Thank you so much for playing, and for all the words of encouragement!! I'm very happy to hear that you enjoyed the writing; as I've mentioned elsewhere, this is my first time writing anything of particular note, so I'm kinda flying blind in terms of style and feedback, haha. Oh, and the description! That was a good 2-4 hours of effort writing and rewriting that part to get it sounding just the right amount of "corporate jargon" while still being interesting and to the point. Hopefully I succeeded!
Thanks for the compliments on the character writing as well! Writing for an LLM is so interesting; nothing is off the table because the character has the entirety of human writing styles and experiences to draw on. Your idea about D.I.D. is a really interesting way of looking at the crisis ELLA-M experiences! I'm planning to explore both the character and the implications of such a character much more in the final release :)
The funny thing about the "TV show" metaphor (and the entire ending section of the game) is that the whole section was written in a little under an hour. I spent about a day and a half agonizing over several different variations of the script before trashing the whole thing in the last few hours and rewriting it from scratch. That specific section was created as a combination of getting really into the flow by that point and the sleep-deprived delirium. I didn't even have time to stop to think about whether that was a good analogy for the situation; it was the first thing that came to mind, and it was 4:30 AM, so into the script it goes. That was my favorite piece of writing in the demo, though, so maybe I'll have to try staying up late in the future if I experience some writer's block, haha.
I one hundred percent agree on the audio front as well! In actuality, I think it's more important to an experience like this because I don't have many other tools at my disposal due to the lack of visuals. There are actually a few different sounds in the files that I never got a chance to implement due to the time constraints: one for yelling and an unfinished one for whispering (the current default). I'm going to carefully consider everything I can do to add dramatic weight and tension to a story with no visuals, and the sound effects (and eventually music) are currently the strongest and most straightforward ways to do it.
Lastly, I'm honored that you like the idea enough to be willing to pay money for a full release! However, I'm currently planning to make all future updates (including the full version) completely free to play. One reason is because the game is entirely web-based, and I don't feel comfortable charging money for a game that the end user can't actually have on their computer. If it goes offline for some reason, what will they have paid for?
But the main reason is that I'm just happy to finally be able to share something that I created! This doesn't mean I'm never going to charge for anything I make (the necessity of food, water, and shelter remain a harsh, unforgiving reality), but because this project is extremely low-budget and low-time, it's a lot easier to fit it into time that would have been spent playing games otherwise. Plus, if people get interested in this project, they might be more likely to consider other paid projects I release in the future (which would be awesome).
...I don't know while all my responses to comments turn into multi-paragraph affairs. Conciseness has never been my strong suit, as you can probably tell from the game/description, haha. I guess I'll close by saying, once again, thank you so much for playing!! I hope you'll find the full release just as engaging!