Nice prologue-style story! Is it possible to fail rolls?

Saw a few “narrative bugs” here and there like repeating information or questions, but overall easy to understand.

The last bug was humorous though:

“Your name, what is it?” “It’s $name.”

Interesting, I checked the first two but they didn’t use the shortcut on the first level with horizontal throw… I suppose it’s less reliable before of its chaotic nature.

Hey, that’s right. So the statistics are not complete…

It may be nice to set it as separate category indeed. itch.io must know what tool is an engine since it has this page listing engines.

I was checking the sorted list of most used engines: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

which is based on the number of projects using this engine every week, you can see it in the figures.

But then I saw there is also a sort by popularity: https://itch.io/game-development/engines

which has a completely different order. How is it measured? I don’t think it’s about creators rating the engine itself as not all of them have an itch.io page (and I suppose people don’t often do that?)

so maybe it’s about players rating games made with the engine? Which would place more niche engines at the top like Ren’Py because of genre, creator experience, game length, easiness to create, etc. increase the statistics of players giving good ratings?

I don’t need a precise formula but just an idea of what the sorting means and how I can use this information to understand indie dev activity / player reception.

I was checking the list of most used engines: https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects

and notices the libGDX is dead (old link: https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/ gives security alert on https, then if you remove the s -> http it gives an error)

The new homepage is at https://libgdx.com/

I saw it!

… in the meantime ratings just officially ended, but it seems we can keep rating somewhat, and we’ll get top 15 results in 3h and all results in 6h so I suppose we can keep the banner for that time!

I noticed that the big Ludum Dare banner at the top of my game page (and other LD 53 games) disappeared at some point). Yet the rating phase is still running for 2 days (see countdown on https://ldjam.com/)

I understood that it’s normal that the top-right link is not present because the jam is not hosted on itch (see https://itch.io/t/882254/ludum-dare-badge-disappeared). I’m just talking about the banner.

Maybe the rating phase is longer this year so itch metadata has not been accomodated?

I also noticed the Ludum Dare link (the one in the top-right under Rate this game, and the temporary big one at the top that shows during the event) are not active, you have to open More info to see them. Is some meta info missing?

EDIT: wait, it’s the same for my game. Did itch remove the links too early? There are still 2 days to rate. And normally the top-right link to jam should stay forever…

EDIT 2: oops, I forgot Ludum Dare is not a jam hosted by itch.io so there has never been any top-right link. That said, the top banner should probably still stay until the end of event…

Reported: https://itch.io/t/2861327/ludum-dare-banner-disappeared-before-end-of-rating-ludum-dare-53-may-2023

OK, I think you mean window size rather than aspect ratio? (which is also good to support, but the relatively small world + small text issue appears when stretching window, even at same aspect ratio). So supporting different sizes should be worth for Android anyway. In this case it’s more important to have bigger text (which also acts as button), this was my main issue when playing text adventure / visual novels on Android. I know you can play with stretching modes in Godot to decide whether to scale text or not with world, so you could try that; or just manually set the size when using a dynamic font.

Did my comment on Ludum Dare already, but for an itch-specific one: you enabled fullscreen in the embedded web version, which allows me to see more status lines (so I can see the full inventory), but otherwise the rest if the game doesn’t seem to support it: the viewport and font is not scaled so we can see a lot of empty space on the left and right, and even some void since the looping background is not made to cover such a big screen (maybe 1080p but not 1440p). So it may be better to disable? That said, if it doesn’t look too bad at 1080p then you can keep it for such users. Would be nice to have a way to go “partial fullscreen” where you scale the game to a certain limit and fill the rest with black bars, but I don’t think Godot has this out of the box.

Hey, nice game! I’ve played a few ones where you roll a block with colors and you must pay attention to which color it will land on (Zelda and some indie games with a cube), so I was worried I’d have to think about the 6 faces in my mind in advance… But the “next figure” hint helps a lot, and allowed me to focus on the level!

I’d say that it is a little too easy to test the few possibilities we have to finish a level, I even finished one of the first levels only using 30% of the level. I only realized at the end that there was a second dice doing something. I think it’s because you wanted something simple for a tutorial level introducing a new mechanic (here, second dice), but I think that making the most natural/direct path fail and force the player to think and understand the new mechanic to succeed would be more efficient (I had to think better on the next level in the end).

