itch.io

One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, four sheep, five sheep, six sheep…. sheep, sheep, SHEEP, SHEEP, SHEEP, SHEEEEEP, SHEEP, SHEEEP, SHEEEEP, SHEEEEEP, SHEEEEEP, SHEEEEEEP, SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

5/5 Stars, want MORE SHEEP!

Glad you liked the music! If you are stuck, it’s very likely you either need to put some card from the bottom deck to the slot that appears in the narrative area, or you likely haven’t picked up a newly spawned card from the narrative area so the story cannot progress until you do so.

If you can tell me the exact point, I can help you out. We have extensively playtested the game so there should be no cases where the player can soft-lock themselves, so I am fairly certain it is one of the above two cases. That being said, thank you for playing our game!

A very interesting premise exploring the themes of isolation in our modern society and how it’s our mindset that’s at the root of that isolation and disconnect we feel even when we are amidst people in a crowd. A simple gesture of appreciation and an attempt at conversation that breaks that artificial boundary of awkwardness can work wonders, fostering warmth amidst desolation and often creating deep long-lasting connections that would never have been possible otherwise. Such is the magic of communication! Very well done and a very relevant and fitting interpretation of the gamejam’s theme. I wish you all the very best!

Thank you so much for playing our game! Glad you liked the card mechanic. I’m assuming you went through the first path like most folks, so there’s some more surprises with cards waiting in the others, since the first ending wasn’t the worst fate one could have. ;)

The storytelling is inspired by the narrative style of Alexis Kennedy and the narrative philosophy of Hidetaka Miyazaki, so if it felt a bit ambiguous, that was purposeful, since I intend the reader to piece together the whole story and make sense of what’s happening only after they finish all 4 routes, especially the true route. I would avoid spoiling any more than that for now though, but I’m really glad that the vibes went through. Thank you once again for your kind and encouraging words!

That was… beautiful. I can already tell you are also a fan of Yoko Taro, loved the Nier Automata inspired [E]ndings (and especially the way you incorporate those letters as the truth crystals), and the whole premise also reminded me of the start of Nier Replicant, snow in summer. Extremely well done!

I can really tell the amount of effort that went into creating a looping narrative like this, and all the pain that goes behind integrating it into a complete story. And moreover, providing an in-world justification for the design choice with the TGA condition just makes it feel even so more thoughtful. Absolutely love the game design here! One of my big wishes for the future is creating a “roguelite” interactive fiction game where the world and narrative changes everytime the player dies or ends a run, so I’m also taking notes from your work and learning ha ha!

Great work on the art, UI visuals and music from the team! Everything binds the whole essence into a thematic congruency , especially loved the way the big ice crystal provides a visual cue for the completion status to the player. The music is tense and foreboding, which greatly enhances the atmosphere. Very mature character artstyle as well, while being anime-inspired, it has its own individuality to it, so it feels unique.

Also surprise new world order reference here? 👀

Jokes aside, this was a wholesome moment after all the rejections and creep allegations the protagonist received. Leveling up stats surely does wonders, innit?

Great work from everyone in the team on delivering such a wonderful experience in such a short time, you have my best wishes! Perhaps the real bus is all those moments in which we discover ourselves and find new meaning through such experiences?

Love the artwork, especially the character design! It reminds me of the promotional images from Wonder Egg Priority, and I wonder if it served as an inspiration for this. The game has got a very warm and vibrant atmosphere, almost feeling like the juncture of spring and early summer, very vivid and full of colours. Love the music too, really sets the mood and atmosphere.

The idea for the game is really innovative and unique as well, I’ve never seen something like this before. Controlling the shadows by moving one character and then letting the other character use those as platforms is a really cool concept. I feel like the execution would need a bit of polish and bugfixing though, since it was a bit difficult to control the characters and prevent them from getting stuck on objects or shadows.

I also got stuck at this point since I could not move the girl any further down, so the shadow of the stairs couldn’t get low enough for the shadow girl to jump on top of it. Maybe I am missing something here.

Overall a very fun and unique concept going on here. I wish you all the very best!

Woah, you actually played and recorded them! That’s just so very impressive, I am totally in awe. 🙏 The most I can do is play on my Casio keyboard, so I usually just use VSTs when I’m trying to compose something myself. I’m just an amateur though ha ha.

And wow, you wrote the haikus yourself too! That’s some sheer dedication to one’s art. I’m excited to check them all out when I play the game with some proper time in hand. My Japanese is only at the level of modern literature with some basic familiarity of classical forms, but I’ll be sure to take my time to appreciate them properly!

