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Download for free: https://eko-dev.itch.io/turnaround

You wake up somewhere cold and unfamiliar... a man you don't recognize stands before you.

"Don't you remember me?"

Turnaround is a short puzzle game about escaping the house of your kidnapper.  Find items to break out while avoiding capture using hiding spots. With 6 normal endings and 1 true end, can you make it out alive?

...one more time.

After putting it off for so long for no particular reason... I'm finished. Hopefully. I'm only waiting for my tax forms to be accepted so I can recieve donations in case anyone is kind enough to do so.

This project was supposed to be something short, but ended up taking for longer than intended... partially because I don't work on it as often and as much as I should, partially because I wasn't satisfied with what I had so kept redoing things several times. I'm still not completely happy, but at some point, enough has to be enough. I can't wait to finally be rid of this thing so I can go back and work on my real project, haha.

In any case, I can at least say I actually created a full game and brought it to completion! So that has to be worth something, whether anyone ends up playing it or not. Or if it's good or not. I still have something to be proud of. :) And I proved I could do it. And that's what matters the most!

Been a while... I've still been working on the game, but Baldur's Gate 3 is very distracting. In any case, the game is more or less done, and I'm merely in the stage of focring my friends and family to play it to get feedback and see if they discovered any bugs I missed. Now I'm working on implementing the feedback I got, such as adding alternative control schemes and also adding a marker that helps the player knows which places can be used to hide in.

Aside from that, I rewrote almost all dialogue in the game and changed a part of the game to make more logical sense, plus added some ambiant music for when you're wandering around the house. I tried adding footstep sound effects, but I didn't like how it came out, so I removed it. 

Well, it's been a while... I got distracted by playing video games. 😓 But now I'm back on the grind, working out the last small details. I neded up creating a new song for the main menu because I realized the old one didn't fit... oops. But I think I'm reaching the stage where I'll be mostly satisfied.

I've also gone ahead and set up the game page:

Here's hoping I don't get too distracted again...

Thank you for the reply! I managed to find the song now. :) I looked through a bunch of other songs from the same artist but managed to miss this one... 😓 At least I got it now!

Tbh, I'm not much for reading visual novels, but something drew me to try this one out, and I really loved it, a lot! The descriptions were so primal and visceral they completely immersed me and drew me into the story. And when it comes to horror I've been quite jaded, but some of the moments I felt in my soul. Super great.

Also, not sure where the best place to ask this, but is there a way to get more specific song credits? There was one song I really liked and I'd like to hear more of, but there's a lot of songs to go through on the credits listed. Thanks in advance for any help!

It's interesting to see the obvious quality difference between my old CG's and new ones... part of me wants to go back and redraw the old ones to match the quality of the new, but I know I must restrain myself or the game will never be finished.

Speaking of, I decided to change how I draw open mouths. Before, I just used white without drawing any teeth or tongue, and while that may look fine without color or shading, it looks a bit out of place when that is added. See:

VS

I say it's a definite improvement, and I also get some practice drawing open mouths.

I've decided to create my game page soon, after I'm done drawing all the art work. There's still some more work to be done after (such as playtesting), and I'd like to have some time to pulish the page before the game is published.

It's been a while since I made an update. The reason being, a bit late into the game, I decided I didn't like the design of our second main character. It didn't fit the vibe of what I'm going for, so I've redesigned him and am in the process of redrawing all the old art work to fit the new design. Oops.

Old:

New:

I've decided to add some visual indicators to compliment the audio cues in my games. The cues are there to warn the player of imminent danger and I realized, if the player doesn't have access to audio, it would make the game quite a bit harder to complete.

Now it's also time to start seriously working on the sountrack, which I both look forward to and slightly dread... I do enjoy creating music, but I find it much harder to tell if what I've created is actually good, compared to drawing a picture. It's also harder for me to visualize the finished product, because I can't hear the audio in my head the same way I can see a finished picture... there's a lot more experimenting to find something I like.

I'm trudging through making all the sound effects, which is certainly not my favorite part of the game making progress. At least I can use some sound effects from my other game, Hell's Gate. Silver lining.

Creating the sound effects is a mix of using Cubase, Bfxr, and downloading sound effects and throwing on some bitcrush effects on them for the right "crunchiness". Having too realistic sound effects would clash with the game's simple pixel art style, but the bitcrushing method works pretty well.

In other news, we now have a working inventory:

I had a more complex design in mind for how it should look, but I didn't like how it turned out, so I settled for something more simple.

I still need to add buttons to take the player back to the main menu. Which, in theory, shouldn't be too difficult.

Happy news! I have finally ugraded my DAW from Cubase 6 LE to Cubase 12 Artist! Now I need some time to familiarize myself with the new interface, but at the very least it's a lot faster and (hopefully) less buggy than the old DAW.