So overall there was no big difficulty, and I have the impression some levels could have pushed things deeper; but some of the later levels had me retry a few times!

OK j’ai dû en faire 4 avant de tomber sur l’accent alors ! Le truc c’est que les phrases ayant toute le thème (ici, années-lumière) elles finissent par se ressembler et donc c’est plus difficile de sentir la progression. Je suppose que ça permet d’être sûr d’avoir le mot du thème même si les phrases sont tirées aléatoirement. Mais j’aurais préféré des poèmes plus variés sur l’espace, les étoiles, le voyage…

Il suffirait de piocher un thème parmi ceux qui contiennent “année-lumière” au début, jusqu’à ce que le joueur réussisse, puis on pourrait piocher dans n’importe quelle autre poème sur l’espace à partir de là, jusqu’à la fin de l’épisode, pour avoir à la fois le thème et de la variété. Ou alors réduire le compte nécessaire à 3 ou 4. Ou bien un mélange des deux !

When using the fullscreen button provided by itch.io as an overlay on a web game embedded like on the game page, after clicking the button to switch to fullscreen, the game focus has been lost and keyboard/gamepad input doesn’t work until you click again.

WOuld it be possible to auto-refocus the game after switching to fullscreen?

Unity and PICO-8’s embedded fullscreen button on web export do this properly. However, Godot doesn’t have such a button in the default template, so I use itch.io’s own button there.

J’adore le concept et les références ! Mais tout comme un autre jeu de typing (japonais avec une version en anglais) auquel j’ai joué où j’avais un problème avec les caractères spéciaux, j’ai des problèmes avec les accents.

J’ai eu un problème avec le premier “à”, mais là j’ai peut-être mal lu le texte brouillé vu que le suivant a bien fonctionné.

Par contre les deux “ê” suivants m’ont complètement bloqué.

Ensuite, au niveau du flow, on ne peut pas passer les dialogues du partenaire même si on les a déjà vus. Et même après avec réussi 3 fois de suite, je ne passe toujours pas à l’histoire suivante. Comment sait-on si on progresse bien ?

Nice game!

I noticed there is no fullscreen toggle (at least on Linux).

The concept is interesting, esp. how dynamites are dangerous and helpful at the same time.

I think the difficulty peak in the second phase is a bit too much, I would have liked some level to get familiar with the horizontal throw first. Eventually I could never make the big horizontal jump from the top-right, although it seems possible with a very precise timing. Instead, I just waited for the dynamites to align themselves so I could do a double explosion jump and directly reach the higher platform.

But it’s not something I could repro 100% as I don’t really remember how I manage to align dynamites vertically by throwing them horizontally, so I didn’t feel too satisfied about it… but finding shortcuts was still pleasant overall, and certainly the way to go for speedruns!

Hey, I’ll be posting itch.io specific comments here as the rest will be on Ludum website:

• you can add a fullscreen button by checking the corresponding box in Edit game
• or, I think Unity has an option to embed one in the web template. Sometimes the the game dimension settings on itch is too small too, so the game view is cropped and you cannot see it. Is the view I’m seeing in web the actual intended view?

Still at the beginning, but I noticed that itch.io selects the first version corresponding to your platform in the list by default. Could you try to move the jam hotfix version up and see if itch decides to select it as default install on Windows? I’ll also try on my side on my own games, I realized I also have a jam and post-jam channel so it may be worth making the post-jam default too.

Otherwise, the Windows Jam hotfix build is running fine on my PC. The web build is running on Linux + Chrome and Windows + Chrome, but is failing to start on Windows + Firefox. The console errors do not mention SharedArrayBuffer, but blocked loading for Content Security Policy, so I suspect Cross Origin Isolation.

EDIT: I kept playing the Windows build it has lag on massive bullet spawn, making it harder to play and dodge at critical moments. Oddly enough, I have the impression the web version on Linux Chrome was smoother? I’ll try it again. Are you spawning your bullets by adding new nodes? I know Godot should be performant and not necessarily need manual pooling everywhere, but in this case maybe some sort of pooling could help. I haven’t checked how other bullet hells in Godot work, so not sure.