I’ve never met someone else as such doing gamedev either, so this is a pleasant surprise for me as well! Most of my peers were, well, very muted creatively, and I really felt lost and out of place having no one else to really share my creative passion with. In a country like mine with an enormous patient load, the work environment in the medical field is just soul crushing, it reduces a person to something… not quite human. Thankfully I’m gonna be moving into a branch focused more on research and academia, so maybe I will find my place there, and also find more time to pursue my creative endeavours.

I just saw your ongoing project now on your website, the premise looks very interesting and gives me Rune Factory vibes. Mikos are also one of my favourite character archetypes in Japanese media, really love their traditional red and white outfit, very elegant and graceful. The reveal mechanic could work really well, maybe with her holding a kumiko lantern, could lead to some really cool light effects I imagine. Lots of interesting possibilities to explore.

And sure I’ll be visiting your discord! (I’m guessing the link is on your website.) Would love to observe and learn from your creative process. My best wishes to you folks!

Thank you so much! 🙏 I am really glad that the feeling got conveyed because we were aiming for an atmospheric and immersive feel, taking the reader along with us on an allegorical journey. So happy that you enjoyed the experience!

I do have a lot of plans for the future, but let’s see if Fate favours me ha ha. I do this entirely as a hobby but it’s my true passion, so while I cannot be sure when the next project comes, I am actively learning when I can and exploring new horizons. One of the things I’d love to work on is my conceptualization of what a (primarily) interactive fiction game would be like when the “roguelite” philosophy is incorporated into the game design, with the entire world and narrative changing every time the player character “dies”, based on the actions and decisions they made in their past runs. While I have the entire story and worldbuilding set in my head, the challenging part would be the implementation since there’s probably gonna be a lot of flags and states and branches and what not to handle. Let’s see how the tapestry of the Wyrd unfolds… 🤞

We are really glad you liked them! Thank you so much for playing our game!

Absolutely gorgeous art direction! It is just so aesthetically pleasing to the eyes, the pastel colour palette on that slightly off-white canvas, with the world rendered in that washed watercolour post-processing effect is just SO GOOD. It’s especially beautiful when the world slowly reveals itself and it feels like a painting being gradually drawn on a canvas.

And did I say that the violin and the flute are just the two of my most favourite instruments? I loved the music so much, it’s so calm and relaxing and has got a certain feeling of nostalgia to it with its slightly melancholic undertones. Combined with the art, it makes the atmosphere feel very peaceful and zen, and evokes the fond memories of reading a fairy tale book from one’s childhood. Absolutely wonderful!

Some of the scenes I really loved:

The twin jizo statues in the field of nemophilas and morning glories

The fox shrine beneath the cherry blossoms

And these two especially wholesome ones. Really love the little ducklings!💖

Would love to see you folks build upon this further. I think it might be nice to improve the pathfinding for the ducklings a bit since the ones further down the line kept staying behind, especially if the line had three or more at once. Also some kind of restriction against using the reveal ability without any limitations might help in making the gameplay loop feel more engaging, since it would encourage the player to be more thoughtful in their actions.

I also went ahead and checked your other project Rokoh and it looks absolutely fantastic as well. Classical Japanese aesthetics are some of my absolute favourite, so it looks like a real treat for me. I’m definitely gonna check it out properly when I have a nice chunk of time in hand. I’m curious though, did you write this haiku yourself: “朧々の… 儚き命… 煌めかん”? Cause I couldn’t find it in literary sources myself, though it’s likely I didn’t look hard enough.

Thank you so much for playing our game! Glad you liked the idea. It’s somewhat different than how I originally imagined it to be, since I intended to let the cards interact with each other and organically combine to either form new cards or destroy one other, letting the player experiment with them more and have it be a more sandbox kind of experience, though I quickly realized that it would have been too ambitious of an idea and not something we could execute within the game jam’s period and still deliver a playable experience. It’s definitely something I want to explore in the future, either as a remake of this project or probably an entirely new one if fate lets me pursue this passion of mine. Really appreciate your kind and encouraging words!

Thank you SO MUCH! We are so happy you enjoyed the experience, and personally, it means a lot to me that you liked the writing. 💖 I shall also convey your praises to the rest of the team!

I initially had a grander vision where you would have been able to combine cards like in Weather Factory’s games and have a more non-linear and interconnected branching for the story, many more routes and probably thrice the number of cards used currently. 😆 But that was too much for us to handle within the game jam’s duration so we had to scope down about 7-8 times during the development process ha ha. Though I would definitely love to work on this further and create a better and more polished version if everyone else in our team is interested to continue with this project in the future.

Thank you so much once again for playing our game since being able to connect with people through my stories is the entire reason driving me to pursue game development, even though I can only afford to do it as a hobby right now. Being able to make the player live inside my worlds and experience them firsthand feels so much more rewarding than just telling them a story through an interface of lines and letters. Maybe someday… one can hope, right?

