itch.io

I do not have the attention span for this style of text adventure anymore but I love the presentation and the fact that there’s a modern Inform dialect that supports graphics and music. I remember back in the day when The Lurking Horror had some (very limited) sound and there were graphical elements in Beyond Zork and Zork Zero, but I’ve not kept up with the modern era of IF.

Anyway the music’s pretty good, if repetitive, and the art has a cool vibe to it. If only I were in a better headspace to actually explore this little world you’ve carved out.

I think the bugs are the only thing in this game which are arguably and demonstrably not fixed

(that is a neutering joke)

When I try playing this through the itch.io app I get an error early on with “Cannot load image big_monster.png” or something to that effect, but it works fine from the web. Weird.

Anyway it’s always a pleasure to make music for these silly games, and Craig is the absolute star of the show here. I hope he gives his paralegal team a bunch of big kisses. Such a cute bean.

I only managed to find one ending though.

This is such a clever concept, and I love how many different weird paths there are to go down. Great music, too. The UX is so weird and disjoint but I think it works well for this, especially with some of the little meta-jokes that show up in places.

The x64 version just crashes when I try to start the game, but the x86 version works just fine. I’m on a Ryzen 9800X and AMD RX 7900XTX, if any of that matters.

Anyway. Galaxian but with dongs is a fitting idea for this jam. It’d be nice if the controls were a bit tighter (that’s what she said) and if I had any idea what the heck I was even doing.

Making a visual novel in RPG Maker 2003 was a curious choice. I’m finding it really difficult to actually control anything because of the too-fast-moving keyboard-only cursor with tiny click targets. I love the art style and music though, and the characters are well-written and each have a very distinct voice, especially the introductory character.

It would definitely be a good idea to re-export this with the RPG Maker runtime included and also tag the bundle as being for Windows, which would make it a lot easier to install and run (particularly from the itch app).

The writing in this feels really disjoint but in a waking dream sort of way (shades of Link’s Awakening and Mulholland Dr), which I absolutely love. I also enjoy the feeling of a mid-90s multimedia point-and-click adventure with the Cutting Edge Computer Graphics™ in the background. I have no idea who/what Gar 28 is, and having a relevant link somewhere in the game description would have been nice.

The music is also great for setting a mood.

UX-wise I’d also like a way of making the text not slowly appear on the screen, and maybe cut down on the time taken by visual transitions as well. Keyboard access would be nice too, and I couldn’t figure out any way of making the settings menu appear while playing.

Jop also seems like a real garbage person [affectionate].

Anyway, this was an interesting experience overall.

I couldn’t get this to run through the itch.io app for some reason, but the webpage lets it play just fine at least. I wasn’t quite sure where to click in order to progress the gameplay parts of the story, though, or how to actually make money in order to do repairs (being on the “collect money” screen it never actually automatically filled up with any coins), and when I tried going to the bar I got a ren’py exception screen.

From what does work I get the impression that this is sort of an idle/clicker game, and implementing that in ren’py is an interesting (and ambitious) idea!

I love the idea of this game, although I find the font kind of fatiguing to read so much text in. Also there’s a lot of lore to absorb, and after a certain point I found myself just clicking through quickly to see if there was ever an interactive branch point, and ended up accidentally clicking on the “wrong answer” one which then, of course, booted me back to the main menu, which kind of felt like I was back in high school English class. If there were at least a “skip forward” button like what ren.py normally allows I’d be a lot more eager to try again.

The music is great and reminds me of the Pixeljunk games on the PS3 (especially Monsters and Eden). I’d love to have a standalone OST to listen to!

EDIT: oh duh I just looked at the credits, the music is by my friend Jeremy, awesome

you have not seen me at my hammiest

Yeah I’ve taken a bit of a step back from Strawberry Jam stuff for a few different reasons that I won’t get into here and this year I was definitely not feeling up to making a lot of music (I was actually planning on taking this year off entirely, after having participated in every previous year to some capacity), but I’m glad that a bunch of people still reached out for music all the same.

I think I need to get better about listing requirements before I’ll commit to making music. I want to be sure that the game’s creators have a chance at actually submitting something (even if it’s incomplete/prototype) and also that we’re on the same page about what kind of stuff they’re looking for, because communication was a big pain point this year.

Yeah I really like working with Kageki! We have a good rapport and I’m always happy to make more music for the Rubber Wizard series.

I love how the eyes follow the mouse cursor

Bandcrash is just producing files to be uploaded anywhere. If your web hosting allows password protecting a directory (via .htaccess or whatever), that’s all you’d need to configure and everything should work. If that’s not enough information then please share what your web hosting situation is and maybe I can provide more information.

