itch.io

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. :-)

That's a good idea. It's very similar to my current method of just putting all of my dialogue in one big Common Event and copying and pasting it from there as I develop :,) Thank you for the response!

Is this mostly for editing dialogue that's already in a pre-existing project? I've been searching for a while for a tool that lets me easily write and edit all of my dialogue in one place to later inject it into a new project.

If I make a game that breaks your computer and makes black ooze start pouring out fo your computerwill you be mad

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

You're severely misunderstanding a lot here. Interactions with other users are by no means limited on itch just because they're public, and they're a large part of the way many people use the site. The discussion posts feature exists for a reason. Your malformed personal opinions on private messaging really have nothing to do with whether or not itch can be considered a social platform when it's very frequently used as one.

There isn't a distinction between "users" and "developers" on itch, so I'm sincerely having trouble following the second paragraph. Uploading an .exe file doesn't bar users from leaving comments or opening discussion posts. Banning someone from a game's page isn't an answer to being antagonized in different areas of the site.

There's also just the simple fact that there are reasons to block someone that wouldn't necessarily get them banned. You can be harassed or stalked off-site. Someone can poke and prod at you in a way that doesn't overtly violate any terms of use but is clearly meant to hurt you. Hell, people can just get on your nerves. That's all enough to stop or at least hide their interactions with you. Just letting the site's moderation take care of it isn't a solution to the problems this post is actually raising.

It's supposed to be treated more like a modern-day mute feature than a true "block" feature, but it doesn't even do that well.

If I mute someone anywhere else, the whole point is that I'm not shown their comments or posts without actively seeking them out. If I "mute" someone on itch, it doesn't even stop them from showing up in my main notifications feed. I haven't seen any sort of blocking or muting feature on any other site work that way, save for maybe Twitter after already starting its descent into a Nazi-run cesspool.

You know, it's on me for taking the bait and replying to someone who seems to genuinely believe in reverse racism in the first place. Thank you for indirectly strengthening my original point by acting like a complete idiot while disagreeing with me. I won't be responding to you anymore. Goodbye!

Really squeeze those neurons together and I'm sure you can figure out why European fairytales don't exist in the same cultural context as the traditional belief system of a group whose cultures, religions, and people have been massacred for centuries.

Thank you so much for taking the time to play through my game and make a video on it! Like I said in the Discord, I added a downloadable file for content warnings that I meant to include before. It's in kind of a weird format, but I wanted to offer options to people who like to minimize spoilers.

I'm really glad you recorded this one. It's super interesting to see how different people react to different scenes. Everyone initially sympathizes with completely different characters in completely different ways.

It's such a strange feeling hearing someone cry because of something I made. There's a small sense of guilt, but it's oddly warm? Just knowing that something I wrote connected with a person I've never met before enough to move them to tears. It makes me sound like some kind of creep if I'm like "It was great listening to you have to reach for a box of tissues!" though. I hope you get what I mean.

I'm also really happy you liked the gameplay of the snowy sections. It took a lot of iterating on the same thing to get players moving how they needed to. I set up the first snowy map just to teach players how the rocks and the lights worked in a safe environment, but a lot of my friends got completely lost before they even found the first rock. For the other sections to make sense, it was necessary to have those basics down, so there were a lot of changes I made before and after posting. I probably flexed my game design muscles more for that one area than I have for any of my other actually-gameplay-focused games. It means a lot that you appreciate what I was going for.

(It was heartbreaking watching you grab the Power Pod .5 seconds after the timer ran out, by the way.)

I was acutely aware of the issues with cutting off textboxes early, and I made an effort to keep important dialogue out of any text you couldn't keep onscreen. In theory, anything that you might have missed could be gleaned from context. 