Nice paper aesthetics!

At the end of the platformer level, I thought the main character was getting hit by the police car coming from behind!

Also, I didn’t expect the car chase! Unfortunately, I had some issues with it and other sections, listed below.

Note that I’m playing the post-jam version, so the initial jump issue was fixed.

Gameplay

Car chase: I couldn’t jump above the barriers except in rare occasions, so I had to dodge them all besides the cars, which slowed me down quite a lot. The prediction system showing future obstacles in red is interesting, but without the distance left + color changing when coming closer, it’s hard to tell which obstacle will come first when 2+ are coming. So sometimes I’d just go on the wrong lane and hit the next one. I could not catch up with the criminal truck because of all this delay and just gave up.

Once, I tried to jump over the barriers, only to get rejected and fall on my back, causing instead game over (Failure, you wrecked you car!). Another time, a civilian car hit me from behind and also caused wreck game over. I’d rather have a classic life gauge or, since hitting something makes you waste time already, no additional penalty (but a Retry button instead so you can retry if you know you’re not gonna catch up in time, instead of willingly crashing your car).

UI

The main character name in the top-left near the health gauge gives the impression that she’s talking when another character is talking because the avatar + name appears near their speech bubble

Cannot skip cinematic

Animation

When falling, stylus crane animation is a bit slow Also, it took me some time to realize it’s part of the “paper” aesthetics.

Physics

3 balloons gap: the 3rd balloon collider was disabled, so I kept falling through it. I had to keep pressing right from the edge of the 2nd balloon to make a big jump to the next ground to go on; and it worked!

After falling, if you Attack (Z), then move, you can move even during the “stylus crane” animation. It causes the character to be offset from the crane (e.g. a little on the right of it), causing character to fall again in the void at the end of rescue.

Exploit: you can also use the Attack during the crane animation to actually hit enemies

The Windows file is in fact an installer, so trying to play this game from itch.io app will try to install the game several times. You need to manually open the folder to run the game. For itch.io, prefer a portable upload (so basically directly upload the zip that the installer extracts, with the Game.exe inside).

The intro was fun, after that I didn’t get what was happening, then just understood I had to run away.

I reached the top of the maze, or so I thought, I could reach the left and right edge of the map but nothing happened when I went there. So I got stuck and unsure where to go. The random encounters added more runaway scenes so I suppose you should just avoid flames.

I also noticed quite a heavy lag on input as the input buffer stacks more and more if you input many directional changes. That may be a limitation of the engine.

It’s very polished, the tweets are really in sync with the music and the different pitches for each note/key helps “feeling” the patterns and playing more with audio and less with visuals.

I also like the changes of expression, and how the hype gauge influences the foreground.

Sometimes, the last note appears at the same time as the first one starts showing stars so it’s hard to keep track, but adding sound or looking at the last note from the corner of the eye, it was okay.

The difficulty curve was irregular though: it starts very easy for a while, then intermediate for a very long time (where I started wondering if the game had an end), then it suddenly becomes very hard, for the few patterns left. Hard both because there are many notes, and they are placed closer to every other on screen, making the order in which we must press them less obvious. Eventually I lost almost all my hype at once, whereas it was full the rest of the time.

It wouldn’t be that much of an issue if you could wrap to any song section in some kind of training mode, but since you have to restart from the beginning, I didn’t have the courage to go through the easy-medium section again just to try to do better at the hard section. If you could either warp, or the difficulty was steadily progressive, I wouldn’t mind replaying a few more times.

Interesting concept! It takes some time to get used to it and after some time you sometimes confuse the two phase to your death, but overall the invincible phase helps a lot destroying the most annoying enemies. You need to avoid getting stuck between bullets during the slow down phase, esp. at the bottom of the screen!

I died a lot during the last phase, esp. at the end trying to kill more enemies during the invincible phase only to mess up and die by accidentally moving while vulnerable.

In the end I decided to just keep a clear lane and dodge the remaining aimed bullets by moving vertically. This way I could dodge them all, whether in vulnerable or invincible phase and didn’t have to worry about it anymore. So the fact that you don’t have to kill all enemies makes a big different on how you progress.

