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komehara

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A member registered Mar 13, 2016 · View creator page →

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I tried again from the Downloads popup and now I get:

“An error occurred during installation No manager for installer unknown”

image.png

I was eager to play this game since I had been interested in Kid Paddle’s algebraic fight into an actual video game for a while.

The corruption system really makes sense to give a penalty to imperfect match proportional to the difference, while giving an extra change to the player to make things right (or fail to match once more and propagate corruption further).

My second run went pretty well, I kept using unit 20 => divide in 2x 10, square 10 to 100 and easily reach big numbers. At the end I picked the “merge digits” card which was super powerful and allowed me to reach the boss’s HP in just two steps.

The game is pretty and is a technical “sugar” as usual with the engine. Even grass moves!

The ingame interface is nice as instead of selecting a pair of objects you click between them, and move units around to prepare this, making the game more toy-like and funny to work with (maybe inspired by educational tools that let kids move numbers and letters around to form words and bigger numbers).

Now for a few issues:

  • after the last fight of an area, GO! appears but then the soldiers don’t move and just celebrate. They should probably just reappear and celebrate, without the GO which gives the impression there is another phase after the last one.
  • I didn’t get that you were deactivating bonuses in story mode: I assumed all bonuses were disabled by default and just clicked to start. So at the end of the area, I was sent back to main menu, tried next area and discovered I needed 3 more starts, but I had gotten 0 since I had so many helpers active without noticing! It’s obvious when you try to toggle helpers that they are deactivated (text is struck and star score increases), but the first time if you don’t try it, you don’t notice the 0 star (thought it was a hiscore of something) and just end up playing for 0 star. May be good to explain this better to players who want to play hardcore and assume bonuses are disabled by default.
  • the Sword (attack) button is far in the top-left making mouse play pretty slow. Fortunately I discovered classic PC shortcuts 1-2-3… numpad keys for quick access of Attack and Spells. This could be added as a hint so players not used to MOBA don’t have to guess them.

Hey, I reached level FEU A VOLONTE and thought I found the solution, but my Canardeur is stuck although it seems it should be able to go on. As if it was stuck by just 1 px step too high.

Should it work this way or should I try something else? (I have an idea using the 3rd character if needed)

OK, in fact I was looking at itch app Downloads list and I saw an update there, but I think it was just the old update that fixed the Boost during pause issue.

The first boss is the Imposter.

OK, I had the impression the game was saving at every step since I was seeing a mini-transition screen after each scene, but I suppose it was just a loading, not a saving screen (it appears and disappears super fast).

If you can implement auto-save after each battle / important decision it would be great! Like Darkest Dungeon (I think?) or Healer’s Quest. If the game is using manual saves on selected slots rather than auto-save on the same slot then you could allow manual save after each battle or something (but I’d need to be reminded of it… unlike Renpy games which are standardized I may not think about it).

OK, I’ll reach you on DevTalk, although I’m mostly interested if there is either per-battle save or a good difficulty balance because currently the first boss battle is quite long so I’m worried about losing it, closing the game and having to redo the minion and boss battle again.

OK, full keyboard is good for me but there was that bug where you lose focus when you press Escape and so you need to click once (although you don’t see the cursor) to grab focus back so it wasn’t totally full keyboard either I think. As long as I have ways to learn what the status icons mean, it’s OK (for instance Octopath on Switch works well with just the gamepad, but there is a status tutorial (which could be replaced with the PDF guide for this game - or additional text on status change).

Aha, I wanted to write a website support chatbot parody but this one is not bad either! Although I went into a semi-loop at some point (I had to answer what I was doing twice, I replied Sorting documents and then It is boring the second time). You don’t really predict how to reach the right place in the dialogue, but it just happens and it’s quite fun when it does!

(coming from: Unity 3D Francophone Discord)

Hey, I tried your Slice Manager from GitHub and it worked great, but I needed to slice a bunch of items from a downloaded spritesheet so I also tried Better Slicer next, but it did nothing in Aseprite v1.3.2. Is it supported?

I can give more details on GitHub issues and a sample spritesheet if needed.

Hello, I’m back and testing the last version now after a while. With a fresh mind I can also tell you what issues I still notice or discovered due to not playing for a long time:

Setup

  • first, my game started 1 fight before the 1st boss, while I remember having defeated the boss and stopped soon after that last time.
  • in fact I just tried again after defeating the minions and I’m also back to before the minions! I’d rather be sure the save system properly works before going further before the boss takes quite some time to beat
  • the game’s maximum resolution is 1080p. On a 1440p monitor, the main menu (and the rest of the game) looks OK, but the settings menu itself still looks blurry. Maybe it’s due to the Unity default widget textures just being too lores, and it will be fixed once you fully customise the UI?

UI

  • the UI is still very raw at places (I mentioned default Unity buttons but there are also many buttons using primary colors that look proto), since release is approaching it’s something to work on seriously over this year. I see there is no UI/graphic designer in the team, that will be an important addition to the staff, not only for the overall in-game look (since it’s a VN / turn-based RPG you can say that UI is a big part of the aesthetics)…
  • … but also for promotional art. If your case I see you already got a Steam page with capsule art and all, but you can still improve things like the color palette. For instance, the blue of the BONDS in the MAGNETIC BONDS logo is bit dark. It’s not too hard to read but you want maximum clarity on the capsule art. If you find a good stylized Japanese font for マグボ, it will also help stand out (e.g. Freedom Planet’s katakana sub-title uses a nice font with a golden gradient - OK maybe the 3-level gradient is a bit too much and not that easy to read, but you get the idea)
  • on the same idea, a few messages (e.g. “Victory”) have very low contrast (yellow on white) making them hard to read.

