Hello! Writer, character artist and animator for Dichotomy here! (Sorry for my late response, I totally forgot about the jam submission page and was only checking the game’s main page, lol)
Thank you for the detailed review! I’m totally on the same page as you when it comes to the shortcomings of our game, haha.
On the writing: I agree that the dialog in this didn’t have as much going on as it could have. I think I was a bit too afraid that these particular characters weren’t gonna be interesting enough for players to enjoy reading through longer cutscenes of, so I focused on making all the interactions short and sweet (and unfortunately, just a tad boring/pointless). I was originally gonna explore much more into the ethics of the Angel and Demon, but I’ll touch on that later with the ending.
On the character art/animations: TYSM! With the characters, I loved designing cute fantasy characters, and with the enemies I adored creating weird and unnerving creatures that each moved differently! Luke did a fantastic job with the tile set too!
On the ending: O H B O Y, is it a rough one. So what Proteus said is mostly accurate, there was gonna be a final boss and potentially different endings. I was indeed gonna go in depth about how the two love interests had both messed up in their own way, (I won’t say all the details here, but there was gonna be a lot). However, it wasn’t time constraints that caused issues. It was about a week before the end of the jam that I heard there was a high probability of my animations being cut, which resulted in me phoning in the rest of my work. I didn’t want to animate a final boss that might’ve been reduced to a still sprite, and I admittedly was so cross about the whole situation, that I purposely wrote a very unsatisfying ending to the game.
Luckily, at least me and Proteus are for sure gonna work on a post-jam version that should have most of the cut content! Also, if you’d like to check out my writing at its best, we made a visual novel called “Get Into Their Heart” that I can guarantee is actually a lot more interesting and in-depth than Dichotomy (ESPECIALLY if you wanted a deeper dive/exploration on the nuances of characters in relationships). Feel free to check it out if you want, lol. Thanks again! <3