When green bullets appeared, I feared they would be unphased, but they still move during the invincible phase. If they moved during the vulnerable phase only, we’d have a hardcore game based on duality, maybe harder than Ikaruga!

OK, I wouldn’t use a translator anyway, I prefer getting proofread by people. I didn’t try Grammarly and I admit that my main concern is idiomatic sentences and false friends with French, where I do a lot of mistakes in my drafts; but it seems that Grammarly also covers that, so it could help.

If you have specific bad sentences in mind, you can post them here. If you don’t remember, don’t worry, I still have that writing group on Nanoreno Discord that I forgot to contact after releasing the game.

Thanks! I want to add more scenes, some more focused on humor, and I’m more motivated when I see some people playing the first version!

You made Tiny Adventure, right? I’ll have a look at it!

OK, you can leave this for the first real battle though. In Xenoblade they split the tutorial like this: the intro show battle tells you about the very basics of using skills. The first real battle tells you about advanced mechanics like making the enemy fall.

In this case, there seem to be a vulnerability mechanic, but I couldn’t see skill description explaining which skill increased vulnerability to what. So at the start you could just have normal damaging skills (or the vulnerability would happen but you don’t need to understand that to win). Then the next battles would go into detail in those.

If you fix the radio show, will I still be stuck as I wasn’t supposed to be there, or just trigger an event I wasn’t suppose to see at that point? As long as you leave the door open for me to exit back to the city, it should be fine!

Or if you make the intro battles faster, it’s also fine. Finally, if I can change the mode from Easy to Difficult mid-game, I can also use fast to quickly finish the intro. Just tell me once you updated it!

Still playing the game, posting my findings so far:

Wow, that’s a strong setting and intro. The story flows fast, I want to see how it goes on! And character psychology is smartly spread over the talks.

Bugs:

• At the beginning, the Confirm button is cut at the bottom

• After “Ah… I’m crying”, the next text from the detective is instantly skipped

UPDATE:

• the hospital beep loop has a shorter interval at the end, so regularly, the next beep will be played a bit earlier than expected. There is no reason for the character to be stressed at the moment of the story, so I don’t think that’s intended.

Typos:

• “That checks our for a cult” -> ?
• “My fists slam against my legs. One, made our metal shaking”… There were many oddities in this paragraph, it took me a lot of time to understand. Basically, the character lost an arm and a leg on the opposite side like Ed in Full Metal Alchemist? The sentence looks complicated but I think there are also grammar issues there, maybe if you fix them it will become clearer.
• “There’s a hand in my shoulder?” -> “on my shoulder”
• “I thought you were to find who did this to me” -> maybe “you were here to find”
• “I can’t believe I’m beliving her” -> believing

Okay, I was stuck in an infinite loop so I didn’t play too much, so I’ll just post my findings so far and then edit my comment later as I progress. I will also give my notation once I see more of the game.

Bug:

• First, the infinite loop that got me stuck. In the building at the bottom-left you can listen to a podcast between an AI researcher and a journalist that keeps interrupting him. At the end of the dialogue, the dialogue starts again. I try holding escape to avoid pressing Space or Enter and restart the dialogue by accident, to no avail. I had to refresh the game page to restart. I thought I just had to reload the last auto-save, unfortunately, that auto-save was taken right at the beginning of the infinite dialogue! And I didn’t save manually before entering the building. So I basically have to redo the game intro to get back to this point. It takes a bit of time in Difficult mode. I could try Easy mode to finish the intro faster, but can I switch back to Difficult mode later so it’s not Easy all along? Alternatively, if you can patch the bug, I’ll be able to jump back to my browser save and resume my journey from here.
• Some clamped text on the right of the dialogue on long sentences. Not sure why since resolution is fixed. It may be an engine bug:
• Pressing Escape to open menu also exits fullscreen mode. I had the exact same issue in another game (a Unity game with WebGL build). It was not fixable but at least I added an alternative input: Tab to open the menu. In your case, you need both menu and back nuttons. There is already have the Touch button with a Back icon, but a keyboard shortcut is better, so you could pick Backspace or Z or whatever as alternative Back, and Tab, E, M, etc. as alternative open menu button.

