itch.io

Hi,

The rules say that at least one team member must have Discord, but there's an implication that the team member must also be in a Discord server. 

I was just hoping for some clarification as to whether this rule meant I needed a Discord account in general, which I already do, or specifically had to be in the server for this jam.

Thanks.

I actually wasn't suspicious of this entry at all until I saw this comment

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sorry, will add some controls to the page! I've had an insane fever and in my delirium just forgot to add

???

Thank you! We've been working on V2 for a while now too. It's shaping up to be about 4x longer than this version, so if you wanted to see more of the characters definitely check it out when it releases.

I don't know how often you use itch anymore, BUT I LOVE YOU FILMCOW!!!! It's so nice to just have a bunch of local folders I can scroll through to find random incidental sound effects as I need them. I think every game I've released since I found these has had something you recorded in it.

I'm not FilmCow, but generally speaking, the terms outlined here would make it perfectly legal to edit the SFX in any way you see fit. Later packs are also explicitly stated to have been recorded at super high resolutions specifically for editing.

Disabling HDR didn't really have an impact. I never specifically enabled it, so I'm not sure if it would have been visible regardless...? I messed around a little more with what you gave me, and I think I figured out what works though:

or alternatively:

Basically, as long as you force the actual lights to be the exact inverse of the ambient color like this:
...it will perfectly punch out a hole in the ambient color, hitting the ambience with the exact inverse of itself at the exact same intensity to cancel it out. (The default black/white of the ambience and lights respectively works fine for this, of course.)

Like the comment in the second screenshot says, I think what mixed me up a bit is that the default light compensation is 3, but the jsdoc says it's 1. I was just getting a little confused trying to get here lol

Thank you for offering your time! I'm really excited to dive deeper into Crystal.

Even with adjusted intensity, the lights still seem to affect the colors of anything caught in them slightly. ^^'

It doesn't look bad on its own, but I'm wondering if there is a way to actually, explicitly and exclusively cut a hole through the ambient lighting. I.e., I want to be able to color-pick a screenshot of the player and know definitively 100% I will get the same hexcode if I color-pick the raw sprite in my art program. Basically how a lot of simpler lighting frameworks (like Bulb) do things by default if you don't explicitly try to color the lights or add any extra effects.

Low-intensity spot lights can get close, but they still seem to brighten the image under them a bit.

Hopefully this image illustrates what I'm looking for a bit better. 

Hi! I'm sorry if this is really obvious, but I'm having trouble finding it in the documentation. Is there a way to do a simple "cut-out" light without any color influence?

Something like this, that just removes the ambient color without adding any kind of overlay of its own?

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"Start Active" doesn't seem to work properly, even in an otherwise blank tester project. None of the extra menu options appear until I've called the plugin command to enable them at least once.

I really love the art style for this game. Like a lot of people, I think it's what drew me to it in the first place. The use of the video feature, the sound design, the character design, the parallax mapping, etc. all comes together to create a really cool aesthetic. I love the weird hand platforms and really wanted to see what more of that world looked like.

If you're okay with feedback, there are just a few things that I'd suggest adjusting. A lot of these are just minor oddities with RPG Maker that I know far too well.