Battle

  • dropping back into the game, I had forgotten about non-trivial inputs (namely E/R to switch character and boost, Shift to cancel). It would be nice to have a Help / Input reminder menu somewhere (in the Escape menu I suppose) or have the controls reminded in the PDF Guide (easier since no need to implement feature in-game). Personally when I don’t have time for in-game controls I write them on the itch page, which you can also do (but that won’t do for Steam, as people are less expected to read the Steam page while playing!)
  • … but to me, the best is in-game HUD indicators, namely showing the E/R keys near the character avatars and boost buttons to indicate E/R switches character or increases/decreases boost level
  • E/R effect actually depends on context and that’s a bit troubling at times: you want to boost and instead you switch character. More exactly, in the top battle menu and skill menu, E/R switches character (or fails with error if no character available, which can give the impression that Boost is not available when trying to boost). When selecting an enemy, E/R changes Boost level. It differs from Octopath which allows Boost level change on skill selection, so I easily mess up. I like however that unlike Octopath, you can Boost at the last moment during enemy selection. => in the end it may be better to allow boost on both skill and target selection. To avoid confusion completely and also allow player to change character during skill selection, you can also assign different buttons to character switch and boost level change. It would be more complicated to remember and use all these keys though (but if inputs are remappable, players can choose to either use contextual boost/switch character or dedicated buttons).
  • if you support gamepad (very recommended for Steam), I suppose E/R would become L/R triggers which is very intuitive (Octopath uses it for Boost already). Would could still use LT/RT on Xbox or X/Y to switch characters. Alternatively a Chrono Trigger-style left/right button to switch character from the top menu (then it’s better to show all character action boxes as in Chrono Trigger - it can be overwhelming to some, so there’s some UI decision to make)
  • the Escape pause to increase Boost indefinitely hack has been fixed!
  • otherwise my observations are the same as last time (too many OT, nice to defend at last moment…), and my strategy didn’t change (defend when enemy turn gauge or Rage approaches 100%, else use most powerful skill, consume all Boost when available - I’m considering to use 2 Boost instead of 3 since if I wait for 3 I will “waste” some Boost increase as it gets clamped on the max level)
  • I tried to use the mouse to inspect enemy status alterations/weakness, but I couldn’t see my cursor. Is it disabled during battle? I’d recommend PC-compatible RPG to support mouse, it’s very useful to hover all sorts of information (as in Darkest Dungeon). Otherwise you need a way to navigate through all UI elements to inspect them (I know, it’s hard to do, even Octopath doesn’t do it - I only know CrossCode to have a full help with navigation to get a hint on every element on screen, and that’s just in normal menus).

I have no time left to beat the boss now, and the save system seems to fail again so I’ll wait for your confirmation that it’s working again before I try to beat it again. Then I’ll continue the demo as much as I can.

Similar feature request on GitHub: https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/69

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I noticed an inconsistency between Grid and List (column) view for collections:

  • Grid shows the most options with add/edit blurb and remove
  • List has the fewer options with just add/edit blurb
  • both miss the reorder buttons, which are only available in the Library view (https://itch.io/my-collections)

It would be more consistent to give all the commands (add/edit blurb, reorder, remove) from all views.

Grid view widget (removed pictures to make image smaller):

image.png

(the text buttons in French mean “Add comment”, “Edit comment” and “Remove…”

Same on List view:

image.png

(these ones are translated - may be worth making localization uniform since the buttons are supposed to say the same thing! It would be more correct to use “blurb” everywhere which could be translated as “résumé” in French, rather than “comment” - although admittedly “comment” makes sense when commenting on someone else’s game, while blurb is good to introduce your own game)

Library/All collections view:

image.png

OK, I admit I rushed to the end of the prologue a little but here is my feedback:

  • presentation is interesting with point-and-click style “one text color per speaker”. When character sentences are inserted inside “she said”-style narrative sentences, the character sentence is precisely colored, that’s very neat detail
  • the MC is quite interesting at the beginning, where they “say the right thing” in a very rational manner to make other people feel good. So it’s like the philosophy that “being clever leads you to do good anyway” which I like, but at the same time, they do so only to reach their goals, which also makes them sound manipulative and reduces my own empathy with the MC. Later in the story, this feels less and less, though. Which leads to the next point.
  • each narrative section seems quite disconnected from the others. As mentioned, the MC’s style changes but the theme and focus also seems to change. The only link is the mention of the criminal case, and in fact switching to a battle scene is okay (since that’s the jam’s theme too), but the 3rd section where they just play around in the apartment really feels disconnected. Characters show each other emotions we are not sure how they are justified (second character is ready to live and die with MC, just because they did a good talk in the first section?), and while I understand they can relax, second character said in the previous scene she wanted to stay with you tonight to discuss the case - which you don’t do at all, except mentioning the fight (which you covered as a bomb explosion, see below)
  • there is no explanation for hiding the fact that there is a killer and saying there is a bomb. Actually, the reason given is to protect the second character but I don’t see how
  • some typos/broken end of sentences and unexpected pronoun during the fight (killer named “her” before MC identifies them)

Now for the big issue:

  • while the fight scene is really tense at the start (actually surprised me that MC reveals good fighting skills), it quickly becomes long and repetitive, after the choice, all options take a few pages but not many new things happen. The first 2 options repeat the same things a lot, and the 3rd (correct) option too so I thought all were leading to game over, then I realized the 3rd option actually led to something else at some point so the fight could continue and I could win it

Which leads me to the critical question: have you used generative AI for the text, or were you simply trying to give the same length to all three options, which led you to repeat the same ideas multiple times?