Pacing:

• cool moves at the beginning. The characters move very dynamically as in Sdorica, although they don’t have many sprite animations. It’s rare for games with sprites like these. It almost makes me forget about the standard RPG Maker Sprites
• dialogues also go fast and fun

World:

• you actually knock to people’s doors and talk with them instead or breaking into their house! That’s incredible innovation for an RPG! (although maybe some games did it before, I don’t know the whole history) And this means you spend less time opening chests and fridges in other people’s houses, while still getting a feel of how the main character is integrated in the city in their new life. I would have preferred seeing the outside of the neighbor’s house though, seeing the inside if you don’t enter gives too much information and the impression you could enter at first. Also, if you only see the outside, you can make the neighbor appear behind the door immediately instead of having them walk down all the way to the door.

Battle

• Cool intro, but a bit too overloaded for an intro demo battle. The fighters have almost the exact moveset they’d have at the end of an actual RPG adventure. But that also makes it hard to decide what to do, you need to pay attention to colors to distinguish MP and TP costs, etc. Unfortunately that’s a difficult problem to solve. My advice would be to reduce the number of available skills and make the battles shorter, as it matters more to know if the player is good later in the game when the actually get a grasp of the system. In Xenoblade intro, you start with a bunch of heroes with a set of skills too, but 1. Xenoblade limits the number of skill slots in its core system, 2. Xenoblade battle system is real-time, based on auto-attacks and then you can trigger skills when you want, so even if you hesitate, something will happen on screen, 3. the battles are short, I even wonder if it doesn’t get interrupted at some point in time. So basically if it’s just for the show, you don’t have to make something too complex. Although I appreciated I had to pay attention to my party’s health in Difficult mode to actually beat the intro boss.
• Some skills require charge time and it’s not indicated. You could distinguish Instant vs Charged skills like Othercide, using icons and/or colors; but I suspect it’s a limitation of the engine. So at least you could indicate the required time in the skill description (although without a timeline, it’s hard to visualize, but that’s a limitation of the engine without plugin).
• I would say there are many other unexplained battle mechanics, but it all relates to that intro issue. If the battles are fast in the intro, it doesn’t really matter, as you’ll relearn the mechanics later in the game.

Dialogue-tutorial was very helpful, although most of the discoveries are done by trying! I see you were efficient by using Fungus too!

Not sure if “third of bullet bounce” power stacks when chosen multiple times, and I couldn’t observe bounce myself in the middle of the action, so I didn’t pick it on further runs. Speed up was very useful and seemed to stack though.

The fact that the outside fog is just a fog and not walls is cool, you can go near the walls to catch those extra beads lying on the edge, at the risk of meeting more enemies.

And the fact that you can go even further to reach a secret “gameplay safety event” is even nicer. I translated it, it’s fun, but it doesn’t seem to match with the final boss event…

After that, you’re warped back to the center of the map, and I noticed you collect all beads but also all enemy damages on the own! So you must be careful, but you can do that to collect many beads and level up at once! Of course going off map takes a lot of time and there is a risk to meet enemies in later game, so it’s not really exploitable, just fun.

During the final phase, the boss stopped throwing chain of bullets and only shot a few bullets sparsely. Also, some of their bullets were frozen in place (bug, or a balancing system to make the end-game not too hard?). Hitting the boss randomly seemed difficult, but it seems the probability of bullets been increased toward it for this final phase? Or was it from the beginning? If so, extra points for the invisible balance to help the player!

Not sure if I understood the final dialogue correctly… Which makes it harder for me to understand the player character’s final decision too.

Anyway, still had fun and felt encouraged to replay until I succeeded.

I played this after playing Harvest 2300 from LD 52, I see how they relate and also how different they are!

The tutorial is nice, although it’d be useful to be able to disable it on second runs.

Realized you can spam scouts, but probably a bug since I could see the message “already scouting sometimes”.

On my last finish, I was carried over the big mine I didn’t spot earlier and it gave me extra spice! Exploit: for a even higher score, aim for the big mine, then move the camera so that the next small mine is at the bottom of the screen, and you can easily go over 500 by adding extra mining during the rescue!

