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The very visceral atmosphere, the visual flare, and the refined simplicity of it made for a very engaging 20 minutes, even with just 2 types of enemies. Just kept going downward, almost mesmerized. Achieving so much with seemingly so few elements is quite a feat. Very impressive game, especially for something made in just 7 days!

Would love to see where you'd take this next (if you ever did), but super cool game as is! Congratulations!

For sure, that's a bunch of guys! Just some lil' guys! Also got to eat an egg.

This was brought you by: "You're not immune to manglerfish death ray."

Comedy as rules-text is an artform, and Grant Howitt, a master. This is so fucking peak.

Yes, exactly, those are the two endings I was talking about! Sorry if that wasn't clear! Thank you so much for your kind words :D

i mean, you know? yeah

Let's fucking go, thank you so much! The world needs more weird books I think!

Yes! There are two endings! Ultimately, this is how I see these things:

In one of them, presumably, they will be able to meet, but they live in a very dark, dangerous world, so their fate might ultimately be very bittersweet.

In the other, they will never meet, because Nano escaped from that dimension into a perfect world, which may or may not be an illusion created just for her, and she will live a long and happy life, while Ngazi will be fighting against the terrifying Watchers.

Thank you for reading!

Thank you so much for playing/reading this old thing! I'm so confused by the influx of downloads that has been happening for a few weeks but I'm not complaining haha

What do you mean some doubts?

I'll never know what Serious Weakness changed inside of me. But it did. Some things changed irreversibly and I'll never know, because it also made it feel like I've always been this way. Have I always been this way?

It made me worse. It's also my favorite book. The more you read, the more the trap closes on you, the ropes bite into your skin and you're hanging from the ceiling. It affords you no dignity, no room to breathe, and less of all the comfort of removing yourself from the experience that it inflicts upon you, that it makes you inflict upon yourself page after page. Some of my ugliest laughs, most horrified joys, most conflicted thoughts; it's delicious in a way that feels deeply wrong.

I think it made me have the most violent, self-degrading thoughts i've ever had in ways that maybe helped me accept myself more. Weird shit.

You were already my favorite author, but I don't know how to qualify what you are after this. Thank you.

PS. I can't believe I hadn't posted here, I finished reading months ago but it's still living under my skin. I think it laid eggs. I started writing a TTRPG because of it and it's one of the sickest, slimiest things I've created. 

I understood barely half of it. But I received ALL of the VIBES.

Absolutely Excellent.

Absolutely lovely!!! I love "play to find out" so so much. I love what you did with this, the layout, the color palette. Excellent writing and A+ for the literal Man Cave. Get fucked Theseus, what an asshole.

Maybe this could have used some setup to either introduce some of his misdeeds from myth to players who aren't familiar with them (cliff notes version kind of), or give directions to make shit up for players who are so inclined? Exemples/directions/tables for that would have been welcome I think, but it's unclear to me what to cut to make it fit.

Incredible work of art. Beautiful. Would make the campaign for north africa blush

Gorgeous, perfect, wonderful, excellent release date for excellent content, no notes

Is there an ending-ending? I felt like I had seen most of the content at some point, but I didn't see any conclusive ending? Really liked it though, and by that I mean absolutely despised it with all my soul! Thank you for this horrible game-app-twine-thing, I hate everything that it depicts!!

My god, of course you didn't have enough time! Balance is so much work. You did this for LD, it's insane you already got so much done! Oh, I'll try some Lv20 gameplay then, I only got to lv 15 or so for now! Sorry I shouldn't have worded it like, "the AI isn't very good" but like, "it's going to be hard for an AI done in a week-end to help as much with analyzing the game and pushing it to its limits as a human opponent would" (because you're pushing each other to improve), and also because you can't chat with the AI to discuss moves and theory craft (and also because I think the game is probably a bit more complex to play well than it looks?)

This is just REALLY good oh my god.

The Snake is kind of overtuned right now because the venom affects only the opponent (but you probably know this); the robot and starfish seem way too strong at 5 critters, but I think the game gets much more interesting with battlefields of 6. Bird that reduces opponent's size of the field seems very powerful as well, while Venos seems downright unplayable? Can't really tell because the AI isn't very good, I really want to just binge play it with other humans to really break it in half.

