Damn, my tiny cat brain just now realized that it's an actual review and not just a comment!
First of all, I'm really grateful that you decided to spend your time playing my game and writing this analysis despite this jam having more than 40 entries. It means a world for me right now.
Speaking in general, I agree with all your points about my entry.
The condition of writing and the reason the story stops so abruptly is that it's my first successful attempt at releasing something myself.
I struggle with severe mental issues (Unfortunately, it wasn't a joke) and usually can't force myself into doing anything for too long.
Even this month, I spent most of my time sleeping or lying in bed.
I'm very judgmental of my own work, and was able to notice most of the issues that you have described in your review.
The combination of these two factors is the reason I never finished any other projects, despite being in fandom for several years now.
I dropped last Maywolf, and despite a huge desire, ignored novembear(buck), because I simply know that I'm not skilled and capable enough to create an objectively good game.
However, you can't change anything in your life by doing the same thing over and over again. So, despite the game not reaching the level of quality I would call satisfying, and the story being unfinished, I decided to release it anyway. had a panic attack while uploading, but I guess I need to learn to cope if I actually want to create stuff.
Oh, actually, I have one point I can disagree with, some colleges indeed look like high schools inside. The story doesn't happen in the USA. It's quite common for small colleges in Europe to look like that. I personally studied in one that only had classrooms. (But I still made a mistake calling the classroom auditorium. thanks for pointing that out)
It was easier to find assets for the classrooms than the auditoriums.
I'm ESL, so my writing requires a lot of polishing. It's hard to create a balance between perfect grammar and conversational English, so I often end up using unnatural phrasing or wrong word order.
Marcuz and Luiz indeed can feel a bit the sameish at the beginning, Jane got much more personality since she's the group leader, and I wanted to show her dominant demeanor.
The idea was to show Marcus as a bad boy who actually has self-esteem issues, internalized homophobia, and all this shit.
Luiz is supposed to be a good guy who also always agrees with Jane because of her authority in the group.
But since they both eventually play along with her decisions (Mark just complains a lot), there is not much room left to show their differences.
The fact that Luiz is lacking his own scenes doesn't help it at all
In the next build, I'll try to concentrate on balancing their screen time a bit and Checkov's guns, which I placed earlier in the story.
Again, thank you very much for your review, and stay safe!