Glad I could help! I was also thinking, if you intend to make a full commercial game at the end, you will probably have redraw from scratch the assets based on Midjourney image generation just in case (I know it says you can pay a commercial license, but because it is trained on dataset without authorization, you never know when they get sued and the contract changes). You can of course reuse existing pictures as reference.

And for something less serious now: the male idol has a Japanese name, but the sprite was screaming “K-POP” to me!

OK! I personally find the narrative text quite elaborate for a first pass, I spend a lot of time polishing my text but it’s quite not as much “novelized” (I’m also not a native speaker and don’t read a lot of novels in English, so I just write in simple English; and my narration phases are told as if the character was speaking casually).

Indeed, I don’t have an easy solution for the sprite changing and the narration box reappearing. In other games I’ve played using NVL mode, either there were no particular sprites shown (sound novel) or the sprites were shown on the side (Magical Revolt: Mimiko’s choice).

I’m still mid-game but posting my remarks so far.

I like the mood and the story flows simply. Setting is classic but it’s difficult to see where we’re heading without clear character goals. But should be adequate for slice-of-life.

Maybe the main character doesn’t tell much about themselves although they do reference childhood memories, I have difficulties establishing their personality (I have the same issue when writing a VN at first-person though).

UI issues:

• Sometimes the narration box disappears, we see the BG of character sprites appear/disappear/change, then the narration box comes back but not cleared. So I take some time finding where I was in the text

Story issues:

• Cerise said she spent days in the library with her friend, then later during sports MC says “she mentioned she didn’t spend a lot of time for reading earlier”

• “This can’t go on much longer or homeroom will end” => is MC worried about that despite the battle? Or is Cerise strong enough MC doesn’t worry about surviving anymore, but more about silently coming back to school?

• Hero tries to throw a stone to help Cerise after she got her armor and sword, and worries about hitting her

Typos:

• “read it for fun once you’re returned it” => “once you’ve returned it”

Bugs:

• Error: when saying “I… have an idea”: “Cerise eye_closed not found”

• Error: when saying “Anyway…about those monsters”: “Cerise mouth open not found”

The setting is very interesting! Cyberpunk themes takes the biggest part, then dystopian idols, then magical girls.

I really felt in my choices that I’m doing some compromises but ultimately I just end up trying to survive.

I couldn’t experience a lot of changes based on my choices, but I assume the loyalty will affect story later when further chapters are released!

The magical girl aspect doesn’t strike out as much possibly because “artificial” ones are very different from what they usually look like, or because of the cyberpunk blend? I think that visuals could be blending the two aspects more. But I’m not sure what it would give (crossing a certain threshold, the Magical Shield bodyguard design would not look serious enough). There are several ways to interpret “doll eyes” so I’m not sure if the sprites show exactly what’s described in the narration, almond eyes with strong edges and eye-lashes, or if they are supposed to be rounder like the idols (but I suppose not, to make the distinction?). That said I like the individual designs, taken independently of this.

The female idol’s character art stands out too much compared to the other ones, but it’s also part of her “modifications” and due to the fact she’s wearing very different clothes, so I’m not sure what could be done about it. In the Gunnm movie, Gally/Alita has bigger eyes but it didn’t strike me that much in the end. Maybe it’s just that she appears for the first time out of nowhere in the neon city, but she has no cyberpunk elements on her? (but the male idol too, however I find him to blend better; smart clothes are probably just better at this).

Was AI used more for characters or backgrounds? (I see backgrounds have some gibberish so that could be it, while characters have precise details mentioned in narration, so more likely hand-drawn; but since the description says AI results were heavily edited anyway, it’s hard to tell)

UI issue: when the scrolling bar appears, it overlaps the text (surprised Ren’Py doesn’t fix that on its own)

Typo: “Stelar Tears” -> “Stellar Tears” Grammar: “the only 10 years old young idol” -> “the only 10-year-old young idol” (I’m also not sure about “only” if it means it’s the only idol that is so young, or if she has only 10 years; and “young” sounds redundant)

Audio: it’s nice! But maybe the opening theme is too much on the magical side, not even on the Cyberpunk/darker side? It also depends on how the story unfolds, but it quite surprised me compared to the visuals.