I wish I could have a boardgame version of this, I'd play it a lot. Even as is. For real. Strangely gives Faraway vibes crossed with Mindbug, even if it's mechanically very different from both? I just really really love this game, astonished you managed to put something like this out in just 72hs, with this amount of content. Balance is not even that out of whack. Gorgeous work.

Holy shit this is so good, gorgeous writing, extremely-thick ATMOSPHERE, vibrant imagery, love love love love love. Incredible that it's done with so few words, the structure is so smart and it gives the experience a very specific tone and vibe. I also did a sort of weather generator toy for a joint project with my girlfriend, https://lamaxelle.itch.io/augury-engine ,  but the structure you gave this, in one minute blocks, make the experience really self-contained and powerful. And the kinda simple variables for world-modeling and the way you used that for your procedural writing, SO smart. Exposing them also somehow adds to the atmosphere!

Holy shit you made something that actually procedurally generates conlangs, while also displaying them in the smartest way possible what the fuck

I'm just wondering if skills ignoring 4s and just 25% chance of a failure per dice might not be a little too generous? With a skill of 1 you're going to have 74% chance of clean success, which raises the skill immediately, and then your chance of clean success is 94% with a skill of 2..! 

And even if the DM is adding 2d4 every roll, you get 52% of clean success at skill level 1, and only 16% chance to make any cauldron dice back as the DM! At skill level 0 with 6d4, you still have the 52% chance of success, but only 18% chance of a clean success so there's that! But I'm not sure of the overall experience that those distributions are going to yield!

I think if I try it I'll see how it feels at first but my first design pass on this would be to really iterate on the ebb and flow of the cauldron and the DM moves tied to that, maybe really go full DM-moves list a la PbtA?

AHHH I love the writing in this and the aesthetics of the game!!!! This is so cool!!! Awesome work and really cute layout/typos! Is that font a josefin sans? (I just really like josefin sans lmao)

I love the way you tied the basic move with the risk management of the cauldron, and the agency/decision layer it can provide to the DM. It reminds me of fate tokens kind of. I think there's some work to be done here but I feel potential! Really cute and interesting!!

OH MY GOD I DIDNT UNDERSTAND IT EITHER UNTIL I READ YOUR COMMENT, I thought I'd tried pressing one of those keys as well during gameplay but maybe I didn't!

Really cute, love the gorgeous artwork! Great job on your first solo unity game!

It looks like the size of your viewport is not quite right, you can adjust it in "edit game", under embed options. You can also enable the fullscreen button right underneath, if your game supports it as well, so that even if the viewport isn't exactly right, people might still be able to play the game in fullscreen!

Thank you so much!!! That's so nice of you to say!

On stan l'ex-assistante turbo-militante lesbienne, quelle reine <3 get rekt jean michel corpo. J'aurais bien aimé pouvoir insulter ce vieux mec et me casser ç'aurait été cathartique. 

(J'ai kiffé qd même le corporate dating sim très homosexuel, j'avoue j'ai donné toutes les bonnes réponses au sassouké avec les cheveux noirs)

Delightful <3 So glad the treasure was the milk we made along the way <3

Love it! Love the lush visual maximalist generosity of the collage and illustration, and the contrast with the very simple, basic black font on white backgrounds aesthetic of the text. You reinvented yourself on every page. The poems are touching and resonant, and sometimes very beautiful. Great work and thank you for screaming this into the void where others like me just might get a chance to stumble into hearing it.

Oh yeah, yet another quote on the pile of  all these quotes applying to both of us

Really cute puzzle game! Some fun logic going on with the restricted bits and the way you have very few ways of placing 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 and all the 2-bit numbers. You can go pretty fast if you're smart about the way you use the available info. For a first time puzzle game, this is really good I think! Also, love the confettis <3

Incroyable test de grande qualité, je vais maintenant aller peindre toutes mes cartes yu-gi-oh aux couleurs du drapeau lesbien.

