The toggles are a good idea, but still need a bit of work. For example, the inn keeper will still be referred to as a cat girl even if you set it to humans only. Or the recruiter will always have both sets of genitalia, regardless of settings.
Alice please, you promised to take me hunting in the forest. But we've just been eating hundreds of meat skewers, drinking different beers, ales and meads, and asking each other riddles that don't make sense for literally hours now. I just wanna go, please Alice, I can already feel a hangover coming on. 😭
Hey no problem, just trying to help out. Thank you for writing this IF, I can't wait to find out what happens next!
Edit: Oh dear, I just read your reply to the comment above about why you are taking a break. I'm so sorry, I did not mean to imply any form of pressure for you to resume writing.
If the game tells you that you can now challenge Long Wyoung, while you can't actually do so in the current build, then I would call that a (small) flaw in the current build, since that line could have just been commented out until it gets updated.
If you pass a check (INT iirc, but I'm not clicking through the whole game to make sure :p) with the correct degree of success, when she tries to convince MC to follow her to the cave, then MC lists several similarities between Ro Huy/Hyi and the "Mistress/Little Demon Queen" (e.g. androgynous, wears mask to hide deformed face, etc.). So that comparison strongly suggests to me that MC recognizes her suspects her identity.
MC is referred to as "$heshe" and "calen". (The former is clearly a bug, but the latter might be an unglossed term?)
Selecting a different font, doesn't actually change the font. (Changing the size does work though.)
Because the textbox has such high transparency, the patches of moonlight and reflection do not contrast sharply with the text.
The text box is already about half the width of the screen. Add to that the one inch margins inside the box, and the text takes up barely one third of the screen. This despite there not being any side panels using the two-thirds empty real estate (a toggled bottom panel having been used instead).
A great start to something that could (have) be(en) terribly ambitious. The sheer amount of world building done to create a background of characters, places, factions, artifacts and relations which never appear but are mentioned in passing, is enormous. Unfortunately, it also suffers from some serious flaws:
Given CoG's bizarre obsession with not wanting to make ChoiceScript user-friendly, a back-button and the ability to export saves were always pretty much out of the question.
<SPOILERS>
The game isn't consistent about whether Tigress is from the East or from the West.
If you hope that Tigress is okay after getting injured during the Outer Disciple tournament, the game says you can challenge Long Wyoung. But if you then go to the Arena Administrative Building, it says you can only issue ranked challenges, not personal ones.
The game tells you the Ro Hui/Hyi is the "Mistress/Little Demon Queen", but then doesn't give you any options acknowledging this (You can only either go along with them apparently without recognizing them, or you can express disinterest in the disciples' lives without recognizing them).
</SPOILERS>
"There is no right and wrong. Justice is upheld by man, and fairness is a made-up concept for the weak to soothe their aches."
Ooh yikes. Methinks somebody's been hitting the Nietzsche, Foucault and Le Guin a bit too hard. Quick repeat after me:
The Dao that can be spoken of, is not The Eternal Dao. The Name that can be spoken of, is not The Eternal Name.
Would the whimpering of some child whom I didn't want to take along in the first place stop me from strangling Rohan? 🤔 No. No, it wouldn't. Not a chance in hell. In fact, it feels jarringly unnatural. MC needs to sort out their priorities.
I can't say that I'm familiar with Homelander (I literally just googled it and went "oh the guy from that meme what has laser beam-eyes", but I'm still clueless as to his level of evil 😅).
But regardless, this first chapter is quite the promising start; so I look forward to learning more about Sovereign and the rest of the cast, and the relationships between them - as well as to getting around to trying your Calamity Control.
Is this, by any chance, based on or inspired by The Return by H.B. Piper and J.J. McGuire? Admittedly, I've only gotten to the MC seeing a lady reading a proper (i.e. pre-Collapse) book thus far, so maybe I am jumping to conclusions; but up until now the similarities are so striking that I simply can't imagine it's mere coincidence!
A steam-punk portal-fantasy murder-mystery, you say? And I'm the (presumed) villain? Sign me up!
Though so far, I can't say that the Sovereign seems like a villain? Dalgliesh, Fairburne, the servant siblings and even the ghost of Angelica certainly seem to like them well enough.
Finally got around to 4x4 Galaxy and loved it! The fact that it is much simpler and shorter, makes the early game feel less drawn out (it is easy to quickly earn renown) and makes each playthrough more contained and therefore easier to replay multiple times in quick succession. In their own, distinct way both 4x4 games are great!
Thanks! I finally beat the end boss after grinding enough points to afford all the hacks. Though on my first attempt, I also managed to break the game somehow, so we both had only our kings left, endlessly chasing each other around the otherwise empty board 😂
Having played all the non-webGL html submissions, I can now say that this is without a doubt my favorite. It's just so wholesome while remaining humorous. Full marks across the board!
Why thank you! It's a pepefication of the default icon that itch assigns to everyone, so it's definitely supposed to be cursed xD
It makes sense that opinions in the crew would differ, since they did indeed also respond diversely to your arrival. Please don't feel pressured to change anything on my account, that's not at all what I intended when I brought it up. It's great just the way it is - my second favorite submission to the jam, in fact.
Sometimes works of art walk a very fine line between being profound and being pretentious. I do not know on which side, if indeed either, this errs. But there does seem to be a lot more of Joyce and Lutz here, than of Coleridge, Shelley, Yeats, Calvino, Borges, Le Guin and Crowther combined...
The way the tension builds as evidence stacks up that something is amiss reminds me of Caleb J. Phillips' horror short Other Side of the Box. And much like that film, this feels somewhat like a demo, a trailer or a proof of concept for a larger work.
So wholesome! I kept unnecessarily worrying about things: that noise on the roof is rats, those apples on the ground are rotten, I'll fall out of the tree, I'll drown while fishing, I'll get fired for selling the kettle, etc. And, of course, none of those things happened. I merely worked up an appetite and even got a day off 😊
I was really hoping that the long wait during the simulation would mean different results for different simulations but it's always the same. That's fine, but in that case it would be nice to able to skip the simulation (e.g. have the blink much sooner and skip over more time), at least after the first time.