Thank you so much for playing our game, we are really glad you enjoyed it! And thank you for your constructive recommendations, we highly appreciate it, and I definitely agree with all of them.

I wish we had one more day to be able to polish the game, since we were scrambling with fixing bugs and card logic and export errors on the last day and had to sacrifice on the aesthetics to focus on a fully playable build (though it’s not meant to be an excuse for the shortcomings). I would love to work with the rest of our team on a post-game-jam build incorporating features like a more polished and unified UI layout, adding some noise textures to deband the background gradient, fixing the resolution crunching of the cards (Emi did an impressive job with the cards but we were just not able to figure out proper scaling techniques to put them in game without distortion :( ), fixing audio bugs and extending the duration and transition of the loop segments, adding font scaling options, and a lot more! Thank you for all the support and encouragement!

This was incredibly well made and polished. I had a lot of fun with this and will definitely recommend this to my other friends!

It definitely plays a lot better on a controller than with a keyboard, and I think it might be a good idea to let the player rebind movement to WSAD which a lot of folks are more comfortable with. I had issues with the game freezing in the browser when all the missile projectiles spawned, so I will try again later with the windows version to finish that section properly. Also might be nice to bind interact and dash to separate buttons since I often accidentally triggered dialogue with NPCs when I was just trying to dash by.

I’m pointing these bits out because otherwise it was an absolutely smooth and wonderful experience, totally professional tier! And I would love to see you expand on this and build something bigger because this was just an absolute joy to play!

The world was very fun and charming, I loved the chickens and their dialogues. And the seals too, though I wish we could hug them! Cute art and colour aesthetics. Also buff chicken was a sight to behold!

5/5 stars from me! Wish you all the very best!

Sorry to hear that, I believe it could be due to your browser running out of allocated RAM, would you mind trying out the downloadable version? It’s at the bottom of the page.

I ABSOLUTELY loved this game! It is just sooo endearing and adorable. I loved the interactions between the monkey and the goat, and the little sfx you have when the dialogue plays adds so much to the charm. The platforming almost feels zen, though maybe a better indication of where the platform hitboxes are could help, since sometimes the ledge sprites can be a bit deceptive. Otherwise the movement and input feels really consistent which I think is a very important aspect that gets overlooked in many platformers. It just feels good to play this one.

The logo design is especially something that is really creative. I really love what you have done with the goat’s horns and the monkey’s hand holding a stick, and the ear and fur on the other letters, which is just such a good way to convey what the game is about.

The gameplay loop is simple to learn yet so fun, and I highly appreciate the QoL features that you have added like control prompts at the bottom of the screen, as well as the ability to pause the game anytime. A very well thought out progression curve too, as the player is organically lead towards solving more complex sections.

The only thing that makes me sad is this… I tried to look for an exploit of some kind but couldn’t. ≧ ﹏ ≦

Would be looking forward to try out the post-game-jam version since I really want to see Monkey get back home and Old Goat enjoy a nice hot spring bath for his hard work. 5/5 stars from me!

Sent one on discord!

A very interesting take on the incremental clicker genre, and while I don’t usually play them, this was quite an enjoyable and comfy experience. You have got a really cozy feel going on, and the voice acting, might I add, was smooth and charismatic. A bit cheeky, but in a good way ha ha.

I noticed an issue with not being able to manually swap the cookie that was being launched from the cannon. Also the pathfinding for the characters might need improvement since they kept getting stuck on the Christmas trees and other obstacles, and I had to free them by shooting them with the cannon.

A few suggestions and ideas from my end if you decide to keep working on this. The camera could move slightly faster and it might be nice if you pivot the cannon to the center and then let the player change its angle with just the mouse movement since that would be a lot more intuitive I believe. Decreasing the progression curve at the beginning might also help, since these games are all about giving small dopamine rushes to the player at frequent intervals to keep them hooked on the gameplay.

Well done with the game! My best wishes!

I really love these types of surreal games so this was quite a treat for me. Very good pixel art, both on the main menu screen as well as the sky, which looked really cool.

The hallway with doors and 鳴門巻き was also really cool and I hope you work on this further and add scenes for each of the doors, maybe only let the player progress with certain doors after they have finished the scenes in the previous ones. Could be a really solid adventure rpg if you decide to keep developing it!

I noticed that a lot of image sprites were missing, so I wasn’t able to progress much in certain areas. The playground scene outside the window was missing and after you finished your homework and went out of this room, it was just totally white. I could move around still but couldn’t see where I was going. Also, it took me a bit of time to realize that you had to hold Right key before pressing Space to get up from the chair.

I also went through the second door which was really cool with the endless level.

I think I managed to make it to the exit, but it won’t let me get inside it.

I am not sure if the other doors in the hallway had more stuff since the character nodded and didn’t want to go inside when I interacted with the other doors, but I could be missing something, so let me know.