As far as “asset pack” that’s down to how you set up the itch project. Make sure you’ve set your project type to “soundtrack.” You can also provide your own custom noun on the project page. You might also want to enable the “auto-play” option so that the run prompt doesn’t appear.

This is actually a pretty low amount of output for me from Strawberry Jam. :) But thanks for listening!

If the first one ended up in a game I’m not aware of it and I’d like to know.

oh yeah I posted it to youtube yesterday

💜

Thanks! My channel is https://youtube.com/@realfakesockpuppet although I haven’t released this album to any of the platforms yet. Usually I release on Bandcamp+Mirlo first and then YouTube comes a bit later (since it’s a bunch more effort).

Fun stuff! I do wish there were an option for instant text appearance though. Even at the highest text speed it feels super slow.

As far as I know I was on mainline previously. Thanks for looking into and fixing this issue!

It looks like when I do butler upgrade it’s still keeping me on dev, though. How do I switch back to mainline?

EDIT: Had to restart the itch app (for some reason the “manage” button wasn’t bringing up anything) but was able to reinstall from there.

Hi, I just updated the Mac version of butler using butler upgrade and the installed version now claims to be:

$ butler --version
head, built on Feb 20 2026 @ 19:34:08

It seems to be working fine but now butler update is requiring --force for further upgrades.

Thank you for everything you’ve done. This decision couldn’t have been easy but it does seem the most logical.

For some reason itch.io has quarantined this, because of supposed “suspicious activity” from you (where that suspicious activity is just you having created the account recently and residing in the USA).

Or maybe the virus embedded in the pdf is a magical mermaid tf virus or something, well anyway I enjoyed the comic.

I can’t even figure out the obligatory introduction puzzle so I have a feeling I’ll be hopeless at the rest of this one.

Wow, these are some really good compositions! Really good usage of your various symphonic instruments, too.

This would be easier to listen to if you had an embedded player for the itch page. You can use my app bandcrash to set that up pretty easily, or if you just want to use the mp3s you’ve already encoded you can use blamscamp to build a player embed.

I love the little warmup puzzle that starts out every game, like, here, have yet another version of the same Sokoban puzzle that gets progressively more tricky than the previous one while having nothing to do with the rest of the actual game

This is like the cutest episode of Black Mirror ever.

Same! This is now one of the first things I install on any new Mac I set up. :)

Oh, it’s possible that I set the tag myself and forgot: https://icosahedron.website/@aeonofdiscord/114924463622425623

Yeah it got reindexed as soon as I removed the sensitive content flag.

I’m mostly just wondering what the purpose of the ‘unspeakable’ tag is and how it got added.

The game it appeared on (Colorful Critter) had been deindexed, although I removed the “sensitive content” flag on it (which was only there out of an abundance of caution) as well as the tag.

I noticed a couple of my games got tagged “unspeakable” somehow, and I definitely didn’t set that tag on them myself. What is that about? And why doesn’t a forum search on “unspeakable” find anything?

I finally figured it out, I had to actually equip a loadout

I cannot figure out how to actually shoot, which is… kind of a problem when it comes to finishing a mission.

It’s fine to keep the music in, just remember that unless someone has explicitly given you permission you need to ask first.

There is plenty of Creative Commons music out there that you can use although if you do that you need to make sure to follow its license. I have an article about that at https://beesbuzz.biz/articles/6910-Creative-Commons-summarized - for what it’s worth, the music you used is now available as by-nc-sa (although it wasn’t yet at the time that you put it in your game), but since your game isn’t also by-nc-sa you still need to ask permission first.

also omg flora game!!

There’s also a starcow :)

I usually do not care for text-heavy games, especially jam games, because I always feel like I’m being confronted with a big wall o’ text where so much of it is just there to inflate a wordcount. So, I really like the writing in this: while there’s a lot of it, all of it feels vital to the feel and the narrative, and having the hypertext for looking at specific things gives me a feeling of agency in reading the different things, which is different than just having it all shoved my way.

I get the impression that it’s incomplete since once you get to the actual potion quaffing it’s just, like, a placeholder for what it’s going to be, and I’d love to see this get fleshed out and completed. (And maybe some artwork would be nice, but given the number of potion combinations, even writing text for all of them is going to be a challenge!)

Hey, you should probably link to the musician’s itch page from the description, especially since they had no idea you were using their music…

Having a prompt at the start that says that Z is how you proceed would be helpful. Also the UI framework for the game is a bit wonky but also charming in its retro weirdness I guess?

Anyway I loved the game itself once I figured out how to control it. The art and sound reminded me a lot of Eversion.

This game just made me remember how bad I am at Freecell.

Also it’s probably the most asexual thing ever that I just found the animations in the background to be kinda distracting.