It's been so long since I've played an actually simulation game in rpgmaker.. I love those but it's kind of hard to find any good ones (or maybe I just suck at finding them lol). Anyway this one was definitely one of the good ones! I love the concept and considering it was for the IGMC made it even sweeter! haha
I'm also a huge gamer (and writer) that sometimes dreams about having their own breakthrough.. so playing this was a bit like a refreshing experience for me. It made me think a bit about how game-making might not be such a farfetched dream after all; sometimes we just need to go for it to actually make it.
I got ending 3 (feel short) but I didn't really feel bad about it, I kind of felt accomplished by the fact that I actually got the game out before the deadline. And I probably could have made it better if I had spent more time on improving my skills. I still had about 15 days before the deadline when I launched the game. XD
One little issue I had: Around day 30 I realize I couldn't write content for the blog in rpgmakernet, it had been a few days already but every time I tried, I would always get the message saying that I could only do it once a day.
Things I wanted to also mention: I thought that managing stress in the game was really hard, I pretty much used and abused of the glamour mags to keep it around 50-60 and after a point I just added to my 'sleeping ritual', I would use a mag a few times and then sleep. haha I would do this every day. It turned to be kind of boring, but I also didn't like that the couch didn't really give much stress relieve (and the stress tonic in Rin's store was always outofstock after one buy?). You could add some sort of bonus for sleeping earlier for example, sometimes I would only get like -5 stress.. T^T
I think that things like creating the credits page should only be available once, or maybe after creating it once, you should only be able to update it, you know? Or you could make it like with the game creation elements, let us work on creating the page little by little in two or three steps.
These last things are just my own considerations tho. Feel free to ignore them. XD
Ah! I didn't mention the dialogues and the art before, but I also loved those. The art for the characters was really good; and I thought the conversations between characters and the interaction dialogues for the game-creation/skill-improvement was really nice too.
Overall: This was such a great game. I really enjoyed playing it.
Great job and good luck with the contest! :)
Viewing post in The Maker of Dreams jam comments
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the delayed reply.
Thank you so much for the detailed and in-depth review of the game.
Regarding the blog post and the energy drinks, they are caused by bugs that I must have missed out when testing the game. I will fix them as soon as I get the chance.
Managing stress becomes pretty easy if you increase your energy levels and stay fit. Your stress reduces by 15 every night with max energy.
I will also make it so that the Credits page can only be created once.