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I’m glad it resonated with you. In retrospect I feel like the story was a little too rough, and the power fantasy section was a little too raw, but it was built in a day for a jam so I’ll give myself a bit of grace for that. Maybe it’s part of the game’s charm.

On a side note, this was written in bipsi rather than bitsy. They’re similar, but bipsi allowed me to be more expressive with color (it allows up to eight colors in a room rather than bitsy’s three), so I feel like the difference is worth mentioning. Thank you for your kind words, and thanks for playing~

It doesn’t, but only because I simplified the example in my comment. I’m actually testing based on a column value, and I probably should have called my fake column “id” instead of “index”. In that case, a little testing in the listener gave me a workable pattern like the one you suggested. For example, testing if a row with id=5 exists looks like:

if 5 in grid.value.id
 # ...
end

…which looks much better, but unfortunately, my actual grid is using a compound key. Consider:

t:insert page id text with 1 1 "frst" 1 2 "scnd" 2 1 "pg2" end
# +------+------+------+
# | page |  id  | text |
# +------+------+------+
# |    1 |    1 | frst |
# |    1 |    2 | scnd |
# |    2 |    1 | pg2  |
# +------+------+------+

And what I want to do is check to see if a given entry is the last entry for that page, which I’m doing by checking to see if the entry afterwards exists. So:

p:1
i:2
if extract where page=p where id=i+1 from t
 0
else
 # this executes, as page 1 id 3 is not in the table
end

i:1
if extract where page=p where id=i+1 from t
 0
else
 # this doesn't, as page 1 id 2 is in the table
end

Maybe there’s a cleaner way to do this, but if there is, I haven’t found it yet.

I found a bit of behavior I found unintuitive and wanted to highlight it, since it took me a bit of time to understand and work around. Apologies if this is already a known factor.

First: The empty list () evaluates to false.

But also: !() evaluates to false.

I think what’s happening here is that !, as a unary operator, is propagated to every element of the list. For the empty list, the result of that operation is the empty list. The reason this came up is because I was trying to test for the presence of a value in a Decker grid, like so:

extract where index=idx from grid.value

This returns a list that contains the value of the first column where index=idx if it exists and an empty list if it doesn’t. I only wanted to take action if there was no entry, so I tried to negate it like so…

if !(extract where index=idx from grid.value)
 # do something
end

…which didn’t work. So now I’m using my workaround:

if extract where index=idx from grid.value
 0 # essentially a no-op here
else
 # do something
end

…which does work.

I’m glad you enjoyed it! As discussed in the story, the patient’s transition was accelerated: what the character experiences in three months (and the player experiences in an hour) would realistically take a year, give or take a few months. Aside from that though, it was based loosely on my own transition, and hits similar milestones more or less in the order I experienced them. Thank you for playing!

Thanks for playing! The difficulty curve is something I hoped would land, so this is great to hear. Hopefully it doesn’t drag too much in the early stages~

This was cute and I enjoyed the characters! Unfortunately I think I triggered a scene out of order and couldn’t find a way to back out of a location I was visiting, so I ended up softlocking the game by going to the store after I’d bought everything. ​Whoops!

This was lovely, and I really enjoyed its retro aesthetic. It reminds me of an old Hypercard deck.

Thank you so much! I had a lot of fun making this, so I’m glad it’s been well received.

I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah, you got it! I used to write serial fiction, posting a new thousand-word scene twice a week, so I definitely tapped into that experience in writing the dialogue for this game. Thank you for playing!

I see I’m echoing several others here, but I also want to say I’m pleasantly surprised to see a C64 game in this jam, and seriously impressed to learn it was written in assembly. Fantastic work, and kudos for finishing on time!

Thanks for playing!

Thank you for playing, and thanks for your kind words! I wasn’t aiming at a dystopian feel, but I can totally see where you’re coming from. I wonder what kind of game it would be if I leaned into that atmosphere more.

I’m glad you enjoyed it! You know what they say, “write what you know.” I hope that kind of acceptance and joy becomes more common too; hopefully putting it into my creative works will help a little bit. Thanks for playing!

Impressive amount of polish for a jam title! I also liked your unconventional interpretation of the limitation. Well done!

So frustrating… But very engaging! I stuck with it until the end, so I must have enjoyed myself. Well done!

You found a really good balance between having enough gameplay elements to make the game challenging but not so many as to make it feel overwhelming. Great work!

I didn’t expect keepy-uppy with the Leaning Tower of Pisa to be so engaging! The earthquakes were a clever way to keep the gameplay from getting too stale, and I thought the ending was a pleasant touch.

I really enjoyed this game! Giving each lemming a different letter to dig through is a clever concept, and reading the letters out as the lemmings spawn is a nice touch. Great work!

Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed the story so much. As I mentioned in another comment, I ran out of time before I could polish the presentation to my liking, but I’m glad the concept still comes across.

I’m glad you liked the story; thank you for playing! I had planned to add sound effects, little “the other person is typing” animations, and clean up the timings on when messages appear, but I ran out of time. Ah well, live and learn!