Nothing really triggered me in the first section, it really looked original. But the battle scene really made me remember of the redundant paragraphs I would get when prompting NLP text generators. After the battle, text becomes “normal” again and dialogue flows more naturally (except in the apartment the characters discuss things unrelated to the case, but that seems to be an authoring issue). But I still had this doubt still in mind and it caused me to skip through the text much faster than before, as I didn’t know if it was worth paying attention to every word or not.

Paradoxically, I spot some big sentence typo (breaking the last words of the sentence) in the battle scene so it means either it was actually manually written, or you were at least rewording generated sentences yourself, only using them as a template.

On your profile it’s written writing is your main stuff, so I’d be surprised if you used such a tool for this, esp. if you could write the rest so far. If battle scene writing is not your forte, it’s okay to keep it simple, and in fact it would give shorter but more intense scenes. If you use AI at some point, you must state it, and in this case you should also not submit your game to the jam.

Of course, if you actually wrote everything yourself, being told this was done by an AI may be offending, so I would apologise and simply say the part after the choice was too repetitive.

Now for art: unfortunately I have the same question, did you use generative art AI? Because it has several symptoms:

  • across the game, characters have the same features (hair length and color) but their actual face details and styles slightly change on every new illustration
  • in the apartment scene, it becomes obvious as the second character changes expression: she also changes face art style! And moreover, while the composition remains the same, the details of the whole environment around her all change, with the plants’ leaves and couch’s folds changing! This is typical of reprompting a generative art AI with the same words (+ a small difference to change character expression) due to the random seed / exact set of parameters changing each time. There is no reason this would happen with manual art, where only the character expression would change.

In your profile you also say you illustrate in position 3, so maybe it’s not your main thing, but again, it’s okay, we all illustrate at the level we can or team up with illustrators. There is no need to force yourself to work alone but end up resorting to those tools in the end. Again, if you use generative AI, you must state it and not submit to jams where it is forbidden.

I checked your other games and they sounds like neat little games, properly handmade (I can’t tell for the thumbnail illustrations since I can’t detect anything on a single piece of art, but I see nothing weird about the game content anyway). There’s nothing wrong going on gradually from these and improving your work’s quality over time. And jams are here to meet other people and work with different skillsets, so you should take this as an opportunity to learn and work with others. It’s also totally fine if you work alone, I’ve seen very good novel-style VNs made for jams by one-person teams out there. In fact, several of them relied on either public domain photos/illustrations or photos they had taken themselves.

I hope you can continue on the path of game dev and will one day feel like a fully-fledged member of our community.

As explained in the Disclaimers, the game currently doesn’t run on a native PICO-8 (mostly due to my custom patch to remove token limitation)… but I haven’t tested it on unofficial emulators (fake-08, zepto8) - I also use a Linux handheld, it uses ArkOS and zepto8 as fallback, but since I already own PICO-8 I just installed it instead and never got to try the emulator. So if your emulator has an option to ignore token limitation, it may be able to run it. Otherwise it will fail as soon as you enter in-game, with a token limit error message (but you should be able to see the title menu and maybe the stage intro).

I don’t have my handheld at the moment, but I suppose it would play multi-carts the same way as single carts: put all the .p8 files together in the usual carts folder, at the same level (in ArkOS each console has a dedicated folder, but they apparently keep the pico-8 folder itself for the official binary if you have it, so instead carts go to a sub-folder /roms/pico-8/carts). Alternatively, the .p8.png should also work.

Unfortunately, I cannot give you more information without knowing your specific setup, and the doc for your platform/emulator will probably be more useful to you. There is nothing special with the game itself so if you can run a single-cart game, you can probably run a multi-cart game the same way. The token limitation break is your biggest issue and it’s not specific to Linux/emulator.

I’m curious if some emulators can run the carts so tell me if you can make it work!

P.S.: and obviously there is the solution to run the Linux binary, I have done it myself but it was a hassle on a GameBoy-style handheld: I had to plug a keyboard via USB, press a combination of keys to enter Terminal mode, use the keyboard with command line to navigate to the game’s Linux binary and run it… And I’m not even sure input mapping was correct. So I didn’t recommend it to you. I wish ArkOS had some “Other” category where you can run arbirary binaries and it still provides you with some input remapping overlay, like Steam Big Picture + add external games to your library. But I get it’s not really it’s original purpose.

Porting tilemaps is time-consuming indeed if you don’t have a dedicated script. I don’t know if you’re switching from manual tiles to new auto-tile or old auto-tile to new auto-tile; I don’t see a conversion script for either just doing a quick search, and I don’t know how feasible that is.

If you really have too many maps it may be worth writing your own and distributing it to help other devs working on long-running projects; but if you’re switching from individual tiles to auto-tiles, that may be too hard, I myself have the same issue with PICO-8 native map vs a new 3rd party “PicoMap” that supports meta-tiles.

I have an older Godot 3 project but I didn’t have much to add so I decided to just keep it in Godot 3 (which requires a little mental gymnastic every time I switch from Godot 4), but for a bigger project like this it’s probably worth it. Good luck!

If you need more Linux testers using various distributions you can open a newsletter / form or something and start seeing if you gather enough people to consider it satisfying. I’ll be glad to subscribe.

