itch.io

Hey there!

Congratulations on your submission!

I'm glad that you joined us this MayWolf.

Here is my basic impression of the game, sorted by Jam's criteria.

Implementation of the theme:

There are different ways to interpret "folklore" as a theme. The story is fairly short, and it's quite hard to make a lot out of its lore.

However, the general presence of the magic in this world and the mysterious prophecy are something that, in my view, is enough to fit your game into the jam's theme.

Currently, your lore is neither well-developed nor based on anything that can be considered part of real folklore. 

For the future, I would advise using real-world prototypes as inspiration. This way, you can easily connect with a reader and create interesting folklore.

Even if you won't find these suitable, you can always use them as a general inspiration. 

After all, art is all about mixing known concepts to create something new.

3 out of 5 stars

Story and creativity:

The story seems to be very generic. It's hard to find something untypical for the isekai subgenre. I believe the beginning is the most crucial part of a story. There is only so much time to grab a reader's attention before they get bored. So it's important to introduce the concept that will flesh out your story from others.

It may be a conflict, characters, or setting details. etc.

Always think about what makes your concept unique and memorable.

The story also suffers from info dumping, zero actions have happened so far, and it breaks the most crucial principle of storytelling.

Show, don't tell

Instead of letting us know about the prophecy, magic, and curses via dialogue, a better solution would be to introduce them as the story goes its way.

For example, instead of:

Mc wakes up along the wolf - Mc asks the questions - wolf tells him about the world.

It could be:

Mc wakes up alone - meets the danger in the face of a werewolf - Black wolf saves him with magic.

By using that scheme, you already introduce your two important world concepts in action. You don't have to explain everything right away.

The idea is to intrigue the reader. You have all the time in the world to come up with natural ways to develop them after.

Lack of mystery is also an issue. You had a perfect opportunity to create it with an opening scene.

Instead of MC right away realizing that he has died, and eye of curse offering him a deal, a better idea would be to turn it into an opportunity for the first conflict.

Make the protagonist question what has happened.

Don't explain the conditions of the deal. Leave it a mystery for now, and preferably come up with something more than its desire to watch Kliwon's journey.

2 out of 5 for the story and 1 out of 5 for the creativity, respectively.

Presentation:

It's the strongest part of your entry.

I appreciate using your own assets. They may not look professional, but it's a matter of time at this point. 

The music is pleasant, feels natural, and complements scenes.

It would be nice for you to learn how to work with transformations instead of using dissolve for everything.

Custom UI would be nice as well. You can find a lot of free assets for Ren'Py on itch.io and edit them to match your atmosphere better.

3 out of 5 stars.

I hope you'll be able to continue this project, and turn it into something great. Good luck!

Hello, thank you a lot for leaving your review for my game!

I'm always happy to hear feedback from people.

Cutting vn short was indeed a tough decision, but the one I had to make to fit into the jam's deadline.

ART: 

I'm going to redraw all my sprites into more polished versions and give each character at least 2-3 poses to make them impactful. 

Writing:

My plan is mostly to polish it as much as I can. I'll use reverse translation, grammar checkers, context reverso, etc., to find spots that may leave some readers confused, 

The story:

The story is supposed to go from lighthearted to a darker tone with time.

One of my ideas is also to rewrite several dialogues and add 2-3 scenes in the prologue to define my characters better.

Their friendship dynamic is indeed leaning too much into humor right now.

Shared sense of humor is one of the most common ways for people to connect. At the moment, I thought that it would help readers to believe in their friendship. It wasn't a bad idea at its core, but I leaned too much into it, and now the story lacks elements that would show their differences.

Thank you again for your critique. I'll try my best to learn from it and become better as an author.

Take care!

(Minor spoilers ahead)

It was quite entertaining. I keep getting fascinated by what people can do in just a month.

I have enjoyed Terry's and Shane's relationship dynamic. bits of their interactions and stories helped in understanding their motivations without overloading the narrative.

The detective part is quite lacking, there are cool point&click mechanics, but they don't require you to think much.

However, I can't say that it wasn't fun. Very few FVNs have those, so any gameplay feels very satisfying.

I would notice that the game's pacing is quite inconsistent. It speeds up a bit too much in moments, especially at the end.

Some plot lines don't lead anywhere. For example: What's the deer girl role in the story? All she does is stop Terry from going into an abandoned building, and then they talk about the monster, which doesn't lead to anything certain. I have a feeling that initially, more was planned for her character.

What happened to Mary? Did she survive or not? Why did the characters forget about their promise to Sophie?

Despite not having an answer to these questions, I still consider this entry more than worthy.

