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I really enjoyed your game, it was so charming, sweet, and made me get a little emotional, so job well done. I really liked the cgs having the expression animations, that was a really nice touch that added to their impact. I know that it's from Nova's perspective, but my only wish was for a cg of the two main characters together at some point since Nova only has the corner sprite.

Really beautiful style and use of effects and transitions. 

I think it might be a good idea to write the ctc prompts in the notebook once it's been clicked to help when reading back the text.

The writing is really good overall, though there were a few things that were a little confusing that I thought might come back to have a little more explanation that didn't, and I think Maurice was a little left out to dry as far as fleshing out the characters, which may be intentional, but given his confession, I would have liked to see a little more of his motivations fleshed out. But that's mostly just a nitpick, as I said, the story was really good.

Great use of music and the backgrounds to convey the mood of the story. I agree with Too Many Teeth that beginning sequence is a little out of tone with the rest of it. Starting with a dream sequence is a hard place to start in general, but I understand it was a way to introduce Kate as soon as possible. Overall though I think the story is the right level of melancholy and  thoughtful.

I really like the story and characters so far, I can't wait to read more. The song your friend wrote is beautiful and incredibly moody. I know the character sprites are just placeholders for now, but I do with they were slightly less stiff in posture, so I hope to get to see the characters updated with your art!

I really appreciate you taking the time to play what I made, and to leave such a kind comment. I would have been able to finish the story if not for the camera's and bubbles, so am really glad to hear it was worthwhile use of time. I'm so flattered that you think that it is that good. Like I really really appreciate it.

I stand on the shoulders of giants, with all of the amazing tutorials and tools out there that helped me feel confident in doing a game jam at all, especially Stella and Feniks, and I am really glad I did.  And I did practice before the jam started, and boy am I glad i did or learning layeredimages would have destroyed me.

I have a comic that's set in the same world 10 years later that made writing the story for this game fairly straight forward. I might move that project to a visual novel at some point, as I had a great time making this, and it feels like a really effective way to tell a story. I need to focus on finishing this one first though!

Thank you so much again!

Thank you so much! Your comments are so nice.  I have another art show that I need to get ready for next week, but after that I'm gonna try to get back to working on this, with some more scenes I have written already and just need to program the cameras for. And now that it's post game jam I can add some background music I have previously written into the game, so I will probably do that as part of my first content update. Next time I am gonna have to pick out some fallback music before the jam starts as a fall back for my overambition.

Thanks for pointing this out to me earlier. Turns out there was a shader issue that my computer could handle but breaks on other builds. I haven't fully play tested everything, but  the .exe should be working on more devices and there is also now a web build that I am actively working on optimizing. I am brand new to this so I had no idea what I did wrong at the time I uploaded  it, or that that was even going to be an issue I needed to look out for, but I will try to keep making it better, so thank you for trying it either way.

It's very possible it's my fault, I'm gonna see if I can borrow someone else's computer , it might be  broken in some way that I can't see on mine.

I have, but only on my computer. Was it the win build or the Linux windows build, both seemed to work for me.

I appreciate the advice! Yeah I figured out the onlayer after a quick Google search but it was really annoying to attempt to clear every object in some of my scenes. I will have to look into setting more of them in config early in my next project or if I "refactor" this one, as I really had to keep going back because I missed one everytime, and I was getting weird variable glitches if I tried to use the Developer Screens too much.

The main issue with the bubbles is that I moved my camera a decent amount and I don't really have set positions for where the characters would be other than one scene, so trying to find default presets was only gonna work for part of it and I'd still be doing it by hand for a good chunk. 

Pretty much all of my troubles were self inflicted but I feel like that's to be expected first time out.

Thank you so much! I will probably be there asking questions as I always have greater ambition than my current skills allow for.