In my experience Godot Linux export is quite reliable (second after Renpy in terms of “just build blindly on Windows, macOS and Linux and if one platform works, all 3 probably do”, certainly thanks to the use of export templates), but I’ve mostly been using Godot 4 lately so that’s probably something works checking after the Godot 4 port (but you can start the newsletter / subscribe form already to start gathering people).

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When trying to upload an image with a very long name, say 132 characters (easier to repro on Linux, due to Windows file path limitations), the upload will fail:

  • silently when uploading an image for a comment on some game page
  • with a fancy error when trying to uploading a BG texture for a game page in Edit theme mode

The fancy error is very long and contains website HTML itself:

image.png

Thanks for the guide! I noticed that embedded web versions of the game also take precedence on the standard width of 960 for the banner, and will extend the banner width if the web game size (that you can set in page settings) is bigger. That could be a nice addition to the page top banner size explanations.

Nice! I don’t check all my itch.io notification emails so I miss a lot of updates, but I just found the Updates available section in itch app Downloads window, which is very convenient to find out what changed since the last time you installed it! (assuming you don’t change computer)

Using this I can easily find titles, esp. jam games, that got an update - this should be more widely known to users to help rewarding developers who regularly update!

Also a personal note:

Tu vas toujours au PIGD ? Je n’ai jamais eu ton contact Discord, si tu es sur le serveur PIGD et que tu veux discuter en direct, cherche-moi en tant que user “komehara” et notifie-moi sur le channel lobby, je pourrais t’ajouter à mes amis pour te contacter plus facilement.

Hey, it’s me again! I just played a few levels, it looks promising, here is some feedback:

Gameplay/UI:

  • easy to understand and play, esp. after playing other programming games and your other games
  • I admit I was trying to edit Orders by clicking on some bot in the Team building phase though and it kept removing the character… but after that it was okay. If you find some way to unify the two phases though, it’s cool too
  • would be nice to be able to accelerate (or decelerate) gameplay speed with a parameter (this may require frame-independent time, see Performance more below)

Level design:

  • still like the secret paths in this game, esp. the fact that if you programmed your bots so they find both exits, and wait enough on the success after a bot found the standard exit, you can still unlock the secret path when the 2nd bot goes there!

Art:

  • units are distinct and gameplay elements are clear
  • pixel art could be more consistent in scale though
  • when going fullscreen, the pixels start to blur a bit or some triangle artifacts, instead of being pixel perfect (a problem encountered in other game engines not made for pixel perfect art - you seem to be using a custom engine based on DX9, so it could happen too if you work with standard rectangular patches, but I haven’t been using low-level graphics lib for a while so I couldn’t help you much on this)

Performance:

  • ok windowed
  • fullscreen 1440p unfortunately drops speed by 20% or so
  • the app speed affects the gameplay speed, i.e. the timer in the bottom-left is really showing longer seconds. It could be fixed with frame-independent time (i.e. skipping rendered frames when needed but preserving physics updates - not super hard to code, already did it a few times)

Hey, the old post was unarchived so I continued discussion there.

I confirm middle click failing to open in new tab on Linux Ubuntu 22.04, even after enabling Enable tabs (it opens in current tab, which is worse than not doing anything at all because you may lose form content). Right-click > Open in new tab works though.

I often write some review post, check info on the game in a different tab, and finish writing the post. But since middle click failed it replaced the current tab, and when I went back my post draft was lost… This only happens in the itch app which seems unable to save form content. In a browser like Chrome, pressing Back restores the previous page and form content. So it’s even more important in the itch app.

For now, I’ll make sure to review things as much as possible in the browser, and use right-click > Open in a new tab when I really need multi-tab in itch app.

(3 edits)

I just started playing, but as with the other games I’ll start adding my feedback gradually. I don’t remember how the original matchstick tale goes, so I’m just going candid on this one!

EDIT: I continued until 2nd matchstick, going well! EDIT: I continued until 3rd matchstick, getting interesting esp. past revelations and character evolution!

Overall

  • interesting premise. Maybe the start felt a bit slow to me, but it was clear what the MC’s problem and what their mental state are

UI

  • when no name is displayed, the text feels too low where there are 3 lines, it should be offset up a little. But I noticed that’s a common issue with Renpy dialog box I had myself… I only “fixed” this on my previous games by moving the name box higher so it doesn’t eat the dialog box too much… Otherwise, you may need a condition in the dialog box screen to change offset based on whether a name exists or not (see last screenshot on game page)
  • one of the sentences seem to go over 3 lines, it ends with “all you pull up” suddenly, I think the 4th line is hidden because it went below the screen

  • History: the text bleeds to the right (need to increase right margin/padding)

Animation

  • when Claude disappears (at least the second time) there are 2 flickers before the final fade out. Maybe 0 or 1 flicker would be enough.