I hope to read more of your works in the future! 

Damn, my tiny cat brain just now realized that it's an actual review and not just a comment!

First of all, I'm really grateful that you decided to spend your time playing my game and writing this analysis despite this jam having more than 40 entries. It means a world for me right now.

Speaking in general, I agree with all your points about my entry.

The condition of writing and the reason the story stops so abruptly is that it's my first successful attempt at releasing something myself.

I struggle with severe mental issues (Unfortunately, it wasn't a joke) and usually can't force myself into doing anything for too long.

Even this month, I spent most of my time sleeping or lying in bed.

I'm very judgmental of my own work, and was able to notice most of the issues that you have described in your review. 

The combination of these two factors is the reason I never finished any other projects, despite being in fandom for several years now.

I dropped last Maywolf, and despite a huge desire, ignored novembear(buck), because I simply know that I'm not skilled and capable enough to create an objectively good game. 

However, you can't change anything in your life by doing the same thing over and over again. So, despite the game not reaching the level of quality I would call satisfying, and the story being unfinished, I decided to release it anyway. had a panic attack while uploading, but I guess I need to learn to cope if I actually want to create stuff. 

Oh, actually, I have one point I can disagree with, some colleges indeed look like high schools inside. The story doesn't happen in the USA. It's quite common for small colleges in Europe to look like that. I personally studied in one that only had classrooms. (But I still made a mistake calling the classroom auditorium. thanks for pointing that out)

It was easier to find assets for the classrooms than the auditoriums.

I'm ESL, so my writing requires a lot of polishing. It's hard to create a balance between perfect grammar and conversational English, so I often end up using unnatural phrasing or wrong word order.

Marcuz and Luiz indeed can feel a bit the sameish at the beginning, Jane got much more personality since she's the group leader, and I wanted to show her dominant demeanor.

The idea was to show Marcus as a bad boy who actually has self-esteem issues, internalized homophobia, and all this shit. 

 Luiz is supposed to be a good guy who also always agrees with Jane because of her authority in the group.

But since they both eventually play along with her decisions (Mark just complains a lot), there is not much room left to show their differences.

The fact that Luiz is lacking his own scenes doesn't help it at all

In the next build, I'll try to concentrate on balancing their screen time a bit and Checkov's guns, which I placed earlier in the story. 

Again, thank you very much for your review, and stay safe!

Mental issues ^>⩊<^

But to be serious, I plan to finish it, don't worry

Damn, it was hot!

I enjoyed this a lot, though I must admit the story indeed is rushed and has little to do with the Jam's theme.

BUT! BUT! The author compensates it with a lot of hot wolves and wild sex, which is, as far as I'm aware, half a reason why FVNs exist in general.

Visuals and animations are also awesome. I can see how much effort the creator has put into it.

Recommended to all horny bastards like me.

10 MENTALLY UNSTABLE LIONS  OUT OF 10

Now, for serious, this vn is amazing. Good atmosphere, unique art, and memorable writing style.

Cake's storytelling is a good combination of light surrealism and poetry. 

The story doesn't feel overwhelming, and despite its non-standard approach, it's still quite grounded. It's easy to relate to Tula as the protagonist despite his dellusions. Cake effectively uses foreshadowing to let the reader know what's going on instead of just saying it out loud.

The open finale of the story leaves much to the reader's own imagination.

It may feel quite heavy sometimes since the emotional tone rarely changes. But due to it being short, it's pretty much acceptable.

It's also quite sad that we didn't get to know much about a fortune teller. The story doesn't give enough food for thought to think about her as anything but a metaphor for Tula's situation.

Landi's art is amazing.

I already praised him a lot personally, so I'm just going to say that the choice to use traditional artworks shot on camera was extremely fitting for the story. I also love music and interface. A lot of developers don't pay attention to small details like that, but he did a wonderful job that helped to increase immersion and feel the story much better.

The author has made me fall in love with Mark

I've never seen such a broken and tragic character who attracts me so much. Even knowing how wrong his relationship with Grey is, you still keep hoping for the best.

Whether where will be a good ending for them or not, it will be deserved.

It was insane

We can't mentally prepare for this

But there is  no way to create a usable model of an image generator with only clear data
Mitsuya diffusion proves it very well

The same with most of GENs

So pls don't write comments like these toward objectively unethical games like this one

I tried it, and that actually bad

The plot is about sexual assaults, and this game is like super lazily made

Even the menu is not fully translated into English

100% True
☆Thank you for playing!☆

Как знаешь делулу

Спасибо что создал целый аккаунт мою честь
"Phucker" очень мило, сразу видно у кого из нас тут проблемы

Господи мне может конечно кажется-

Но ты что плюсуешь свои посты с аккаунтов?