• The first thing I noticed is just that RPG Maker's default UI clashes a lot with the rest of the game. Mouse controls are up to personal preference, (I like to disable them) but the big mobile UI button in the top right corner really distracts from the art style. I encourage pretty much everyone to use a plugin that gets rid of it.
• The behavior of doorway events is a little inconsistent, because some of them are marked "Same As Player." I always like having their priority be "Below Player," so the player has to walk on top of them before the room transition starts. It feels a little strange to hit an invisible wall to go into another room, which is what happens when they're marked "Same As Player."
• In the same vein, when the player moves into another map, I would place them one tile away from the doorway instead of right next to it. That way, the player can immediately move towards the door again to re-enter the room. If they spawn on top of the event that transfers them to another room, they have to awkwardly move off of that tile and then back onto it to get back to where they just were.
• Also in the same vein, there are some things you can interact with even if you aren't looking at them. Riley's toys in the beginning room are a good example. I believe this is because you have events that the player stands on top of to interact with, which means they will activate regardless of where they're looking. If you set the priority to be "Same As Character" and move the event into the wall, the player will only be able to interact with it while facing it.
• The passability for some tiles is strange. It's noticeable with the boxes in mom's room; it really feels like I should be allowed to move closer to them. I would look at star tiles for certain things like the tops of the boxes.
• The save station is super, super cool aesthetically. The only issue is that you can also save from the pause menu, so it seems redundant. I believe this is a setting you can change pretty easily.
• The item description for the Wretch's key cuts off in the menu.
• Talksprites seem to blink in and out for new textboxes sometimes. I think this is when there's a specific transition involving the images fading in, but don't quote me on that.
• I got stuck behind the cat in the kitchen because it moved after I snuck past it and it sealed me behind the table.
• When you talk to Riley's mom in the kitchen after grabbing a bowl, she turns toward you for one frame. You can fix this pretty easily by setting her Direction Fix to on.
• The talksprites seem to be slightly offset from one another, so when characters' expressions change they move around a bit.
• Punctuation and capitalization is somewhat inconsistent.
• The songs could loop more cleanly. It feels strange to hear them fully fade out and then start again.

That seems like a lot just because I'm longwinded, but like I said, it's all super minor stuff that could be fixed pretty quickly. (I'm sure some of the issues are present in a few games on my profile too...) I'm really, really excited to see where the game ends up regardless of anything I wrote here. Good luck with the rest of it, and feel free to ask me to elaborate if I didn't explain something well enough!!

honestly just walk away, you're arguing with a brick wall who's done nothing to pass the time for the last ten years except watch right-wing grifter videos

What is "misuse of blocking?" How would you mass coordinate something using a feature that exclusively affects your own account?

Thank you so much for the comment. :,) This is by far the most "basically a literary journal submission" story I've put into a game, so I was really worried it wouldn't land. There are a lot of different micro-threads to pull at to explore Amias's character, rather than one solid throughline. If someone asked for a basic plot summary, I don't even really know what I would say. It's a style that's practiced pretty frequently in writing as a medium, but I don't know if I've ever seen a video game try it exactly like this. I really didn't want it to come off as a bunch of disjointed pieces of different narratives just being smashed together.

It makes me very happy that you seemed to have gotten what I was going for by telling the story this way, though. It's not just about Tulip, it's not just about returning home, and it's not even just about Amias's dad. It's about facing the past and dealing with the grief that comes with it.

I'm glad you liked Amias's attitude too. His temperament was really interesting to write, because he's simultaneously very emotionally intelligent and very emotionally constipated. (I think this is written almost verbatim somewhere in my planning document.) He knows he needs to seek some kind of deep revelation within himself, but he instinctively tries to guard against anything that might lead him towards that revelation too quickly. You can (hopefully) see why he would be this way given his parents' behaviors, too. Avery was written to completely contrast this; they're super open with their feelings, but they're not always the most sensitive or emotionally thoughtful, which pushes Amias to places (physically and emotionally) he would never go on his own. I don't know if he would have even gotten through one box in his mom's shed without Avery there, let alone go to the diner and think about the details of his dad's death. 

I wish I could take credit for the custom tilesets, but those (save for the dream sequences) are actually all from TheJabberwockysMaw. I gave him direction for the types of tiles I needed and their color coding, (there's a very specific reason certain things are colored certain ways) and I shifted around a few tiles, but for the most part he just sent the entire sheets for me to work with. The dream sequences were honestly a nightmare to get right, though, because of how weird RPG Maker's texturing is. I used a mini texture pack meant mostly for materials in 3D games. Most of them lose clarity really severely at 48 x 48 pixels, and of course they don't natively follow RPGM's weird property of dividing certain tiles into thirds and only repeating the middle section of those tiles in some contexts. I honestly don't remember how I got all of those working... I think in a lot of cases, I just made sure to not put certain tiles in certain formations. All the objects like the desks and the bed are high-fidelity 3D models I manually applied textures to then exported renders of. I essentially learned the basics of Blender for the sake of this game, which is really funny to say about an RPG Maker game.