Choices

  • in the first choice, if you choose to “push him back” it has no visible effect as you immediately join the common branch (also met by the other choice). It may be nice to have a few sentences about trying to push him back, whether it actually succeeds or not (e.g. you try to push him but your hands go through his body, ugh)

Text

  • “You hesitated for a moment longer” -> from this sentence until “you needed to figure out the truth”, the tense suddenly becomes past whereas it was present before, and becomes present again after.
  • “How did we meet and… fall in love..?” -> only dots at the end, since “…” turns to ellipsis and not “..” it doesn’t look intentional
  • “they stood out–a moth among butterflies -> may be better with space around dash, to avoid reading “out-a” like a word Interestingly, I though “a moth among butterflies” was a joke as I had a worse image of moths than butterflies. I checked a few pictures esp. of white moth and I can see the beauty now though.
  • about making up stories-they could change -> same remark on dash and space (in fact, the other dashes in previous sentences had them right)
  • Some’s chasing me -> someone’s chasing me?
  • Your head spings. Just this morning you could barely stand anything to do with the guy => technically MC was really annoyed yesterday, they were quite enthusiast that morning I think

Flow/Progression

  • the matchstick count is quite good for progression, it allows me to save and have a break after each matchstick while having a feeling I advance steadily

Audio

  • angry crowd SFX doesn’t loop perfectly

I just discovered that my published games automatically generated “[author] published [new game]” posts in the New Games Feed section (the global one, but also visible in your personal feed if you follow the author). I was searching for my game’s author+title on a search engine and it found this “hidden” page (see link more below).

The content is auto-generated from the description, which is convenient, except the formatting is not great: bold and newlines are lost, and the description is cut after some N characters with an ellipsis.

Example for https://itch.io/e/15644917/komehara-published-powder

Fortunately, you can click the Pencil button to edit the text for a better short description.

Note: in fact you can even put more characters than the ellipsis, which is great when you just needed a few more characters to finish your sentence - I fear it is however exploitable to make very big descriptions and therefore take more space on people’s feed to increase odds to be spotted. You don’t even need many characters as you can just add newlines to increase the height of the post, so an upper limit on characters AND newlines may be helpful - or maybe some CSS to just limit the post height itself (fading out text too long when it gets closer to the bottom if you want to be fancy)

So I did it for the game mentioned above, but I only found it by accident thx to the search engine. I can search the pages the same way for all my games, but it would be more convenient to access them all from my dashboard or corresponding game edit pages. I didn’t find any obvious link to the Publish post though (I would expect it near the Devlog link or something).

In addition, I see I can delete the auto-generated post by clicking the Bin button, but then I don’t know how to regenerate that post if I messed up. Maybe publishing a Major Update/Publish devlog post would auto-regenerate it? Also, is the post initially created on actual game publish or only when you post at least one Major Update/Publish devlog pose?

Finally, it would be nice to notify users of the existence of that feed post, at the same time as you notify them that they should write a devlog in the top banner soon after uploading a new game binary (at least when done via butler).

Just linking back to my thread for a specific jam I noticed this issue on: https://itch.io/jam/once-upon-a-time-vn-jam/topic/3451243/trying-new-filters-to-encourage-spreading-playtest-and-reviews-random-least-rated-most-karma where the jam host said they couldn’t find the right setting for it (me neither when trying to create a test jam). When we get answers on this thread, we’ll try to implement them for existing/future jams.

Hello,

I noticed the default jam entries filter is Popular which tends to create a snowball effect on good entries as they receive more and more comments and good ratings, and even more as they are displayed on top of the page, as I described on this thread: https://itch.io/t/3451166/game-jam-filters-how-does-the-popular-filter-work-where-is-most-karma-set-random-to-default

This is not bad per se as the players are guaranteed to find good games when they visit the jam submission page, however, for jammers it is more stressful to work on 3 months like the others and receive almost no feedback because we are stuck at the bottom of the grid. It may be that our entry is simply not good enough (but then feedback may help us improve), or that our entry does not look good enough to entice people to click on thumbnails and play (in which case we don’t get a chance to get appreciated on actual content).

In jams that have an official rating period (with stars) and ranking at the end of that period, I saw some of them enforcing the “Rating queue” system: the first entries you rate must be selected randomly from the list, to ensure good distribution of ratings. However, I’m not sure if that feature is available for jams that don’t have actual ratings like this one. It could be reused without the ratings, just as “the first N entries for which you comment on the jam entry page must be random”, but I noticed that on this particular jam, most people prefer commenting directly on the main page, not the jam entry page, so this would not affect them much.

So an alternative would simply be to encourage users to try different filters. Is there is a setting to set “Random” filter as default, for instance, it would allow players to be less affected by others’ ratings, esp. during the period just after the jam end which is critical to decide what gets popular and what doesn’t. “Popular” would make more sense to use later (since there is no official “rating period”, it’s quite arbitrary but I guess one month after the jam end would make sense) since people are now visiting old jams and there are many of them, so they generally care about the best entries only.

In addition, I saw other jams like the Mini Jam showing additional filters: Most Karma (a bit like Ludum Dare), Most Rated, Least Rated. Most Karma and Least Rated would be very useful to spread comments over the different jam entries. Did you have options to enable them in your jam host interface?

I just tried to create a dummy jam just to test, and I see no such thing on the creation apge interface. Maybe they appear only after games get enough comments? Which is a pity for smaller jams which may never reach them.

Anyway, this is not criticism I have towards this particular jam: I had the same issue with all previous Nanoreno jams, and to be honest I just take part to those jams to experiment these days, and I stopped expecting getting that much feedback until I make a really high-quality game. However, that’s for 100+ entries, and this jam is more like 30+ entries, that’s 2 pages in the browser, so I’m sure that spreading playtests over all the entries is feasible.

Of course, for users who come not because of the jam but because they followed a specific developer or did a wild search on itch, it’s more understandable that they just comment on the main page and don’t use the jam entry filter system. I haven’t the stats for such users though, so I cannot tell if there are so many following users in comparison to people interested in the jam as a whole that this is the main reason for focused feedback, or if it’s more related to filters.

If there is a way to make Random the default filter (otherwise recommend using it on the main jam page for the first month), we could at least try it and see what impact it has on the feedback.