Dude that's cringe

Что это за reveal моего имени как будто я скрываюсь?

У меня буквально тот же никнейм

Во вторых весь этот поинт не имеет никакого смысла так как доля Машиного перевода мне прекрасно известна

А давность переводов как-бы не меняет ситуацию

Даже если вам сто лет не отвечают нельзя начинать перевод без проса
а тем более ставить новеллу на монетизацию нельзя
Даже если вы там не гребете деньги лопаткой, все мы знаем что все это делается из passion

Все-равно нельзя

Кстати меня никто не выгонял, да грозились если продолжу грудь выпячивать но по итогу я сами ушли

Я просто защищаю любимый фэндом от тех кто к нему относится пренебрежительно

Ну во первых кудзе разлогинься если это очередной альт

А во вторых вы не баните людей в тг прямо тех которые говорят что им нет 18
Я помню это еще с поста про набор переводчиков

Ну машинный перевод все еще используется как основа

Эта инфа у меня от одного из переводчиков

А во вторых все что выкладывается в тг/группе напрямую отражает вашу команду и разработчики имеют право знать это что-бы принимать взвешенные решения

Не говоря о том что половина вашей аудитории это миноры которых вы не баните
А за такое вообще палками бьют в фэндоме

Окей начнем с того что не вижу смысла отвечать на английском.
Я знаю команду exgames очень хорошо,  и  с тех пор как я стал разработчиком новелл получил много новой инфы

Во первых вы не получали разрешение на многие из переведенных новелл хотя своим переводчикам и аудитории говорите что получали

Более того, ты только недавно заявил разработчику Repeat что вы хотите получить разрешение, и если не ошибаюсь делал вид что repeat вашей командой до этого не переводилась
что является ложью

Во вторых вы используете машинный перевод и это факт ваша наипопулярнейшая связка это translator ++ и DeepL
Также когда один из стажеров использовал чат гпт для перевода одной неопубликованной  vn данные действия не осуждались и методика даже активно обсуждалась в чате

Это идет напрямую  в противоречие инфе предоставленной разработчику

Качество редактуры также не всегда блещет, вспомнить только перевод RTF чистая машина, даже местоимения персонажей меняются от строки к строке

Вы использовали ИИ сгенерированные изображения на 14 февраля что является огромным леймом в FVN фэндоме

И в принципе много чего еще

You right
 "Repeat" was translated by Exgames itself

Exgames mostly don't use ChatGPT for translations, but they use DeepL for most of them

I don't recommend giving them permission for translation

The OST is also very enjoyable
Especially the track "velleity"

Incredible writing&art!

☆She's the queen!☆
Thanks for playing!

☆Thank you very much for playing!☆
☆It's so nice to hear that someone loves my grumpy boy☆

I want him to be my dad lol

Thanks for playing☆

☆Thank you for playing☆

Okay, the start is a bit cheesy, and the game plot develops a bit too fast.

BUT

Overall, it's outstanding work. I especially love the complexity of the GUI and the amount of high-quality artwork that was made for the game

The story is dynamic and works.

It's a pretty solid dramedy with elements of romantic

It took me a while to check it out, but I enjoyed the story

Wonderful atmosphere!

It was so good to read!

The story is nice, the programming stuff is pretty advanced, the music hits, and the artwork is cozy.

Thanks for playing💚

Thanks for playing!
I showed your message to Jericho's route writer, and they are happy to hear such sweet words!
We are doing our best to update the game as soon as possible, so please keep following us💚

ExGames Telegram

Can you please send a screenshot in our Discord?

Hello,  I'm Onion current lead programmer of the game.

Since I'm also one of the main writers,  as our lead said we could use some help

We need help with game mechanics polishment and basic stuff, like putting text and sprites into the game, checking that labels will be in the right place, etc.

Also, we will work a lot with transitions, screens, imagemaps, and image buttons.

And finally, some non-program but tech stuff like PNGs to WEBPs convert.

Hello!
I'm a programmer and sent you a friend request on Discord
I can do everything basic, and also some complex stuff
My nickname is gr_cat

Thanks!

Oh and also can I start drawing sprites, writing draft, and looking for backgrounds with music before February

Without making an actual build of course.

Can I use some code parts from my other game project?  I already have some mechanics that also want to use in jam bounds.

And there is no practical sense to recode them from zero, but I don't want to cheat, so ask. 

It's simple mechanics like a time system or transitions for choices.

 If it's not allowed, what should I do?