none of the songs are anything I made, I got them off OpenGameArt, the names and titles are in the credits, and I’d also love to know the genre beyond “electronic” because searching for these things took ages
while I’m a little flattered there’s a million artists out there better than I am, and I do not have a gallery site nor wish to maintain one at this time
I have no idea what you’re talking about and assume the phrase “a scrawny wretched thing with weird eyes” must be something I assembled from whatever same sources you’re misattributing to a thing I made
I appreciate your detailed and thought-out response. I really feel I ought to have maybe made the content warnings more detailed and specific in future. Yeah, the mixed messaging is a problem stemming from me going back and forth in the “writing process” (2 weeks of mind wandering) and then having to cut out a lot of things that made sense leading to a weird stitched-together narrative that had one concept of a character doing a monstrous thing and another concept of the same character with a sympathetic background just not really clicking.
I have to be honest, more people were accepting of this than I expected, and I think when it comes to things like these people interact with a different headspace than reality. I don’t really want anyone to come away from this with a takeaway that I condone actual abuse of people, and this was in fact one of my biggest fears publishing this at all, uh, whoops
Again, as I think I’ve said before either on this page or in the jam submission page, so much of this would have been resolved if I had had any dialogue choices or other player influence over the ending beyond a simple win-loss condition in time for the deadline, but that was just not how things worked out, ugh.
I’m sorry this was harmful, though. I definitely need more specific content warnings in future.
Extremely neat concept, it’s just a shame I suck at rhythm games (I fell off ADOFAI so early in it’s embarassing)
I would probably need to spend time fidgeting with the offset options coming back to this, something seemed severely desynced on the version I played (downloaded instead of web).
Took me a while to realise what the vertical bar was trying to tell me but when I did it just made me more confused about timing.
However, as stated, me bad at rhythm game. Grug.
Gorgeous art. Music is good but looped a bit too often for how long it was being played, I can still hear Lil Jon screaming at me as I write this. Dialogue pauses were pauses for an excruciating amount of time; I get wanting pauses for pacing, but I'm not used to a VN deciding to take control of the pace to this level of an extent without having some sort of choreographed animation or sound or some other moment as the reason for the delay. As pointed out, I barely noticed the usual Ren'Py UI elements were even present (and I did have to make use of back a few times, for some reason some of the choices were weirdly hitchy and laggy and just decided to choose themselves, which would feel appropriate if not for it being one of the earliest options going)
The writing is phenomenal. Loved it all, including the ~mystery narrator~. Felicity sure is a character. (and I don't even know what I mean by saying that, but whatever he is, he is the most.) The coffee order nearly killed me.
I was actually kind of taken aback to see it end, even though for a jam game this already runs on the longer side (such is the nature of a VN). I would absolutely be intrigued to see this expanded upon somehow.
I love the character designs and the aesthetic at play. The actual game is sort of a hitching buggy box of parts, but given the whole life emergency thing that's understandable.
I love the ambition here. Good work getting a submission in at all, that's still more than most can say!
Ember's walk speed is so slow it makes shuffling between the shop and the fishing pier a bit more painful than it ought to be.
The actual fishing minigame is alright. I like the art and the characters in play a lot more than the actual game to the point I half-wonder if the fishing element is detracting from what I liked about the VN bits. Intriguing either way. Good work!
Thank you very much for your in-depth comment! I myself am not really sure how to feel about this contrived scenario I ended cooking up. It was a lot less all over the place when I had the wild idea for things like emotion meters and dialogue choices affecting the story and giving way more chances for Erx to go "wait this idea is not just morally bankrupt but also really stupid" and more chances for Yuni to actually apply any agency if things didn't go well. I ended up compromising with the worst of worst ends and the most anti-Erx end for winning, and, yeah, results are indeed mixed. Something that needs revision in future if I even keep the noncon/dubcon stuff at all.
