itch.io

omg thank you for the kind words!! 

but also aaaahhh i'm so sorry! I didn't have anyone willing to playtest/proofread my script so I had to go in hoping that the acronyms would be somewhat decipherable... tbh though those translations you have do make a lot of sense given the context. next time hopefully I'll drag someone to sling sangria at to see if it meets the sinclair quality assurance (if there is a next time).

(is that "my bad, you're right, i'm a bad girl"? I don't think I'd make a good Sinclair either tbh, that's just my guess!)

That was really cute! And it's doubly nice that you posted a devlog of your process, fascinating stuff to see (though I think some image links are broken?). The main character and Lake becoming friends was a result of things coinciding in the right place and time, imo I read the former being open about their interests a little bit from being tired... really get a sense of a guarded person from the way they think.

GBF!! Okay full disclaimer I went into this with such a tattered memory of the source material that I may as well have not known anything at all. oops

Right off the bat the music and art are gorgeous! Really truly gives the vibe of walking into a royal garden. The writing does well to establish the setting even without the prior knowledge, I think... anyway, it certainly feels like it could be an event from the game itself, that little seasonal snapshot type of story that GBF/DL tends to do. Very cute!!

The art is very lovely! Like a pencil sketch on paper, blotted in some places almost like watercolours. The story is a little sad, and worth replaying a few times to see what I can get away with typing for a different response.

Oh wow, I really like how you used the image for this! It sort of felt like the narrator was leading the reader around one large fairytale illustration to tell the story, and then zooming out at the end to give the full scope. The writing is intriguing and nicely paced too!

Oh! Right off the bat I love the start button placing a cage over the canary, poor thing :( can't start the story without that, but still...  

I wasn't expecting that to end the way it did, but everything comes around. Everyone's a canary in some way here. Beautifully written!

i'm so sorry. she's just Like That. we can't stop her

But omg thank you so much! I had a lot of fun doing the art for this and doing little details like the window fog, hehe. I was initially unsure if the menu would look weird but I'm glad you like it!!

As I was playing this, I wondered to myself 'did they write this based off their own experiences? it sure feels like it' and looking at the comments after, yep, I called it! I think that's a good thing, personally, since it made it feel all the more real.

I don't have much to say other than to echo what Too Many Teeth said; this hits in a way that will resonate with most people, I think. We aren't psychic, but broaching issues and starting conversations like the one Rose is so paralyzed to do is not easy and not without its consequences.

But also, cute art and lovely music!

Aaah, what a sad story :'( the art is so pretty though! Somehow, you manage to pace it so that the roll ends just as the story does. The way it goes from one tragedy (mistreatment from the children) to another (the gradual shift to the vines) is so neat!

This was a really neat snapshot that implies and tells a story of a much bigger setting. I see in the comments that 1k words wasn't enough and yeah, after finishing this I was definitely left with more questions than when I started (and would play a game of this setting, even!). But it's still its own little story wrapped up with its own conclusion, which fits o2a2.

The art, music and prose are all gorgeous! In particular I really like how we see a glimpse of Clarissa on the reflection of her blade.

Oh my god i was so sure that no one was going to look at this the moment they read the fact it was a fangame, tysm for proving me wrong!

I'm... so sorry for Ryoshu oh my gosh. It's hard being Sinclair...

everyone involved here is terrible, i love it. jessica especially but live your life girl!! get that bag!!

the old lady's expressions are gold!! love her. 11/10 would scam again <3

Again, thank you so much for playing! Doubly so for helping with bug fixes/balancing/etc!

I've always wanted to make game maps that look pretty while serving their purpose... next step for these in particular would be to make characters that just walk by the roads to make them seem populated. One thing at a time and all that

The battle music only recently got delivered so that explains why I didn't have it out for .1, but it was well worth the wait! And yeah, having to consider things like pacing and refreshing the party (as well as realizing that locking the player out of a shop is a bad idea, even if thematically fitting) are stuff I'm slowly learning.

((redacted) jumpscare real. i needed some npcs to use as shopkeepers and he and Morgan got picked on impulse... i'm unfortunately quite fond of him. (redacted)-centric game one distant day, surely

Aaaaah thank you very much! (I got some mixed responses from the puzzle but ultimately everyone seemed to figure it out eventually, so I'm pretty happy with it, haha.)