So glad to hear that from you! It always feels really good to have an artist's beautiful art to work with while doing some visual design & layout! ;)

I enjoyed reading it, of course! It's really like an interesting little video essay, and well-written. I wouldn't have typed this long-winded reply if I hadn't liked it! I really love the "collective, unspoken roleplaying" aspect of emergent phenomenons like these "fandoms for stuff that doesn't exist" - just so many people pretending and being in on a joke. Something about it resonates with me. It's like the whole "brass kingdom" thing as well! It feels immersive, in a way, like opening the door to an alternate reality, and getting to live slices of the daily life like it is in that other world. It's a feeling like a change of scenery, exploring something new yet familiar, in a similar way to immersive experiences like videogames can provide (cultist simulator, potioncraft, monster hunter come to mind), some LARPs, or long-form, continuous, collective roleplaying experiences (to a much stronger degree I think). It's like there's this critical mass of immersion for a joke to turn into this little pocket universe that you can actually live in, even if it's just pretend, if enough people are in on it, it's undistinguishable from reality. (Sorry now I'm just musing.)

Of course, you were right to focus on it! It is a very fascinating topic! I'm looking forwards to your follow-ups!

I really like the empowering message and the idea that collective creations actually affords more expression space to individual creators. I think, like you said, that the fact that it's a joke also lightens up the gravity of the creative act, makes it "just playing pretend", not only when accessing to the lore of the work but also when adding to it. It brings an element of play into the creative act, which helps make it more accessible - make people forget that they are "arting" even if they think they're just "memeing". 

But also, I'm not sure people are waiting for anyone to give them permission. Sure, there's a lot of focus on individuals with regards to creation; but also, creation is hard. You have to create a lot of small and simple things before you can step up to some more complex and ambitious stuff; and most people see the works they love and want to replicate them - and the discrepancy between their goal and what they're capable of (just yet) creates a daunting inertia that is very hard to overcome. Playful creation helps alleviate that, and gives a drive to make this myriad of simpler things, so that you almost sneak up on yourself: when you want to make more ambitious stuff instead of just playing around, you've played around so much that you are now able to achieve it, and you can keep playing around - which also makes it easier to undertake the more ambitious works.

Collaborative, artistic (unknowingly?) efforts are also rather common actually; Goncharov is very much our present in that sense. I think so much of the memes that are produced and iterated upon can qualify as a form of artistic expression and can help playfully develop a voice and skills; more directly, the Backrooms and the SCPs are sprawling examples of that as well (very similar to Goncharov in their folklore/community effort aspect and maybe more evidently creative). Game modding, fan fictions and romhacks also help a lot - but it's less collective than Goncharov and more directly artistic. 

But I think the fact that it's a form of art that is seen as lesser helps with the dedramatization, the idea that, "oh, I can't do something like that, but this, I can do. I'm just creating a mod." And that gives an intermediate step - you don't have to make something big from the ground up, but you're still able to create something very close to your inspirations.

So to me it's less about waiting for a permission (even though, of course, as you said, there is the feeling of illegitimacy that can add to the paralysis), and more about finding a way to get creating that doesn't feel overwhelming and that's accessible to your skillset, while dodging some of the frustration that comes from limiting your ambition and your scope at first. But that's just a (491 words) nitpick.

Poetic, witty, and with that funny stab at knights and how they can't stop talking about their frigging sword and horse. Love it! (Aesthetically these are all my jam)

32 points in the extra messy edition! There's just that pesky bit of bacon in the middle that kinda ruins my perfect brunch. (But I'm craving waffles now...)

I love roll&writes! What a cute little one. Very simple domino-style puzzle, but the theme & the zine are super delightful! But, oh no, you made me want to make waffle-themed games as well!

Thanks for the treat!

(I, for one, love your food habits you gremlin <3 Let's all hop on the sad bastard train)

Thank you so much for the review <3

Yeah, I made it with EZM, I just slapped the game's logo onto some Klimmt and blasted it into next year through collage (texture pen my beloved)

I love how much personality you crammed into this minimalistic format. I love how analogue it all feels, all the little details, and the rhythmicality of the sounds and gameplay. This is such a nice game-toy, I really adore this. Thank you <3 What a nice way to celebrate a 10th anniversary!

vroum <3