Also, I don’t read Spanish but it’s nice you had it too! I don’t even publish my own games in French, but it would help me as I often think about fancy expressions in French first, then need some time finding a good equivalent in English, but not as fun.

Aha, I expected a full mini-game for the ending, but I suppose that works too!

The story is simple but clear. The dialogues flow well although the initial monologue is a bit long (but you can see how she’s explaining the situation, objectives and means to the player). The sprites do the job too (maybe the road toward the mountain wasn’t clear as there are trees blocking the road, but the dialogue showed clearly it was the way to go at the end).

There is some imbalance between time spent with Chocolate vs Strawberry so we don’t get to explore much of Strawberry.

The thing that surprised me the most is the sudden change of mind of the main character (and Strawberry, but that was to be expected since we were approaching the end), but I suppose there’s not much to do about this when the story is very short.

UX issues:

• as invadererik said, it would be nice if the dialogue was skippable. The long dialogue with Chocolate is repeated if you talk to her again, so it was very tedious to go through. It’s weird that Vanilla would apologize twice, so she should have a new line like “I’m in, just seek Strawberry” when you talk to her again. This was the only big issue I had.

Sprite issues:

• character sprite appears below Strawberry’s house roof (layer issue)

Bugs:

• I could enter Strawberry’s house the first time, but when leaving I triggered a dialogue saying she’s absent…

OK, I’ll see how things are going. I intend to add more content, making it a proper intrenaimo, but if I stop here most of the work would have been done during the jam, making it closer to a classic nanoreno.

I wonder how many manual inputs are needed before a tag gets officially recognized?

Actually I just searched and there are only 3 entries so far: https://itch.io/games/tag-intrenaimo

Is the IntRenAiMo tag a mere Twitter tag, or something we can set on itch.io? I started typing it in the itch.io page tags field, but it didn’t autocomplete. Maybe just because not many people used it? Should I still enter it manually if I need to?

(in my case I didn’t do much work before the jam that was not changed later, so the tag is not super relevant, but if I decide to use it eventually, I prefer knowing how exactly)

So I was lost at the beginning for the same reason as Spirit, I threw the pets but wasn’t sure if it reached the monster or not. Apparently, I managed to do it once as the monster stopped attacking me, but sometimes it would turn into a snake form and move randomly instead… So I followed Bis35’s video (which corresponds to the dev’s advice about luring) and let the the animal plants follow me and stay behind me, then waited for me to be eaten by the monster, and it’s much easier and reliable.

In the end, I didn’t have to care about the second type of seed, nor using the plants as fuel (can be useful in emergency to recover stamina, after sleeping outside, though), and didn’t have to face the Snake form at all… It seems there were many things that were designed for the game that didn’t become as critical as they were supposed to be in the end.

My biggest issue was the current tile selector. It was difficult aiming right to plan seeds and water them, and while being attacked by the monster I had to time to aim right, so I couldn’t really have fun with the extreme experience of doing stuff at the last minute. So in my last run I just played safely, sleeping early, etc. but I’m not sure if that’s the intended experience.

Also, since you barely have time to plant and water your seeds in one day, you just stay in the same spot (preferably near the seeds); fortunately it’s enough to win, but if the game was longer we’d need more time for extra exploration each day.

That said, I’m used to these kinds of issues when testing jam games, so it’s okay. The concept/story itself was still interesting.

I’ve studied some AI and decision trees so I like the concept. Although computing expected value from probability weight and reward is not very fun for a human, as we tend to like being intuitive and getting the feel for it rather than doing the math. An exercise to force ourselves to get a rational mind?

I noticed that the random setup can give odd rule combinations. In particular, when there is no “if the attacker is caught once, the game ends”, there is no way to end the game and check the final score (and I tend to just get worse and worse). I also got a setup where Reward = -(If caught) everywhere, so everything was about reading probability. On this game I could catch the attacker, so it ended pretty quickly (generally speaking I just end ignoring the score and focusing on probability to end things faster).