I appreciate the faith in the aesthetic of the game. Roughs were all I could manage, but I hope at the very least what I have conveys what I want in the final version. And yeah, people did tell me the final battle was a struggle, so it's been adjusted quite a lot since! Balancing combat is hard, I have learnt...

Thank you for the comment and for playing my game! I'll work hard to finish this!

This is really good, especially for a first game! The pixel artstyle of the sprites and map are lovely, and the dialogue sprites for the two protagonists are very charming, simple but does the job.

The gameplay is nice, ramping the difficulty up slowly, and it's good that the game keeps touch controls since, honestly, I don't have the hand-eye coordination to navigate that with a directional pad under pressure, haha.

The story is short and sweet but leaves a lot to the imagination; it raises a question at the end (why was the altar room in that state?) but unfortunately the epilogue doesn't really address it. It made me lowkey think there was an alternate ending I missed and didn't discover some sort of truth to the plot.

The character writing/dynamics are nice though - Spark comes off as jaded, someone who does the job they're bound to and has seen it all. Maya is a bit quirky (please do not drink soy sauce like water in real life) and though arrogant, there wasn't exactly anything that challenged that arrogance/pushed her toward character development. With that said, the game is like 10-20 minutes long, so that's fine!

I hope you make more games, this was fun to play.

Yeah! In addition if you want to keep the glittering and fire animations, just enable stepping on top of directional lock - it'll make it so that it constantly uses the stepping animations for its direction, even if it's being interacted with.

Thanks for making it!! It was a blast <3

HELP IT ACTUALLY WAS?? our friend group is so chronically online oml

I streamed this to some friends and it was really fun! The general consensus was that the writing was very 'comedy skit' like. I'm inclined to agree; it's very well paced and had us laughing the entire time.

(somewhat spoilery below please don't read if you're just skimming the comment section and haven't played. go play it i very much recommend it)

Starting the game and immediately somewhat struggling with a slime that I picked a fight with for no reason was really funny; at first I was thinking, what, is dying going to give the MC a huge buff or something?
No. No, this dungeon's local skeleton is just really strong and unwittingly hijacks his place as main character. Honestly, Greg is so strong, who put him here, how did he even die. He says he was born in the dungeon but I'm inclined to think that was for comedy's sake. The way the entire cast talks bounces really well off of each other - doesn't feel like a holier-than-thou hero party but like a bunch of mismatched adventurers meeting for the first time slowly becoming friends (which, to be fair, is what it is). 

It was also fun picking out the various media references, from dialogue, right down to little things like the party's incapacitated sprites. One of my friends was asking if Greg's was based off of a mummified alien meme? Can't believe he'd recognize something like that smh

The custom pixel art/design is really charming and it must have been a lot of effort to do all of that in the span of a month or so. The music really catches attention though, it's really good! Especially the final battle theme.

wrt gameplay; relaxing to play, but well balanced - Sereda's healing is plenty strong, and having Recover means she won't run out of juice, so if it had to be it could be a battle of attrition between player and enemy. It didn't have to be because Greg and Rob hit very hard and have various means to increase damage output. No wonder why heroes die here

By the way, I think the directional lock was forgotten on some things, like the bonfire and the crystals. Very minor, you literally only see it if interacting from directions other than from below, just thought I'd point it out.

also i can't believe there's no fishing minigame. inexcusable. 0/10 (i'm joking, i'd rate this 5/5 if i could)

I tried to go for wacky but I just wasn't that good at it, haha. But an attempt at a romcom style of writing is probably practice I'll need, so it is what it is. 

Thank you!! I'll try to finish it soon!!

Never! (Half of the comedy hinges on it, unfortunately...)

asdfgkskf omg thank you!!! 😭 

ETRIAN OD- (i am immediately shot and left for dead)

Okay, in all seriousness; I adore this entry! I'm really impressed that you made an entire dungeon crawler with just the RTP plus the 3D plugin. I'm also more than a little biased because I loosely re-created my Etrian party in here, haha. (Also, regarding the images used when showing the character portraits on creation - are those upscaled with waifu2x or something? The artifacting is a bit odd to me, but it's nothing major.)

