for good chunks of it and how you did Seabound! I thought about the layers and the movement of the screens a lot while picturing how I wanted it to feel.
Also!! so funny about the text boxes haha you'll laugh at me, I had to manually hit space bar and line them up. RPG maker is insane for how it does text box alignments there's just no way to align them I guess. I never thought about how it would slow down going through them, I wonder if it counts all my spaces as individual characters. I sincerely never noticed!! I'll have to fiddle with that and see if I can find a nicer solution.
I should write more romance stories you're right! They're very fun. I struggle with them in short form I think? Just planning them out the pacing and the build idk I get too in my head about it, so that's why I do avoid them a bit for jams haha. But for my Big Project that Definitely Exists it's going to be a romance and that's exciting.
And speaking of my big project that definitely exists, fun fact, the main characters name is Hope. So hearing you mention how that felt at the core of this made me smile <3 Gotta have Hope, no matter what.