Other than that, I've finalized the title screen. There's still some more work to add, namely, I want to play around a bit with particle effects, but other than that, I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

I've been doing various small tasks on the game, such as creating and adding sound effects and some quality of life fixes. I also customized the game over screen:

I'll continue working on adding sound effects and making other minor fixes.

Just games on itch or in general? Darkwood is really cool, though it's on Steam and GOG.

After some fiddling, I managed to edit the dialogue box to something more pleasing. Looking at it now, I think I'll also go back and remove some of the spacing between the letters.

I'm done putting all cutscenes together except for the last ending. It's the ending with the most images, but I'm about halfway done. I also still need to add the sound effects and music... but adding it is the easy part. Creating it, less so.

I'm done with all the CG. Only thing left to draw now is the main menu!

I've been working on putting together all the cutscenes. I wish RPG Maker had better ways to test your game, but you deal with what you have.

I've also been messing around with the code to make the text boxes look nicer:

I want to remove some of the empty space below + add some space on the left side of the text.

Soon I'll have to do my least favorite part... add sound effects. I'll play around with jsfxr, a free program for creating 8-bit sound effects. I want to match the art style of the main game play.

I've been working on improving some of the CG visuals, as well as continuing to sketch different ideas for the main menu. Here's a few scenes from the intro:

I'm still not completely satisfied with how it looks, but at some point you have to decide that enough is enough and accept the flaws. The game would never release otherwise.

In most images I have just redrawn small parts, but sometimes something is so ugly it's best to just start (mostly) over. Here's a work in progress, but by far the best improvement:

I'll continue to look over my old images and see which ones should be cleaned up and then start designing the main menu.

Alright, I finished the game. Or partly, I don't think I managed to figure out all the secrets out. :o

I like the use of black and white, and the intro cutscene was pretty cool. :) The puzzles were pretty clever too.

I noticed one bug. If you choose not to read the diary on the bookshelf, it doesn't remove the picture.

Anyways, it was a neat experience, even if I feel like I probably missed some stuff. :)

Hello. :) I want to play this, but I can't figure out what to do after the book goes missing. I've looked everywhere I could think of but no dice.

Yay, I'm happy you enjoyed it! I will watch the video as soon as I have time and leave a comment.

So close to finishing all the cutscenes... only one image left, though I think I'll go back to a few older ones to touch them up a bit to look better.

Like here where I think the hands look a bit small...

After that, it's over to sketching out ideas for the main menu.  I already have 2 crude sketches, but I need to spend more time considering the menu composition.

Oooh, Hisoka. :o That slipped my mind somehow, even though I love HxH. I wouldn't trust him anywhere near those pigs.

That's an amazing Peppa Pig, haha.

(Jokes aside, your pixel art looks really cool. :) )

Hm, I've never encountered that before, so I'm not sure what is wrong... maybe contact the game developer and see if their download happen to be broken? Which game are you trying to download?

You could also try downloading it again in case something went wrong when you downloaded the file.

If it's a .rar file, you need to extract the file contents. You can either right click and choose extract, or manually open the file and drag out the contents. You need a program that can open .rar files, though I think windows automatically comes with one (if you're using windows). If not, download Winrar. It's free.

After extracting the file, there will probably be an exe inside you can run.

The first thing I notice is that the trees have much more detailed textures than the mushrooms. I'd add some texture to the muhsrooms to match the rest of the art style, plus give the mushroom more... volume? If that's the right word. Mainly the mushroom cap. I made a quick sketch to illustrate what I mean: 

And for the night sky, I'd add more stars to fill out the blue space, but make them more spread out than the stars you already have.

In any case, I think you got a pretty nice style going. :) I like the way you've mixed 2D and 3d! (Personally, I think the grass looks good.)

It was pretty fun, though personally not for me.

I liked the sound and visual, simple but effective.

I think a short tutorial would be useful, it took a while before I understood my goal.

Also, I think a way to acces the options menu without leaving the level would be good. I also think a button to reset the ball would be a good additon, so you don't have to wait for the ball to finish moving when you already know you failed.

I noticed in one level that the ball movements became a bit unpredictable. After the ball hit a yellow cube, it followed different paths each reset. Not sure if that's intentional or not.

I haven't played the game, but I noticed it looks like you're using RPG maker assets, but the game is made in Game Maker. You should know that using RTP RPG Maker assets in any engine outside of RPG Maker is against their rules, so I'd suggest switching them out.

(I hope I'm not coming of as antagonistic, I just thought it would be good to know. I doubt Kadokawa, or whoever owns the licence, will notice but still. Better err on the safe side.)

Mad Father has a 640x480 resolution, though most modern games run on 1920x1080. I think most players prefer a higher resolution, but I think the best thing to do is to try out different resolutions on your own and decide what works best for your game.

