itch.io

I totally agree here! I'm actually going to wait a bit before I read the new manual, as the decoding process you mention is such a pleasure of the experience.

Oh this is lovely! I've been thoroughly enjoying this game (and perhaps sinking too much time into it with my morning coffee each day).

Having a guide will be a great help but I've also been loving how the game gently teaches you these systems through trial and error. It's been really pleasing to feel each of my cities get iteratively better as I understand the systems. (Maybe I'll wait a bit longer before reading the manual after all...) 

It is true, becoming a poet may very well cause personal injury..... I do love how you tie this one together at the end.

Thanks for playing!

I'm touched! I want to print out this comment and keep it in my wallet. :)

guess we've got good taste

I love that CentoQuest got to stow away in your browser for so long, like having a little squirrel nest in your attic.

I love this dangerous early-spring love poem you've made here - kind of like a surprise volunteer seed popping up of an unknown variety, just as summer begins to warm up.

love it. clean (well, gooey) and effective.

oooh it's so good to finally be giving this a play! i'm terrible at it, yet it still feels fun to keep striving, and your sound/feedback is tuned in way that feels very pleasing. 

oh this rules. the control scheme is really intuitive, and it also does a great job of making me overthink how i'm using my own fingers. it felt stranger and stranger, and a few times I even thought "wait that can't be the right number of fingers???" 

great unity of visuals/mechanics/experience!

The screenshot and title really piqued my curiosity! Unfortunately my computer couldn't ever load past the title screen. I'll come back and check it out again later to see if things have changed!

I think it's very effective framing to describe the other selves as how they're seen by yet another person -- it activates not just the wistful "oh I could have lived other lives" but also the "oh, there's so many strangers who intimately know other versions of me"

Artfully infuriating and impressive in its efficiency! I feel like this is a great little capsule of a game poem, and one I'd like to save to show some students down the road.

(also i love your little noises, great job)

I loved this. The patience is very well tuned, and finding a moment of contact is ecstatic. 

That makes total sense! Looking forward to coming back after your update!

Lovely pacing, and the breath is a great signal to the player at how slowly you'd like them to move through the piece.

[I kept getting stuck on a solid brown screen after the waves portion, but I could also still keep triggering breath on that screen -- not sure if that's intended, but I did like the effect, as if it was now entirely my responsibility to take care of my breathing pace after learning from the visuals.]

truly engrossing to watch the writhing semblance of life on my screen

love that moment of reflection, right before the screen splits. I lingered awhile there to look eye to eye with my other before moving on!

love the way that this emphasizes the process of  composition over the delivery of output! what initially feels like overly constrained options becomes clear texture of the poem itself. I'm really glad you chose to end it the way you did.

~~~~~

A technical note - I think I hit a glitch on the screen that I've linked here, as it kept adding more "Imagine it ______, though" without giving me an option to continue. Reloading the webpage fixed the issue, but just a heads up. Frankly I thought it made for an interesting effect, but probably not an intentional one since I was temporarily locked there.

the pleasures of stumbling into the little meta social spaces popping up around flash games in the past. appreciated both the argument and the preamble here.

I think the sprites are really lovely here. I wandered and purged for a while, felt contemplative about it. Never made it to the screen where the grass is golden and the beasts are green, but that's okay.

restful (for me, less so for my cat in the room)

love the sound design, terrified by the appearance of the enemy hunter

ooooh this is NEAT

I love the glamour convention! It's a great little mechanical risk to each scene, and I like imagining how moments would branch out and get increasingly complicated on a failure.

great tunes, a close slow dance with the square is a challenge

i love these chubby little pikmin, who look a bit like maybe they've had some species intermingling with sonic adventure chao.

Selecting a single cigarette attached to a specific year is such a great framing device for these flash fiction pieces. It was a good first nudge for me to reach each story closely, to search for (and find!) even more slivers of connection between them.

Nice work with the drink-making menu! I was excited every time I got to see a uniquely shaped glass - it made me want to make a whole bunch of drinks right at once!

Really lovely art and concept here - I'm especially impressed with how much detail you packed into the background while still allowing the character to clearly pop on the screen!

(one small note on my playthrough - it looks like the field widgets in your tutorial section are currently unlocked, so it's still possible for players to edit the text within those cards. Doesn't look like that's the case in the rest of the game though!)

Oh yeah! The whole thing is past the fence!

ooh, those first three lines after the title work so well! 

(I'm tickled you found the comments in there too, one of those silly things where I thought "man nobody is going to even bother seeing this...")

Ooh, this is great. The whole doodly aesthetic works well, it feels a bit like drawing out a little battle in your notebook with the kid next to you in class. The sidequest is a great incentive for poking around/appreciating the margin art too. (The sound effects are great, btw! Little mouth sounds are perfect for this kind of thing.)

I also made a few wrong choices but I'm glad I did - as it's a pleasure to see unique text for handling errors, rather than an immersion-breaking failstate. It reminds me of wanting to try all the weird/wrong answers/combos in the Ace Attorney series just to see what folks will say.

Love a deck with a good text speed menu (and test dialogue!) It's clear that a lot of time and attention has gone into the presentation/pacing/feel of the whole thing. Excited to see how this continues to develop, and hopefully all the great infrastructure you've built here pays off as the project grows!

the "erogenous scrapheap" is very good, will be keeping that phrase with me for a while

Very cool, and I'm impressed with the clarity of some of your little flourishes -- capital C and G are my faves! 

(I guess I also need to play Alundra now, as I hadn't heard of it before and the manual you linked is a beauty.)

The dithering really helps it feel like I'm hunting for something that's just a little *off* on each card, which fits the narrative perfectly.

Thank you for playing (and for following along with some of the production). I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it again: none of this would be possible, nor the groundwork for some of the tricks I managed to figure out myself, without Phinxel's Phield Notes!!! 

I don't know much about the history of paper dolls, but I wouldn't be surprised! The English toy theatres emerged from prints that were originally souvenirs of live theatre productions (you could take home an engraving of your favorite actor in their role). https://www.britannica.com/art/toy-theatre

I know that Pollock's also sold some wooden dolls in the same catalogue I scanned as these toy theatres - I'd love to track down more of these catalogues and do some more digging.

I'm also woefully under-informed about kamishibai, a similar kind of paper puppet theatre that emerged in Japan at about the same time (if not earlier). It's something I need to learn much more about as I continue this project!

(https://u.osu.edu/manga/kamishibai/)

Great idea & execution here, and works especially well alongside your essay you linked in the description. Having to hoof it around the fence feels essential to the whole thing, it's a good touch.