CARROT THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR KIND WORDS, I'M WEEPING
YOU WROTE SO MUCH FGDHGFHFGH I'm so glad that the "apocalyptic" vibe came through (I was worried that it wouldn't feel quite depressing enough?), I really tried to build that sort of atmosphere, with the mixture of despondency and little rays of hope. (AND PLEASE DON'T COMPLIMENT THE CINEMATOGRAPHY IT'S SIMPLY EMBARRASSING COMPARED TO THE GAMES YOU MAKE)
Alab is my LEAST FAVORITE but gosh is he fun (and easy) to write! His office is also one of my favorite (and grungiest) backgrounds, I colored every empty beer bottle and dirty crumb with love and care... (I also did use the largest range of his expressions sdfsdfs I coded in a lot of expressions for both Ramil and Tala, but they're less expressive overall, so I don't get to use all of them *sob*)
I'M SO GLAD THAT YOU LIKED THE DREAMS, I was worried about them because I had such a clear and blurry image of them at the same time. So I'm glad that the dreamlike, surreal feeling came across well!
Your comments about the art and writing are too kind, you're sending me to an early grave 😭 Thank you so much *sob* I'm especially glad that you liked the NOVL, it's something that I didn't bother coding into my previous games but I was inspired by other NOVL-style games that I've seen in the community, and thought "gosh that's so cool and good for narration..."
Overall I'm so happy to receive this feedback from you 😭 because I was very inspired by your work while I was making this, especially your excellent use of narration and audio? I think that narration is something that I felt really apprehensive about using because it can be boring for readers, and so I felt really pressured to either communicate things purely through visuals or dialogue. But after reading OW and seeing how visceral and gut-wrenching and absolutely wonderful your narration is, I really wanted to give a try at making it a significant part. I think mine is overall a lot more dry sdfsdfs and boring, but I'd like to think that I improved! The audio too, I really admired how you used so many different audio tracks for every scene. Before I felt a bit hamstrung, trying to pick a number of tracks by "mood" and including a specific number of tracks and just matching the scene to the tracks as best as I could, but this time I sought out different music for every scene and...well idk if it was better, but it was definitely much more satisfying!! (Gosh there are so many things from OW that I think are wonderful that I want to draw inspiration from but I'm really not there yet.)
(GOSH WHAT I WOULD HAVE GIVEN TO IMPLEMENT A COOL BALLROOM SEQUENCE LIKE YOU DID FOR STLD BUT ALAS MY ANIMATION SKILLS ARE NOT THERE and I was afraid that it would break the entire game)
Thank you again for your endlessly kind and thorough feedback!! I'm really excited to release the full version of this project, and I hope you'll try the rest!