I found it, your builds are not tagged for OS: mac should check OSX, PC should check Windows and Linux.

I’m surprised as itch has a good parsing system and will auto-detect names like mac or pc (granted, for pc it’s unlikely it selects Windows).

How did you upload the files? You can always override the auto-detection with the 3 methods:

• manual upload: just check the platforms after upload
• butler push: the channel name is used to deduce the platform. So mac should work out of the box, pc will probably only add windows though so you’ll have to add linux manually
• Ren’Py launcher “Upload to itch.io” button (in the build screen, click it after building) -> it’s smart and will auto-tag each build with the correct platforms

Sometimes I spot a bad translation in French, go to Weblate, but notice that there are already change suggestions in the Things to check section. The suggestions are good and correspond to the fix I was thinking of, so I try to click on Vote up or Accept button (not sure what the difference is if I don’t have admin rights; as I probably cannot just Accept something by myself?)

But then I’m sent on a new page that says: “The translation has come to an end.”

I’ve searched this string and other users got it on other Weblate projects, but don’t have a clue either. Does it mean it’s impossible for us to improve the translation at this point? Because we really need to fix those bad strings.

OK, even weirder now. After logging in and making sure French was set as my primary target language, I’m searching for the string again and this time I get “No string matched your search!”. I’m now unable to even find the bad string I used to see. Am I missing something in the setup?

For info the bad string in question is “Ajouter à une collection déjà nommée”, but I’m more interested in the correct process to upvote and apply suggestions than this specific issue.

EDIT: just realized I found the exact same string one year ago but got a login issue according to my old post. Since then, I could properly log in with GitHub, now my issue is that I cannot easily search for a string.

So, I tried again and found that to search for a French string directly, I need to use Advanced query builder > change Source strings to Target strings and fill the field. Alternatively, use Custom search with target: "French string".

This actually works, but the reason why I couldn’t see the same as before was that in the meantime, the suggestion I voted up/accepted was actually properly accepted, so I had to search for the new string. But the change was not immediately reflected on itch.io, so I had the impression it wasn’t accepted yet.

So I have a few questions now:

• how does voting/accept work? Should we just vote when we think it’s a good translation but want to wait if something better comes up, and accept when we’re sure it’s okay? Is Accept always immediate?
• after a translation was accepted, how much time does it take to actually appear on the website?

Another thing is a UX issue with Weblate: after searching, you cannot have an overview of all matching results. You must get through them one by one by clicking on the next arrow, it’s very long! Is there another way? Otherwise that would deserve a feedback to Weblate’s team.

I think there was already a topic about the HTML editor being unstable, but I couldn’t find it, so I’m reopening a thread here.

The HTML editor used in things like game description is quite unstable, adding unnecessary spaces and tags, preventing adding spaces before tables, etc.

Today I found another bug specifically when copying Markdown text from Typora: https://github.com/typora/typora-issues/issues/5671

and the bug is not present on the latest version of Redaktor (which I think is used by itch.io according to page source) testable here: https://imperavi.com/redactor/examples/initialization/base-example/ which means itch.io may be using an even older version.

Anyway, Redaktor is superseded by Redaktor X or Article depending on the needs anyway. And there are other HTML editors out there, or, if you fully go the Markdown way like on this very post I’m editing, there are Markdown editors combining source display and result like StackEdit (used on StackOverflow). They say it also has a WYSIWYG mode but I couldn’t see it, however there may be some browser editors with direct Markdown editing too (similar to what Typora does, but in browser).

So at some point, itch.io should either upgrade their editor (probably to Redaktor X) or, if they prefer an open-source/free solution, use some alternative HTML or Markdown editor.

In the thread I couldn’t find, they mentioned it was in the works, but I think it was a discussion from years ago, so I’d like to know about the new status on this.

If the issue is that they want to switch to Markdown, but there are already many pages using HTML, then we’ll have to add a hybrid mode to allow both, at least during some transition phase.

If HTML proves useful for custom pages until the end, then we could even support hybrid content (like Jekyll where you write Markdown until you open an <html> tag, basically). However, that may need more tech integration that just either HTML or just Markdown, which we know we can do since game descriptions use HTML and thread posts use Markdown.