The classes feel like what they're supposed to, as far as I see - I used a Spellsword (big damage, and good trash mob clearing, very key to whittling down the final boss down fast), Knight (I feel like his very existence just soaking up damage warrants a spot, but learning smite and fortify all gives him things to do which is always neat - and unlike in aforementioned dungeon crawler game smite here actually does something instead of just chip damage), Ranger (deals good damage but nowhere near Spellsword - excellent buffs and debuffs that sync well with it though, and good trash clearing, too), and Cleric (Uh... heals, heals, and more heals, and nothing else until you learn judgement, which doesn't hit that hard and costs too much precious TP that I could be using on healing- it's basically what anyone who chose this class signed up for, really.)

I do have to say that the phantom boss in the first area didn't disappear after defeating it, which was a bit disappointing, but ah, well. Also, I initially tried playing this with controller, but there doesn't seem to be a button bound to confirm? (Which is fine, I have a working keyboard, so no big deal.)

I have to admit that the first mimic I encountered oneshotting 3/4 of my entire party with arrow rain before I could do anything was kind of unexpected but slapstick comedy levels of hilarious, so even if you didn't intend it you get a comedy rating for that. I sort of panicked before realizing that it just... didn't do anything but spam heal after that? So I had the knight beat it to death with smite. Haha... that's not going to stop me from opening everything, though.

I could have made the tile puzzle easier for myself by marking all of the tried tiles in an image editing program or something... I did not and suffered through it as god intended 10/10

Thank you!! I won't be able to finish it in time for the judging period, but it is what it is, I suppose.

But omg thank you for pointing out those collision issues?! I realize now that it's because I added that tileset but didn't mess with the collisions manually (sob) lesson learned...

Admittedly, the big scale of the kingdom was me using RTP for the first time and going 'ooh, how do I use this asset/layering/etc? and then getting incredibly carried away. But I'm glad it worked out!

Aww this was really fun! Echoing the creative use of the RTP, using the title images as map assets (and the usage of the castle) was really neat. The drawn CGs are really nice (your artstyle is very cute!) and the story was very funny.

Mmm... kinda want to make mango graham now.

Thank you very much for the long comment and the concrit, I really appreciate it! I'm really glad you found the presentation in particular to be great.

A lot of the things here, were things I wanted to address had I finished the game in time, but alas (I had been intending to play with the battle system, but just didn't have it in me, haha!)

formally apologizing for the masterpiece of all time smh. 10/10 crying from laughter. couch best alien

Out of curiosity, where does one go to find the minigame?

aaa thank you!! I feel like the writing isn't as funny as the other entries in this jam :< hopefully I can salvage it for when I finish the rest...

I'm glad the maze wasn't too bad (i threw it at a playtester and they told me to colour code it haha...)

This had me giggling the entire time, but also damn... the Reids are making me want to go buy milk.

Very lovely overall! The tutorial felt natural, esp with how it was framed and with the 'i just work here buddy' vibe Boss gives. All of the customers were endearing in their own way, and the last client... love them, absolute peak

also: quasooooooooooooo

There's a neutral ending you get for failing to get into a route, and there's a bad and good ending for each route, totalling to 5 endings :)

Okay, I got around to playing all of it today and afterward cracked open the files out of curiosity (hope you don't mind) and LMAOOO. In response to the commented out lines, I would argue that you guys added a tsun in the form of Nenette, does she count. Either way, peak

I think it's really funny you guys picked up that unintentional otome isekai trope in (redacted for spoilers) and in turn meant editing the name tag used to match the internal one (their name was meant to be mispelled because she was initially one of the 'vague references to other media' that I had dropped in, but this is better)

You guys also sticking to using 'clod' consistently is funny because whilst you could argue that 'clau' is one letter away from being a clar typo but actually? The reason her internal name is like that? i was thinking of clodsires at the time. yeah. don't think about it

(redacted)'s 'bad' end has always been my favourite ngl but that doesn't mean the fix made it worse, I think it's perfect. Sweet and in character. still insane. My belorbed... never change (I adore that you made him so obviously smarter than everyone else. Chev, you dumbass)

And speaking of Chev I didn't pay him much mind originally because he was supposed to be a rushed, mis-paced route, picking fun of how some OI just... does that. But you guys fixed him and made the pacing much better!