Definitely enjoyed playing this a lot since I really love top down 2D RPG games.

Very good art and world design, also cute characters! I’m really bad at both 3D platformers and puzzle games so it was a struggle for me but the concept was definitely very interesting. I can see this doing really well with 2 person co-op if you consider developing it further.

Some suggestions for improvements if you would like.

• Adding the ability to rotate the camera would be nice, since your viewpoint is often obstructed by other objects in front of the camera so you can’t see where exactly the characters are moving.
• Some dithered transparency on objects or some kind of distance based clipping mask would also help with that.
• The camera angle could get quite low at certain sections, and while I am not sure if that’s an aesthetic choice, it does make it slightly difficult to view the entire puzzle section compared to a more “bird’s eye” kind of view.
• The difficulty ramps up quite fast, especially with the third room suddenly expanding into a large area with many puzzles, which can get quite overwhelming for the player. Some more tutorial sections would also be appreciated.
• Lastly, the jump was a bit floaty and difficult to control, so some of the platforming sections felt hard to maneuver.

Overall you’ve got a really solid project going on here with a very interesting concept and a nice flavour. I would highly encourage you to keep building upon this post-game-jam, since I think this could easily become a popular game! My best wishes!

I really loved the music track used at the beginning, since violin is my absolute favourite instrument. Nice writing on the opening section too. But I couldn’t really figure out how to proceed with the main segment of the game.

This is where I got stuck at.

I thought I was supposed to collect the bell, but making the cat jump up to that didn’t work.

The camera also doesn’t progress beyond that point so I am not sure if I am doing something wrong. I’m playing on a 1920 x 1080 screen just to be clear, so maybe something is getting cut off at the edges?

Very nice atmosphere and ambience! I really liked the dreamy and comfy vibes.

There were some framerate issues at certain moments but nothing too bad. I managed to get the first two balls of light but couldn’t reach any other locations without falling off the world map. I’m sorry I’m just bad at 3D platformers. {{{(>_<)}}}

I tried going in these two directions but couldn’t jump high enough or fly, so cannot proceed any further sadly.

The art direction is really well done and the world looks really pretty! All the best!

Thank you! I’ll be sure to convey it to our musician!

Really fun concept! And a very polished audiovisual experience. I would never have expected trying to touch God’s hand doing a 🤘. That was very amusing.

I’m crying… I hope they can ski together again… (┬┬﹏┬┬)

Very cute and well thought out. The skiing minigame section is simple yet fun, and I especially loved her expression when they were skiing together.

The story is bittersweet. Perhaps not all meetings lead to fulfillments, yet they are memories to be cherished. One can only hope for fate’s miracle in the uncertain future.

Really well done! I hope you can make an ending where they are together again. I would really love to see that! All the best!

Thank you so much, glad you liked it! We were going for an immersive and atmospheric experience, so I am really happy it went through that way.

Thank you so much for playing our game and for your words of kindness and encouragement! 💖

Thank you so much for the kind and encouraging words! I will convey your praises to our artist and musician, and I am sure they will be delighted! We are really glad that you liked it!

Thank you so much for playing our game! We were a little short on the coding department as our first programmer had to leave midway, so we weren’t able to polish it as much as we would liked to have. Will definitely see to it if we can make an enhanced version after the jam’s voting period ends. :D

The web version is a bit buggy especially if the browser is not fullscreen, so we need to look into better resizing methods for the UI. As for multiple endings, yes! There are 4 unique endings in all. Without spoiling too much, it has something to do with rejecting a certain card after putting it inside a slot (there should be two buttons showing side by side below it, but they are a bit too small for my liking, sorry we weren’t able to fix it in time. D: )

Would love to know if you manage to find the other endings and your thoughts on them. Thanks once again!

Thank you so much! Glad you liked it.💖

As dawn breaks against the frigid smoky sky outside my window, I look back upon a sleepless night well spent. Probably one of the happiest sleepless nights I’ve ever had. This was both the first time I ever participated in a game jam, and also my first time leading a team like this. And might I say, they have all been amazing!

I don’t have a lot to say at this moment, except that I am grateful, deeply grateful to my wonderful team who were only strangers a couple of weeks ago, but have become some of the best company I ever had. Thank you Emi, Kash, Wickidie and Monarch, for your incredible efforts without which this wouldn’t have been possible. And THANK YOU to thatgamecompany for organizing this jam which unraveled the strands of Fate that brought us all together. Thank you greatly for this opportunity!

As someone who dreamed of becoming a creative designer, inspired by the likes of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Yoko Taro, but have been forced to choose becoming a doctor due to the harsh reality of living in a third world country, this gamejam has allowed me to live that fleeting dream of mine, even if for just a couple of weeks. It was beautiful…

Sincerely,
Imouto