I agree that some of my own visuals are kind of lacking, especially in the CGs. For context, this game was submitted to the jam it was supposed to be a part of around 3 seconds before the deadline, and I still had to pull it because there was a hardlock smack dab in the middle of it. The character art style and the awkwardness that comes out of it in more detailed shots are really the result of my own panicking to get anything finished before a deadline. Some of them even have details traced entirely from my own reference sketches for the characters. The character designs were actually originally meant to be a vector style more focused on simple shapes (i.e. Amias's head would just be a sideways square with elongated diamond ears, Avery's head would have just been a circle with two teardrops for ears, etc.) to give them a more distinct visual style while keeping them simple. This sped up the workflow and looked a bit cleaner for larger images, but it looked awful to replicate it in the 48 x 48 walksprites.

Walksprites are also definitely kind of a sore spot for me... I always dread making the vertical walking animations especially. Something I really like about Jabberwocky's character animations in False Fruit are how they reflect everyone's personalities and roles in the story, and I'd really like to replicate that in my own work at some point. I think everyone in WHO ARE YOU? is just animated to at least kind of resemble walking with no extra flair.

Thank you again for playing and leaving such an in-depth comment!!! I hope it's not weird to write such a long reply. I really enjoy talking about my own writing with people and hearing how they interpret it, so I'm happy you posted your thoughts. :-)

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I'm curious who you think the primary targets should be if we're continuing to push back against this. Stripe seems to be handing the blame to someone else in this statement, but I'm 100% sure they aren't blameless. (They definitely actually have the firepower to "fight back" that people are insisting you should have.) The waters are muddy on who's pushing who to do what now.

Thanks for playing! The criticisms are mostly things I've already thought about, but I didn't have time to adjust them for the demo. The final game is planned to have more art and environmental interactions in general, and I've already fixed at least some of the typos for the next demo version.

I want the more "gamey" sections like the dating app to be spread out to break up the monotony of just reading and moving around, though. It's not really meant to be a gameplay-first game that happens to have an underlying story as much as it's meant to be a narrative you move through that happens to have a few minigames. It's unlikely that I'll have more than one or two in the span that this demo covers.

There's a storytelling reason for the single dialogue options to exist, but they definitely need to be adjusted to make it clearer. It's not super well-defined yet.

I appreciate your feedback! I didn't think we'd get any with how late it was submitted.

Very cool! I used some of these in the demo for my latest game, Bloodsuckers. 

Only request I would make is to adjust the metadata so the songs have actual titles. Solely because I use VLC Media Player, and it seems like its playlist function refuses to just show filenames.

Thank you for playing! I was actually hoping we would get the chance to rework the way the dash deals damage, but it just didn't get brought up before PepFef wanted to release the demo. Right now it's essentially a small hitbox stuck to the front of your hurtbox, so it's very possible to end up inside whatever you're dashing towards. I think the idea was to not trivialize the enemies as obstacles by just letting you dash through them, but we're definitely considering better ways to manage that and communicate what the dash is meant for.

You are free to make this game with whatever engine you want. You entered it into a game jam with specific rules, though. The hosts have the freedom to create a jam with specific guidelines.

Hope you and your family are doing okay

Thank you :))

Thank you!! I really want to add more to it once the rating period is over. There was originally going to be a proper final boss fight and a few more levels, but you know how it is with game jams.

I love games like this that don't really concern themselves with fitting into a pre-existing genre or aesthetic sensibility. It's exactly the kind of weird I was hoping to see in this jam.

It was also just generally fun to figure out how everything worked and what I needed to do. I just wish time management didn't stress me out so badly.

That does in fact sound like you're not doing it because you're lazy

this page and the video trailer seem hand-made to give someone a migraine