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Thank you so much! I´m glad that you liked it!

Your comments are also very welcome, they will be useful for future games!

Thank you for your kind comment! I have several projects floating in my mind, unfortunately I currently have very little free time so I don´t know when I will be able to work on them...

Hi! Glad that you like the game!

The dark garden is divided in three parts, you enter in the middle one and first you have to go to the left part where there is a garden shed with the crowbar. Then you have to go to the rightmost part where the chapel is and use the crowbar to open the door. 

The middle part is the actual maze, as a hint, the purple plants/bushes indicate the path to the left part and the red ones the path to the right part.

I hope this helps and that you will continue enjoying the game!

Hi! Put Mr.Teddy on the balcony railing and it will go for it

Hey! Thank you soooo much for your review and the video! I really loved the video, it was very fun, I loved the group of James dancing Offenbach´s Can Can haha.

I´m very glad that you liked the game. I have some ideas for a prequel explaining the story of the family (it would be a little more supernatural though), but I have very little spare time now and I don´t now when I will be able to make it...

I guess that you have already found Mr.Teddy. Have you checked Sally´s bedroom wardrobe after she´s gone?

You can find a few walkthrough videos in the comments below.

Thank you so much, I´m glad you enjoyed it! I note down your suggestion for a future update.

Hi, it is probably not a bug. Have you talked to Sally? After speaking with her Mary will go away (even if you haven´t been with her before). In any case you don´t need to talk to Mary to progress, she will only ask you to speak with Sally.

Hi ezg97,

I feel overwhelmed by your kind words! Thank you so much!

I am more than happy to help, however I don´t know to which extent my experience can help you as I have almost zero web development knowledge and I am  not by any means an expert in game making. Going point by point:

1) It took me about 7 months to complete the game, but I have only spent a few hours per week in my free time the first months, then during the lockdown in my country I was able to spend a few hours each day. I would say that if I had worked on it full time it would have took me about 2 months.

2)This is my second "serious" or full game, you my try "Kyrie Eleison", a platformer  that I published a few years ago also in itchio if you feel like it. However I have being creating crappy games that I never finished for about 20 years. It may seem a lot, but it was only as a side-hobby and for fun. I also made a Castlevania fangame, but was never published online.

3)This is a difficult question, I don´t think there is any "holy-grail" resource for game making but experience. I think the best way is starting making crap games and programs and building up from there. This is like playing an instrument, don´t look for magic recipes, just play and play until it sounds good. Learning a programming language (Visual Basic when I was a kid) was what helped me the most, also some maths can be very helpful, long ago I spent a lot of time trying to make an object orbit around another one until I figured out that it was extremely easy with some basic trigonometry.

4) I have never made a game from scratch (except a simple puzzle in Basic), I always used game making software. This particular game was made in Construct3, this kind of software do all the heavy stuff for you, so you only have to focus in programming the game logic (Construct uses visual scripting but you have to program the logic anyway). When you export the game you get a zip file that you only have to embed in the web you want. Other software I like is GameMakerStudio2 (although it needs a separate license for web export) and Pico8 (very cool if you like retro-looking games). Each of them have their pros and their cons. Starting from scratch will take you tons of time just to properly render the graphics, setup collisions, etc...

5) My workflow is usually quite chaotic :D  I start by developing an idea in my head for some time, then I sketch something on paper (in this case I drew the house and the house map and wrote down some of the key events) and start drawing the sprites and tileset (I use Aseprite for that). Next (or at the same time) I create all the mechanics (movement, object interaction, functions for handling events, text boxes, save system, dictionaries, visual effects, etc..). Finally I put everything together and design the maps and events of the story.

6)My advise (that you may have heard before) is: Start with something very small and simple. Even a small game can get overwhelming at some point and many many people (inclusding myself) end up abandoning the project because it grows too much.

I hope this helps you at least a little ;)

Thank you again!

Downloadable version is now available

Downloadable version is now available

Downloadable version is now available

Sorry if I sounded rude. What I mean is that your issue doesn´t look like a general problem or bug but something more specific to your system. If it is the case and you can play other web games here in itchio, the problem will be probably related to the underlying engine the game was built on. If it is the case I´m afraid that I don´t have the knowledge nor the tools to solve it.

In a few days I will release a downloadable version, maybe you can try it.

I´m planning to release it in a few days!

