It's made in RPG Maker 2003, cause it was made for a game jam that stipulates it! (Still open for about a week, at the time of writing)
As far as I know, EasyRPG has both an editor and a player, and the editor isn't really ready for use yet, but the player is, and since it has a web version, you can use it to play RM2k3 games in the browser. Lots of people have been doing that for the jam.
Thanks so much for playing, I'm really glad you liked it!!
There are technically two endings, yes, and the dialogue is different, but not much else changes.
About the pronouns, I just added them manually as the first line of each text box, with some color codes! And then just copy/pasted for each line of dialogue. It would absolutely NOT have been sustainable in a longer story, but I don't know a better way, eheh.
I was kind of surprised at how negative this commentary is about the game! I really liked it!!
For a game made in one hour, it's shockingly well tuned, I juuuuust barely had enough resources to finish, it felt amazing. And the gimmick of having to find another route to escape was a great surprise moment. I don't know if I would say there's "too much stuff" here, everything serves a purpose. As for the skills, maybe they don't serve as much of a purpose, but... I guess it depends on how long they took to add, it's just RPG Maker stuff, right? So if it doesn't take away from something else, I don't see the harm in adding a little bit of spice to the combat.
This was a super fun and cute entry! Just enough mechanical meat to sustain a short little story, with a nice progression arc and great use of all the RPG Maker tools (consumables especially). The story itself is like extremely cliche, but that's kind of exactly what it needed to be for this. I really liked it.
Maybe my sense of humor is just borked in the exact right way, but it has genuinely been a while since a game has made vee laugh this much, AND there are some genuinely touching moments in there too
Incredible game, eleven ten nine eight seventin th out of 10
About gencache: a quick search suggests that it's not really viable to get a different version of glibc on your system, since a lot of other stuff depends on it. (And that it's apparently very weird to require a specific version of it?)
Fortunately the gencache code seems really simple, so I've written a Python replacement for it. I haven't tested it much, but it seems to do fine with my own project. Hopefully it helps?
This is the first one of these sketches I'm trying, it's a cool experience!
I couldn't really beat it even after I figured out the strategy, it felt really RNG dependent. Which I think is kind of an inherent problem with RPGs if you want to tell a narrative through the combat systems. I think if I wanted to do that I'd rely more on heavily scripted events, but that does take away a lot of the magic, I guess.
It's incredibly cool to be able to see all the design notes afterwards, though! I'm very glad I played this.
About the UI: that's understandable, but I wanted the whole thing to feel more like a real computer system than a game, and I think a little bit of friction and inconvenience (emphasis on "little"!) helps to sell that fantasy. Maybe the message could be worded a little better though, I dunno.
About the puzzles: if nothing else, I'm glad you could get through the story despite not fully getting the logic! I'll take that as a sign that the hint system is working properly.
I'll leave you the full logic for 0000, fully rot13'd:
Guvf bayl hfrf gjb pbqrf: ke, juvpu zrnaf ebgngr gur yrggre sbejneq va gur nycunorg, naq kq, juvpu zrnaf qhcyvpngr. Fb (keo)eb(kqf)(kej)e(kqq) -> pebffkeqq. Gur chmmyr vf nobhg ernyvmvat gung bapr qbar jvgu gung, lbh unir nabgure ke pbqr, fb vg orpbzrf pebffrq.
Yup, it makes sense. I would have LIKED to do that, but it's actually harder than it sounds the way I coded it. I wanted to get the game done and out instead of spending a lot of time on that. I might push an update if I find an easy way to do it, but I can't promise anything.
Thank you for playing, though!! I'm very glad you liked it!
Thank you so much!! I'm really happy to hear you liked the story!
Since several people seem to get stuck on 0004, I might go back and make `hint 0004` give you TWO hint keys instead of one. It's sort of the "final challenge" (0007 is more of a "test what you probably already know" puzzle) so I thought it would be good if it was more complicated than the rest, but at the very least it should be easier when asking for a hint. I don't want anyone getting properly stuck on it so close to the end!
Thanks for playing, and I'm glad you had fun with it!
w is not in fact anything, and 0004 is where I've seen a few people getting stuck, so I probably did not design it very well. It has a lot of overlapping rules and it's not that clear what order you're supposed to do them in, so maybe it would have been better if there was a previous lock that taught you about the solve order unambiguously.
"Finding part of the word and then guessing the rest" is very much intended though, as a sort of release valve for people who don't find the logic very clear!
Hi, thanks a lot for trying the game! Sorry about the technical issues.
I've now posted an update that speeds up the text if you hold Space, on top of making it slightly faster by default.
I haven't been able to reproduce any crashes, so I couldn't fix that, sorry. If you try the game again and it happens again, please let me know what it was doing when it happened. (Also, make sure to click on the game so it's actually focused and getting keyboard input.)
This is a super fun demo, I'm definitely looking forward to the full game! I really can't praise the animation and spritework enough, it's so full of character.