I get the frustration, though. There's no way to know you didn't miss anything important if you can't see what you missed. I want to keep the interruptions for the dialogue's pacing, but it's something I would have liked to have an option for. It'd be easy to add a toggle if I used basically any other engine, but navigating around RPG Maker's base code AND all the plugins I'd already included just wasn't feasible for me, unfortunately. If I revisit it, I'll definitely look at writing my own plugin to make an adjustment.

Thank you again for playing.

When I played Águeda a few months ago, I really adored it. The art and the writing were both fantastic, and they contributed perfectly to the dark, oppressive atmosphere of the game. I loved navigating the derelict hallways and rooms, slowly solving puzzles while simultaneously learning more about the location I was in. Even when I got lost, it felt like a natural part of understanding and appreciating my surroundings. By the time I'd finally gotten to the chase scene, I'd naturally learned the layout of the house well enough to navigate it in such a high-stakes scenario. It was very, very rewarding to me as a player, in terms of both the narrative and game design. I was very eager to install the demo again today to see how far it had come and show it off to my friends.

Unfortunately, I had to put the game down this time immediately after starting the chase scene from the original demo. I mean this with kindness, but I genuinely think the bats ruin this experience. Speaking purely in terms of gameplay, they are incredibly frustrating to play around. Their movements are so fast and unpredictable that they often seem impossible to avoid; this problem is exacerbated a lot by the fact that you mostly face them in three-tile hallways with very little wiggle room. Because of how the game handles auto-saving, it's also incredibly easy to get locked into a state where you're one hit away from dying and can't even hope to dodge the bats because you're moving at half-speed.

I think the greater tragedy, though, is how this hurts the tone of the game. The slow, subtle feeling of creeping dread felt like the lifeblood of the demo I'd played months ago. I adored the discomfort caused by the narrative blurring the lines between the supernatural and the mundane. Until the very final chase scene, the most unsettling portions of the demo still felt like they could have been based in reality; even the chase scene itself seemed like it could be purely symbolic. The bats, though, don't seem to be grounded in reality at all, nor do they seem to tie into Águeda's psyche. The way they decapitate Águeda is visibly overexaggerated, and this saps away the beautifully uncomfortable groundedness every time the animation plays. This clashes heavily with the psychological horror that the game is otherwise steeped in.

Besides the imagery, I think even the way the bats affect the gameplay itself really hurts the game's atmosphere. Unlike my first time with the demo, I felt pressured to avoid exploring the building or interacting with anything beyond what was absolutely necessary. Rather than excitedly look for clues and immerse myself in the story, I rushed through to the next cutscene and brute-forced whatever puzzles I could. It was really, really heartbreaking not to be able to experience everything as I did before because of this, but I just couldn't bear to risk getting caught in that loop of dying and restarting over and over as I explored. For this reason, I also had less of an understanding of the building's layout when the time came for the chase scene. This, mixed with the slowness with which I moved due to the fact that all my health had been sapped by bats a few seconds prior, made the chase feel borderline impossible. After the stress of the bats, I was simply too frustrated to finish it this time.

I really hope it's obvious that I'm only leaving this comment because I absolutely adore Águeda as a game. I've been studying the art and the atmosphere since I first saw it however long ago, hoping to take what I learn from it and apply it to my own work someday. I'm so excited to see where it ends up that I can't quite put it into words. I want to experience Águeda as the best version of itself it can possibly be, because I truly think it deserves it. I really hope you'll take this into consideration.

The fish designs scratched a really specific itch for me; I had an audible reaction to the ray, which is not common for me at all. I could see myself playing a much longer version of this just to see the different ways various marine life is mutated.

Once I got this game working, it quickly became one of my favorites in the jam so far. The art style is very polished, and I'm really impressed with the gameplay mechanics you managed to include using RM2K3. The characters all have a very specific "early 2000s RPG Maker" charm to them as well. 

My only feedback is that the endings confused me a bit. I respect when things are kept open-ended, but the cats are such a specific image, I was hoping for a little bit more of an explanation as to why they were there. It felt like I missed something huge even after getting all 3 endings.