Here's a game for those who enjoy old horror RPG Maker games such as Ib and The Witche's House, Hell's Gate:

https://eko-dev.itch.io/hells-gate-demo

A young man finds himself in Hell and must escape.

Still a WIP, but chapter 1 is complete and released! The recent update adds an autosave feature since the game features many ways to die. Not as a way to punish you! Every death has a unique animation, so part of the appeal is to see them all. :) The first chapter features 13 unique deaths and future chapters has 51 and counting...

Despite containing many ways to die, they are easy to avoid once you know the trigger. Most of the challenge is in solving the puzzles. Hope you enjoy. :)

https://eko-dev.itch.io/hells-gate-demo

Hello. :) I've been working on this game for some time so it's already close to being finished! All that's left is to finish up the CG cutscenes and create the soundtrack and sound effects.

Turnaround is a short puzzle, somewhat horror game where you search for different ways to escape a house after being kidnapped. There are 7 different ways depending on your method of escape, though one of these ends are not quite like the others... 

First order of business: finish drawing the cutscenes!

I'm going for a pretty simple style as this game is a side project and I didn't want it to distract me too much. 6 out of 7 endings are completed, with the 7th one being the longest of them all.

I'm looking forward to working on the soundtrack after so much drawing... I'll probably upgrade my DAW before then since my current one is quite old and buggy.

Here's the walkthrough for chapter 1 of Hell's Gate. May contain spoilers.

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After reaching the crossroad, walk left. You will see a bridge and a hut.

Pick up the rope resting on the wooden crates outside the hut before entering it.

Read the open book on the table. Pick up the empty bottle by the curtains.

Interact with the big cage. It will ask for a password. Find the password by walking up from the crossroad, past the cemetery and into the glade with the angel statue. Look at the empty pedestals to find the password. The password is INTRUDER.

Use the empty bottle on the angel statue. Speak to her.

Walk back to the crossroad. Walk right to the farms.

Pick up the shovel leaning against the house. Use the rope on the well and climb inside. Pick up the knife from the corpse. Climb out.

Talk to the scarecrow. Walk back to the cemetery. Use the shovel on the right grave. The right grave is DAVID.

Walk back to the scarecrow and give him his gold watch. Take the golden pumpkin.

Walk back to the witch hut. Use the bottle of tears, golden pumpkin and the knife on the cauldron.

Walk back to the farm. Use the witch potion on the river. Cross the river.

A chase will start. Keep running right until the chase ends.

After the cutscene, walk right from the ruins until you reach a bridge. Pick up the girl statue.

Return to the angel statue. Put down the boy statue on the left pedestal, the girl statue on the right. Talk to the angel statue. Enter the new passage that opens up.

Interact with the sleeping monster and watch the cutscene. Attack the monster by pressing C. Climb up the ladder.

Walk into the train station. Walk into the ticket booth and pick up the old rag from the closet. Look at the plaque with the pyramid shape.

Exit the train station and enter the metal door to the electric shack. Use the rag on the water. Turn on the switch.

Exit the shack and climb down the ladder, back into the underground passage. Enter the new shortcut that opened up and it will take you to a pyramid.

Look at the shapes on each corner of the pyramid. Count the layers to get 6 numbers from 1-3. The plaque from the ticket booth tells you which order the numbers will be in.

Walk back to the ticket booth and use this code on the drawer. The code is 322113.

Exit the train station and onto the platform. A train will arrive. Give the conductor your tickets and enter the train.

After you're finished exploring the train, talk to Aleksi. After the cutscene a boss fight starts.

Interact with the fire extinguisher. Attack the slug once. Interact with the pile of luggage. Attack the slug once.

Wait for a bit. Aleksi will stun the slug and you can deal the finishing blow.

This is the end of chapter 1.

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ALL DEATHS:

Here's how to find all 13 deaths.

1. After reaching the crossroad, walk back down. Interact with the big flower.
2. Outside the witch hut, interact with the moving vine.
3. Inside the hut, interact with the curtains.
4. In the cemetery, dig up Kim or Darla.
5. In the cemetery, dig up Joane, Darcy or Dean. (There's 2 different grave death animations.)
6. Take the golden pumpkin before helping the scarecrow.
7. Cross the river before using the witch potion on it.
8. Walk to the top of the pyramid and read the "Watch the sky" sign.
9. Let the slug catch you, either during the chase or the boss fight.
10. During the slug chase, run left instead of right.
11. At the broken bridge, interact with the edge and try to jump.
12. In the electric shack, turn on the switch before drying the water. Walk into the puddle.
13. Walk into the train tunnel. Try to leave by going down. 

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If anything is unclear, don't be afraid to ask

Thank you for playing my game. :) What have you done so far?

Edit: I have added a walkthrough to the dev log.