I have been wondering how much things would improve if there was some sort of passive income of willpower over time just to stop things from turning into rapid shuffling back and forth. Maybe something of a more dominant stance kind of mechanic that affects how much willpower you get a turn and then making the cards more expensive to compensate a bit. Although I write that down and immediately see how that turns into a failure spiral quite quickly so maybe not argh game design is hard
I'm glad to see that the challenge of "do more than just bring HP to 0" which was one of my design goals ended up coming through, however flawed the execution. Some more potential there, if I can squeeze more ideas out of my brain about it.
Good ol' standard incremental clicker framework. Ow, my wrists, the RSI is already setting in again... Already leagues beyond the average clicker by having immediate graphical changes in reaction to upgrades. Also a fan of how things rapidly escalate.
Very ambitious undertaking. (sorely could have used an automatic outfitter or default loadout given I went into the combat mission with two characters not having equipment, oops) I like the idea and what's been made of it so far, and the art is fantastic. (Fluffy's music is also pretty good) Definitely room for expansion!
I got completely destroyed on my first go, then understood what I was doing well enough to win the second time. I thought the game was fine, but a bit rough (jam game, so it goes). Some extra sound effects for beating back the tentacles might have been nice. I liked the art a whole lot!
In a single day?? That's a credit both to you and also to the STG Builder, I guess, but dang.
I had a very hard time figuring out the player's hitbox, but still, as a basic shmup goes, I liked it. Graphics are decent, character designs are fun, and this does in fact have both the moves and the shoots. Nice retro sounds too. A neat proof of concept!
Woah. This is very well put together. Not super my thing but the writing was pretty decent. Got ending ... uh, 15/14, apparently. Intriguing concept. Nice work!
Anyway that aside, I like the general idea of this game but it really feels like absolute luck of the draw if you're trying to aim for a specific character. Maybe that is the point? I'm not particularly knowledgeable of the genre that is suggested by Fishing Game. I liked the hosts, and our hapless protagonist, too, though, but I will admit the game doesn't appeal to me mechanically enough for me to keep trying to roll the a different number five times at the mercy of the RNG.
The way food and drinks are selected felt a bit clunky (very much felt like a system cobbled together from an existing engine, which you did mention, and it's a jam so as long as it works it works) and switching between characters felt a bit janky too, given you can't switch between them while one of them is doing something. Other than that I liked the general premise. Characters are good, art is good, I love the vibes, and I did not expect being called a good drone to flick any switch in my brain. so I feel like that counts for something when I can figure out what that something is.
Great work! Also love the classical art reference for the cover image, and I adore the classic OS style menu theming.
Well this was compelling. Short and sweet as any good jam game is, way more customisation than I'd expect for a jam game, and easy enough to get through first try but not so easy I wasn't watching my stamina bar with growing fear.
The character art is cute, and the sound selection worked well. The choice of a particularly ambient dungeon synth track I'm less sure about, but that might just be a personal preference thing. Felt a bit too ambient. I know the genre allows for things that can be a bit more, uh, energetic, which I think might have fit things a tiny bit more. Again, maybe that's just me.
While part of me screams "nooo the poor 'bolds", the people must be fed. Well executed food service game, even if the folding rating had me fighting the urge to shout at my monitor at times. I liked the dialogue too. My first day was absolutely abysmal but I kept getting reasonably good ratings after that, save for a couple of orders I realised I completely bombed at. I had fun here! Art is cute. Perhaps too cute. ...the poor 'bolds...
Oh well, I'm sure they knew exactly what they signed up for.
I also took a bit of time to realise how to destroy blocks (for some reason I thought I had to keep clicking them and sometimes, when I held a click a bit longer than usual, they broke, leading me to think that it was in fact something to do with the number of clicks. Oops)
Extremely good vampire writing. Absolutely callous beasts of the night. I liked the writing a lot and the general gameplay loop was pretty easy to grasp after the initial hurdle.
I see potential in this but it does feel very unfinished (not having any sort of goal or any sort of tracking of things like blood or thralls or anything doesn't help this). However, from reading your postmortem I see that a lot of ambition went into this, and procedural animation is a hell of a thing to get working right on any sort of deadline.
I like the character designs and dialogue even though it was a bit of a dice roll on if you can see it during feeding. Sounds were also good. I would definitely love to see this further developed.