And whilst I say I played all of it today I didn't realize there was an ending that involved all three of them! Gotta get that, stat, haha. Also really like how you guys cleaned up my messy code (first renpy project pls understand) and you made checks for study and status as appropriate, good stuff.

Again, thank you for picking this up! Really giddy seeing it real and live, lol.

Oh my god I- I'm laughing and crying rn this is so good what the heck. Thank you guys for turning my jam-induced fever dream into an actual readable VN oh my GOD

I love that you guys added a lot to my old text! And that you adjusted a lot of the options so that they flow a lot better! The art slaps, the new expressions are a lot more lively (big fan of Claudia's annoyed face, and I'm doubling over that the bleed sprite is called out) and you actually added music and sound design! I'm laughing the entire time playing this game what the hell

Shoutout to the addition of a OG MC route (and the added parts in general are so good) but I'm laughing. Remade version Nenette my beloved

Omg thank you!! I'm really glad you enjoyed the demo. Thank you for taking the time to check for the two leads' silly conversations throughout the place :D

Thank you very much for the detailed comment, I'm glad that you enjoyed the game so far! These two were really fun to write and I hope to keep that sass between them fairly consistent throughout their dynamic :D

The current puzzles are meant to serve as a tutorial for basic mechanics, I hope the full game won't disappoint with the puzzles that are planned - the intention was to have the chat function serve as a possible hints section but it wasn't quite conveyed since there was only one area after getting the second party member, hahah.

I'll be sure to work on improving and polishing the game for the final release!

You don't like my 10 minute backgrounds drawn with a 17px default brush, and my epic plot threads that come so out of nowhere that they basically don't make sense are super surprising? :<

Jokes aside, lmao thanks! Don't know if I'll ever revisit this but we'll see.

If I got a nickel every time I read an otome isekai manga/manhwa that pulls 'actually I was a good guy all along but just wasn't allowed basic communication of the situation to my fiancee' out of nowhere I would have way too many nickels

Thank you!!!

Haha, thank you! Yeah MC is a mood fr fr

I've got a lot of other things on my plate at the moment (other otome projects) but I dunno. maybe, you never know!

Thank you so much for playing my silly game!! And doubly so for telling me your thoughts!!!

Yep, you're 100% on the mark for thinking he was the yandere. I'm unsure if it was clear, but at the decision where he prompted the player to return to the dorms, he was testing her - and taking the bait results in missing his route. He's a very dedicated yan :^)

I'm really glad you say the game is good! This game was a little rushed, admittedly, and mostly hinges on playing tropes from villainess media, so to hear that regardless of it makes me happy. If I had more time or was making this seriously rather than for a joke game jam, I think developing the characters further would have been fun. Alas (currently pre-occupied with other actual otome projects so I most likely won't expand this one)

Clarence's ball ending is my favourite, personally :D but yeah, for a guy that the MC literally refers to as 'fuckface', yeah... that checks out!

I haven't played all of them yet because time but the ones that stood out to me so far!!

https://dollcorp.itch.io/a-story-about-love: Best writing! Shitpost-tier visuals (still very lovely. i hope mark brown laughs at his 'sprite' if he ever sees it) but an overall great read that practices what it preaches. But is it really a bad game...

https://knickknackpj.itch.io/notlikeothervns: Definitely 'worst' game ever, and it knows it (it takes more effort to take built-in QoL out than to leave it in...) Truly simulates the feeling of pure agony. I dread re-opening it to continue playing because I just know Violet will give me 2048 again, leaving me with no choice but to force close and lose my loop progress :(

https://glueblade.itch.io/worstvn: Based writing I hope all of these angels and demons live their best life. I don't want to live in a world where angels aren't yaoi enthusiasts

https://omegabutton.itch.io/hilltop-academy: The greatest soundtrack of all time and the best gameplay loop ever, clearly

https://flufffables.itch.io/thirsty-for-you: Hot-leaf juice route, my beloved... (i accidentally rated this good because I liked it but forgor that the creator appreciated low ratings. oops)

https://cloudrac3r.itch.io/snail-society: The realization that this was a powerpoint file alone killed me. And that it looks like a vn...peak