Keep up the good work! I look forward to what comes next.

Hey, just so you know, this game doesn't run on some newer computers unless you manually inject RTP files into it after downloading it. I got it to work after following these directions, but I'd recommend doing this yourself for the released files.

https://moxx.net/articles/rm2k3/

Hi! I want to start by saying this is supposed to be informational rather than confrontational, and this isn't an overall review of the game. I was playing though the project with a friend and enjoying it for the most part, but we've set it down for now because a particular character's introduction made both of us a bit uncomfortable.

The short version is that I would suggest changing at least the name of the W-ndigo character. W-ndigos have unfortunately been co-opted and appropriated a lot by western media, but they are tied heavily to the traditional beliefs of several Native American cultures. This has been a huge problem for years that started way outside of you, but depictions like this tend to strip away Native Americans' ownership of their own history and culture; it's generally asked that stories about indigenous "myths" just be told by indigenous people. (There are a lot of interesting articles and opinion pieces about this written by Native Americans you can find around online. These tend to give more context as to what the W-ndigo actually is to them, as well.)

Interestingly, the westernized image of the W-ndigo is often so far separated from its original concept that I've seen people say just changing the name is enough. I wouldn't use this as a rule, but I think it's at least a good baseline.

The art in this one is really great! Using one location for a majority of the game is a really smart way to save on development time when you're hand-drawing so much. Of course,  it also works well with the main allegory of the game being the protagonist's inability to make any progress with their mother. Starting over so often was a little frustrating for me personally, but I think that's just how my brain operates when playing games like this.

I mostly liked the approach you took with the writing as well. It shows a very specific type of abuse (and a very specific reaction to it) that's hard to capture in art. It's a lot easier to just show overt violence as shorthand for child abuse, so I respect the depiction of the much more common slow wearing down of a child's confidence and wellbeing. Like I said, the symbolism of the frozen setting and the gameplay mechanics are great for this subject. My only criticism is that the exposition towards the end feels a little direct in comparison. The mother's antagonism in particular seems to condense down years' worth of verbal abuse into a very short speech, so we don't really get to see the sense of love or familiarity that makes their relationship so complicated.

This is really only noticeable because the rest of the storytelling is handled so well just through basic character interactions and imagery, though. You've already got great visuals and interactions throughout the game for most of what you're telling the player, so I think they could do a bit more heavy lifting than you think. (I also get that planning out a story that touches on such a complex issue, especially one that has to condense such a large span of time into such a short timeframe, is just super difficult for a jam entry.) I'm very into what you've made here regardless, and I hope you continue to develop games and tell stories like this one.

thank you for leaving such an in-depth comment! I'm glad the story resonated with you so much. There are a lot of throughlines i tried to include throughout the entire timeline of events so it was still enoyable on a second playthrough, so it's cool to see you picking up on some of those already. 

I did have an idea for a reconnection years down the line, maybe when the characters are in their 30s or 40s, but I don't know if I'll ever actually do anything with it. I think Addie is a little too prideful and obsessive to just let the whole thing go, though. She definitely tries to find out more for herself once she realizes Clara can't be the one to tell her. I don't know for sure how much she would actually discover (or be willing to accept), but it would at least come up if the two ever talked again.

I feel that if I say more, I won't be able to stop from just dumping out my entire writing process and everything about the characters rattling around in my head, so I'll leave it at that :'). I'm really glad you liked it.

Thank you!

Hi! If I'm overstepping or this isn't how you want the message board to be used, please feel  free to tell me or just delete the post.

I just wanted to let anyone who might have tried to play it earlier that my game, Frozen Forward, is functional now. There was a version that constantly threw up errors and failed to load a lot of audio + visuals, and there was a chunk of time when the entry showed up on the jam page but the page itself was restricted and inaccessible.

If you had any interest in it but couldn't play it for either of these reasons, you can try again now. From what I can tell, both the browser and Windows builds work as they're supposed to.

Thank you!