Thanke you for your interest! Is the game not starting at all or are you locked in the start screen? If it is the second case, sometimes browser games won´t react to keyboard input until you click on the game window a few times. If that doesn´t work or the game is not starting at all I would suggest updating your browser or trying another one. Many people played the game without this issue.

Thank you for your comments and interest. I could make a dowloadable version, but it would be a node-webkit package that would be quite big (about 100 MB, the HTML version is about 5 MB). Currently I am updating the game quite often and I don´t want people to be dowloading a big file plenty of times just for minor changes. When I have a more or less stable version (hopefully could be the current one) I will probably upload a downloadable version.

Thank you so much! It makes me very happy that you enjoyed the game and liked the style.

I´m sorry that you had to play in such an ankward way, I don´t know if many people are experiencing that, but from now on the controls can be customized to your liking.

The game had a very good reception so I am considering making more chapters arround the story of the Buxhaven family, but I can´t promise anything and be warned that I am very slow making games (this one took me almost one year).

Wow! That was a big one! Thank you so much for pointing it out, it is fixed now! The bug was independent on pressing z fast (but there was another one related to it). The inventory was not reseted to zero after starting a new game without restarting the whole game (facepalm)...

Again thank you all for the feedback, not only helps improving the game but I am learning a lot too!

Thank you for the video and your kind words! A lot of effort and love was put in making this game, and is still open for improvement.

Thank you so much for playing and recording it! I hope you enjoyed it!

I´m glad that you liked the game and the style. Many thanks for sharing your gameplay!

Thank you so much for playing and sharing your gameplay!!!

BTW I have already updated the textbox behaviour. Instead of skipping the text, the action button now just shows the entire text. I have also adjusted some collision boxes like Mary´s.

And yes, not the only one, but FAITH was a source of inspiration, I loved the atmosphere created with very simple graphics.

Thank you so much! I´m really happy to hear that you love it and that you are recording a gameplay. As a hint I can tell you to follow the voices you hear when reading the grave, they tell you where to go. If you need further help please don´t hesitate to ask!

Changed it! Thanks again!

Thank you for your kind words and your suggestion! I think it is a very good idea, I will take note and try to change that. 

Thank you! I hope you continue enjoying it!

Love them, great work!

Hey, thank you so much!

Nice game and art! I die a lot but is very enjoyable.

Thank you much for your kind words and feedback! I´m very happy to hear that you liked it!

The filter seems to be blurrier in some screens and resolutions vs anothers. Also I had put it becuse I like the blurry graphics of old consoles in old tvs but not many people share that view,  that is why I decided to make it optional.

The message bug was pointed before, I should have fixed it many months ago... I was waiting because I planned to make a major update of the game but at the end I had no time for that and I forgot about fixing bugs... my fault... I will try to fix it some day. In any case it says " You´ll never return the Chalice to the Church".

Concerning the chalice run, the advice I can tell you is to take it easy without hurrying at all, the screen shake, acelerated music and spikes coming out of the floor in the first rooms may make you run, but after you get to the Collapsed Cave (I have just found a typo in the room name) go slowly and don´t get too worried about the Demon, if you go calmly it is very easy to avoid his shoots. For me the Unholy Basilica is more difficult.

Thanks again for commenting! :)

Hi, I have purchased the set the other day and I am very impressed with it. In my case I don´t miss the attack animations that much, but some more villains/enemies. I think that an additional set with some enemy characters (i.e a couple more killers and some monsters/ghosts) would be very useful and I would definitely purchase it. In any case great job with this set and the previous ones. Now I have to look for time to make a game with it...

If I can make a suggestion for the new tiles you are making a piano and/or an organ would be very nice for mystery games :)

I feel very happy yo hear that. Thank you!!

Thank you again! I didn´t know that Safari doesn´t support .ogg, and in Mac I have had only tried with Firefox and Chrome where it plays correctly. I have now tried in Safari and yes, the music is not playing . For the sounds both .ogg and .m4a are there (altough some sound weird in Safari) but because the game was meant to be played online I only put the .ogg files to make the game data as small as possible. I will put the .m4a music files there when I update the game. In the meantime I can suggest you playing in another browser.

Again thank you for playing and for spotting this problem! :)

Thank you so much! It is very nice to hear that the game is being enjoyed! :)

Where do you get the 404 error? I would like to fix it but I can play the game in different computers without any issue in the music.