Very nice. Good art, decent gameplay core, nice scenes. Could do with a bit more feedback on things taking damage and the like (everything currently feels very sort of floaty, not sure how else to describe it), and I'm not sure if I ran out of content or not (beat Ms. Fin twice), but from what I could tell it felt like I wasn't going to see much more but some more dialogue (which was nice, don't get me wrong, but I didn't feel like playing through the entire game again for a few more scenes).
I liked this a lot! On the more ambitious side of the jam entries I've played so far and there's absolutely potential here. I wish I was better able to articulate what about the gameplay felt a bit lacking. Faster being-hit animations might also help? I don't know, I'm basically spitballing here.
Edit: Thinking about it, I think that's why people think the hit detection is weird. It isn't, it's working fine, but the hit responses, without any sort of graphic effects or sound effects to confirm them, feel a lot more ambiguous. Yes, after you're familiar, you can tell the animation is playing and the healthbar went down, but it just lacks the oopmh I'd expect from a game like this. Ah well. That's jams for you!
Wow okay I think I discovered kinks I wasn't super aware I had. Uh. (Well, also ones I did know I had and are usually things I never think I come across often but there we go. I appreciated the options to both submit and resist, for sure.)
That aside, short and sweet. Things were very dreamlike in how they progressed. I think I've found every ending (but that's not for certain), and I thought the minimalist art was extremely evocative, also sort of retro-feeling like others have pointed out? The heartbeat ambience was pretty fitting. A few more other ambient sounds would have been nice (maybe they were there and I missed them) but, well, jam, etc.
Ah yeah, text skip/speed was one of those things I just did not have the time and energy to get in before submission (along with volume settings). I did originally want to just have a next button but I thought that'd be too much tedious clicking on top of already selecting cards. I got feedback that the text was already playing a bit too fast to focus on both card choices and dialogue, so I erred on the side of too slow. Whoops!
I'm a little confused. Does the combat ever end? Also, I had to keep hitting Enter and Space for the combat to do anything otherwise it just stalled out, and I was never clear which of those keys were doing anything. Some instructions on how to play the game on the Itch page would be appreciated in future. I'm not sure how much of the game is there versus how much of the game I can see, so I have to rate on what I can see.
I can see there was definitely more planned, for sure!
I liked this! The aesthetic is nice, and while I can see where you wanted to put more effort in places I have to say just simply getting a game into a game jam is an accomplishment of its own, speaking as someone who failed miserably to do that last year and in many jams prior.
The time limit get-things-done-as-fast-as-you-can-while-unlocking-shortcuts-for-next-time formula is one I don't think I've seen as often as I think probably exists (although the only major recentish example I can think of that I've seen outside of other jam games is the second Turnip Boy game). I like the idea but the moving pace with such a harsh time limit did get a bit frustrating, especially as I was increasingly in the belief that I had to spend as much of the loop inflated as possible.
Full disclosure, I did give up trying to finish the game after getting the left-half of the pendant, mostly because I got stuck and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong after getting into the crystal room and not being able to interact with anything but the screen, and I couldn't figure out what to do with the hint about the observation room not being monitored.
Holy shit. I love this game. I adore the soundtrack choices so much, real tracker module flavour. Sound design is also great. The visual style reminds me a bit of whatever aesthetic they were tapping into for Invader Zim, and I love the icons on the blocks telling you what you need to do to clear them (although I was a bit confused by the cyan face blocks). Simple concept executed with great polish. I liked the interactions between captive and captor, too.
Sadly also getting the sky blue colour clear screen and nothing else. Using Windows 10 and a Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card. I also get sounds when I press controller inputs from a gamepad. Trying to run the demo of Bouncing Beauties, I do in fact see visuals without issue, which makes it even weirder as to why this one won't render correctly.
I have a barely updated gallery on FurAffinity (same name there as here) but I am duty bound to warn you it is riddled with excessive dark kink nonsense, fortunately they finally implemented a tag blacklist feature though
There IS a dialogue log button in the bottom right. Genius that I am, it's a blue button on top of a blue background. It blends in perfectly into the background. Things I'd like to change if I revisit...