I haven’t played the game yet, but the description of this jam entry caught my attention so I watched a bit of the trailer. There is even voice acting on top of the old school visuals, and it’s pleasant to hear the Vietnamese names being pronounced right! (adding exact characters and tones would be even better, but I suppose there may be some font limitations)

The first part is a reboot of https://itch.io/t/2059943/how-does-the-popular-filter-for-game-jam-submissions-work which received no answers, to ask how the Popularity filter worked on game jam entries.

Does it take jam entry comments, general page comments and ratings into account?

According to https://itch.io/t/1688766/why-is-this-game-extremely-unpopular-despite-being-played-relatively-much, recent activity matters, and I have seen entries with many comments and good ratings rank well, so I can at least tell one of those two is used.

Second, I found this thread about implementing “Most Karma”: https://itch.io/t/527869/karma-system-for-the-game-jams but I don’t see it anywhere. Is it a setting that the jam host must enable to work? Example on this one: https://itch.io/jam/once-upon-a-time-vn-jam/entries

I’m looking for ways to make sure comments are more distributed across jam entries and avoid the snowball effect of Game is good enough => Many comments and good rating => become Most popular => People who keep default setting will naturally click on first entries at the top of the page => see Game that is good enough => … which produces a few entries with many comments and most of them with almost no comments (making it hard for me to get feedback and improve the game further as well as being motivated to keep working on it, creating the opposite, vicious cycle).

EDIT: I just looked at other jams like Mini Jam where I see all the new options:

including Most Karma, Most Rated and Least Rated! So it must be a jam host options, or do they just appear after all jam entries reach a threshold of N comments total?

Third, about randomness:

One way to encourage spreading comments/ratings is to enforce ratings of random entries for the first N entries to rate, which some jams do - this one has no rating/ranking though so it probably didn’t make sense for host to enable forced randomization.

Is there at least a setting on jam host side to make “randomized” the default sorting, to encourage testing various games?

If those options exist, then the responsibility lies on the jam organizer, and I will talk to them to see if they can set this up for the next jam.

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It was a nice demo! I see I’m not the only one going with many chapters!

Overall feedback

Story

I like the retake on the classic, to be honest I didn’t know much besides “there’s a living nutcracker doll” so I checked the original story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” and I see where the different elements have gone. But the star quest is original, I’m curious about how it’ll go!

Background

Quite simple, but to the point. They each give the right mood and there are enough to cover all the presented situations.

Character art

I like the style, and there are many expressions with subtle changes of eyebrows. Maybe only changing eyebrow is a bit too subtle though, I had to rollback sometimes to confirm the expression changed. The eyes and mouth could change at the same time for a stronger change (when applicable).

UI

Nice revamp! Too bad the game menu has not been adapted too, it would look great with Christmas decorations!

Audio

I really like the tracks, some adapted from the ballet (maybe all of them but I don’t know the ballet enough to tell).

Issues

Story

When Clarise is sent to another land, she doesn’t seem to worry about not being able to go back to her home, nor that if she does at the end of the adventure she would have still been away for 6 days. In fact she reacts to the Prince saying he doesn’t know how to go back home, but the sentence feels like he’s talking about his home (the castle).

Typos

The King promised to return Christmas morning => on Christmas morning?

A companion of like no other => A companion like no other

Tense: starting with “The figure laughs, then gestures…” tense suddenly switches from past to present. I suppose the introduction was meant to be in past, and the Clarise side of the story in present? Or should it be past/present everywhere?

You brace yourself for what the weather permitting changes may mean for Christmas plans. => not sure about this sentence, I understand “weather permitting” alone at the end of sentence, or “what the weather changes may mean”, but I’m not sure what the mix of both means

I’ll call again when we are heading on our way Christmas Eve. => on Christmas Eve?

Placing away wrapping supplies … reminded you of the present your uncle mentioned was placed on the shelf for you. => wait… that’s actually correct. I thought some word was missing, but after reading it three times, I realised it’s just some elaborate construction, right?

Although, looking around nothing matching … was in sight. => Maybe “Although looking around, nothing matching …” (mind comma placement) would be clearer, but maybe that comma is optional, I’m not sure.

Distrupted by the sound => Disrupted

Event the scent of the breeze carries a foreign sweetest => sweetness?

You politely try to curtesy the best way you know how => Actually, I just researched this and this is the full form of “the best way you know”, so this is correct!

It would probably be helpful if I give some context… => if I gave OR It will … if I give

… not realizing the chilliness from forest walk the outside. => from the forest outside? => Also, realising for UK spelling, but I admit at this point I didn’t monitor which spelling you used in majority so I’m not sure what was the target spelling.

You look at Oren sheepishly … and including me as well. => Mix of you and me in narrator text. The rest of the scene is using “you” so I suppose it should be “including you as well” (didn’t pay attention to the whole game if it was using you/me, my understand is that when Clarise’s head appears we read her mind and she says “I”, otherwise the narrator addresses to the player as “you”) It seems that the end of the sentence was copied from “The Prince opens his mouth … and includes me as well.” (if you choose Friendly introductions) On this particular sentence, there is no “you” so there is no inconsistency. Nevertheless there should be consistency of “you” or “me” across the whole story, so maybe this sentence also needs to replace “me” with “you” (if you decide to go with “you”).

Then it is a honor for me => an honor

Didn’t know slang “voluntell”, “voluntold”! Funny!

Remark: I had a lot of spelling and grammar issues fixed by Google Doc, but any spelling fix service should work if you want an automated check for the most common mistakes (services using machine learning are really good at common mistakes, although they had a number of weird false positives… but it’s less problematic, as you can have these particular sentences be re-read for confirmation).

UI

  • No Exit button on main menu
  • Text input for character name (to replace Clarise) is dark red on red, hard to read
  • Choices are white on bright beige, not easy to read
  • “Exit the story?” on loading save during game is a simplified version of “you will lose unsaved progress” but it’s less clear, as it seems player mistakingly clicked on a button to go back to main menu (maybe you copy-pasted the text?)
  • Right before The Prince says: “Then it is a honor for me to be here”, there is a long wait and the textbox doesn’t disappear. It’s a bit weird as there seems to be no reason for the Prince to hesitate.

Dialogues

On the news choices, if you select Bad news last, Clarise still says: Maybe getting the bad news out of the way would do some good.

Audio

Just after chapter change, advance to next sentence then roll back to previous sentence (the first one after the Chapter banner). You’ll hear the Chapter banner SFX although the Chapter banner animation is not shown! Rolling back again with go to the last sentence of the previous chapter.

Maybe if Chapter banner had its own “block”, i.e. rolling back was actually showing the Chapter banner, it would also fix the SFX issue.

I noticed the same thing on the jams I took part to. If devs are worried about too much DM spamming, we could make a conservative system where user A must whitelist user B to allow incoming DMs from user B (at which time B will automatically whitelist A to reply). It would have the drawback or making message exchanges slightly slower, as B would not be able to immediately DM A, but if A is really looking for people to recruit / teams to be recruited, they’ll probably check notifications, see B’s reply “hey, I’m interested, here is my portfolio, and I’ll send you my Discord ID in DM when you whitelist me” and whitelist B.

But a good anti-spam / trust system can also do the trick. Personally I was contacted my people on Reddit exactly when they had something to tell me about one of my posts, and was never annoyed by spammers (I think? If it happened I must have reported and blocked them in a breeze, so I don’t even remember).

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I’m still mid-game so I will add my feedback gradually.

UPDATE: I finished the demo! I completed my feedback.

Story

  • Intriguing. I’ll wait to see more.
  • Ah, it was a demo, so I still wait to see more! But I see a pattern about how choices influence perception and sprites. I especially like the subtle change at the end, makes me curious about the rest!

Character art

  • Gorgeous! The character art styles & designs are very striking. The Beast has a very peculiar design too.
  • Mei’s dress when she goes out of her room is also impressive. But I wonder where she got all these decorations from… ?
  • Mei’s eyes were more surprising to see in the flashback. Maybe because her eyes take relatively more space on her head when she was a child. Or because sometimes people modify their eye shapes as part of make up, and make up is less common on a child. In fact, I wondered if it was part of character art style at first but when Jian appeared it was clear that it was not. So it must be something specific to her, to indicate the beauty everyone mentioned I suppose.

Background art

  • overall very pretty, esp. the crystal scenes
  • there are some rough edges though, like the patches of snow on the cave/building entrance / hall BG
  • maybe an extra BG for scenes inside rooms (when eating, in bedroom) would be nice, as the default palace BG with snow shows an open area (I also had issues on my game due to lack of planning so I have many scenes with a black background… so I understand, it was either this or reusing a BG that doesn’t exactly fit)

UI

  • Very nice! Cool customization of menu with label backgrounds!
  • Texture style is a bit irregular: for instance, the dialogue box uses “materialistic” textures with precise lighting for the fruits and clean outlines around the vines, while the BG use paint brushes with no outlines nor detailed textured/lighting
  • Issue: when opening History before first dialogue (from the main menu), it shows “The dialogue history is empty” uses default font in bright red, hard to read on brown background and mismatching theme

Hello,

I wanted to play the game but there is only the web version which takes 75% of all my CPU (laptop with integrated graphics card + NVIDIA 860M with Linux drivers). Maybe it’d run better on Windows but I generally have bad luck with web builds.

Could you export an standalone build for Windows or Linux (and macOS users may use a macOS one too)? It should be quite easy with Unity.

Thank you!

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Nice and to the point! Chaining shot jump and shot feels satisfying. It would be even nicer with FX on the gunshot and on hit. Some victory sequence at the end too.

I was a little cautious at the end, using shot jump to slow down my descent and check if there is a platform below, but I suppose it was the point.

The most dangerous part was going up with the risk of hitting an enemy! I had to chain shot jump and shoot up to be safe!

Hello, I noticed the standalone versions don’t appear on the download list on the itch app. You should tag them for Windows, Linux, macOS. For now, I will download them manually via the Download button.

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Still playing since the end of BAF, will add comments little by little.

EDIT: finished! I was just a few scenes before the end! Didn’t expect it to end on cliffhanger, but should have, considering how long and deep the full story seems, and that my own work ended mid-battle too! (well, it wasn’t supposed to, we just messed up with planning) So I’ll just add a few comments.

Story

  • interesting setting. I’ve been playing a few games with an “ark” setting, it’s interesting how this seems to be humanity’s last stronghold yet localized somewhere in Eastern Asia with people coming from a few different countries from there. I noticed the same with Astral Chain mainly featuring US and Japanese names, probably because the Ark must be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean - and to be fair my own entry Spirit Link uses the same process where “East” and “West” is in fact very localized. It makes it easier to deal with fewer groups and fewer disparities, although the amount of differences varies between stories (in Astral Chain it’s all international as it’s humans vs chimeras, in Consummation it seems that the group to which you belong now matters more than your origins, while in Spirit Link conflicts between nations are prominent)
  • most characters are cool (in the sense of down to earth - stylish too I guess), there is nobody overreacting, the child looks normal, so it’s quite enjoyable
  • near the end of demo, the MC mentions avoiding troubles with the law. It surprised me, I assumed she could go farther than that - but I do understand why breaking a window would cause a commotion and possible retaliation. If the character in the intro is the MC then they also were an assassin, but I cannot confirm this (or maybe they just settled down since).

Writing / UX issues

  • in the cross-union meeting, if you didn’t remember where each group is (Pool table, Corner tables, Bar counter), it’s hard to tell where you should go. It would be easier if the group present + key character name was written, e.g. Bar counter (Birds, Juhyeon)
  • in the cross-union meeting, after talking to Kageyama, MC reminisces the past on a red background, but it’s a bit long and repetitive with weird sentences (and some typo). Shorter text mixed with worrying textures and sounds may have been another way to convey remorse with more variations

Art/Promotion

I looked at the banner several times and couldn’t tell if it was the same character featured three times with different color eyes due to magic power usage, or three different characters. This time I looked more closely and noticed differences in eyelashes and eye shapes, so I played the meeting scene once more and could identify each character based on eye color, and even eye shape. However, it wouldn’t have been easy without knowing the characters first.

In fact, the fullbody character sprites are very different, it’s just that close shot means no body pose nor clothes visible and so we can only count on a few facial features. It’s not really your fault as the characters have Asian origins, with black smooth hair (that don’t go crazy) and same skin color, and from here a flat character art style won’t help showing striking features - yet you managed to distinguish some eye features. Maybe it’s just a case where showing a little more around the face would help. With more “budget” I suppose you could have dedicated promo sprites with different view angles (rather than reusing the VN character sprites) therefore making the differences obvious.

The character who appears at the end doesn’t look MC in the eyes, maybe it’s just their style… ?

I noticed many characters have an androgynous look and I think they’re pretty cool (instead of having exaggerated Yakuza & Ane design).

I finally finished the demo! I’m looking forward to the full game!

Here is my feedback for the second half of the demo:

Battle UI: I tried playing entirely with the keyboard but it wasn’t easy

  • I don’t know how to cancel Attack or Magic target selection to go back to the previous action menu (even with the mouse). Backspace doesn’t work (and Escape opens the Save menu)
  • there is however a Back button in the Magic selection, easy to click with mouse, accessible with keyboard via nav keys although I’d rather use Backspace (or Escape, but I understand it’s always bound to Save menu to allow save even during battle, which is not bad!)
  • during target selection, nav keys don’t always work. When there are two enemies, left doesn’t always select the one on the left, I had to use the mouse. Sometimes, no enemy is selected (highlighted), but Space still attacks the first enemy available.
  • showing damage in top-right text is not bad for a classic presentation (as in Golden Sun), although I would expect damage to show directly on the enemy in such a visual-oriented format (I don’t know if it’s a technical or artistic choice). I do see how it’s harder to do on the main character though, since she only has an avatar.

UI: dialogue

  • nice that you can hover names to see their summary in tooltip
  • … but there was no tooltip for Rutilus, which was quite an important character to understand what’s going on, even if off-screen. They eventually explained who it was in the dialogue, but I missed the drama for one or two text blocks (I thought he was a butler like Elias).

UI: History

  • you cannot hover the names to show their tooltips. It’s not that important, but I needed this at a particular time where I didn’t want to rollback too much, just check some info

I’m finally resuming my rush on BAF entries and I just finished this demo! It looks promising!

I added more feedback on the main page under my previous feedback, more specifically about the second half of the demo.

Hey, I saw your follow and had a look at your games. Are you using Unity’s native physics as such? This can cause the character to do weird things like bumping the edge of the ground and flying up.

For arcade games it’s better to get maximum control over motion, using 0 friction 0 bounce physics material, then either setting rigidbody body velocity each frame and having them just stop on collision via native collision solver (easier) or setting kinematic body velocity and manually resolving collisions by clamping position (harder, but more control).

If you’re using a capsule 2D collider, which is okay for organic moves, you can also swap to a rectangle collider there to avoid character sliding and falling from the edge. It will give a weird edge case when character has half of their body over the air, but you can fix this later via animation (the famous Sonic “about to fall” animation).

Keep learning and developing, it’s a long way but you’ll quickly see progress over projects!

I needed this today once more. This could go in the generic search, since currently there is a “Creator” category at the top, we could have a “Game jam” category.

There could also be a search field specifically for game jams on the Jams page (the one with the jam calendar).

To avoid searching for too many things in the generic search field, you could also play with prefixes with autocompletion. Ex: you start typing “ja”, it suggests prefix “jam:” then you can enter the jam name and it will search in the jam category.

Right now I know the jam exact name so it’s a bit weird that I cannot find it on the website unless I use a generic web search engine, or I find a submitted game and click on the jam link from there.

Hello, I’d like to play this game but the web version is quite slow on my PC (not sure why since it’s Godot and I’ve been playing my own web builds fine, maybe Compatibility Render mode would export a faster build?), and I have troubles installing apps from Google Play these days. Is there an apk I can download and install directly on my Android?

Thanks!

Good job!

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Sure, I’m still working on the team Discord, but send me a message or friend invite on Discord at (removed to avoid spam after jam) and I’ll invite you when it’s ready (itch doesn’t allow DM).

If the DM/invite is rejected, just join the Ren’Py or DevTalk Discord servers so we’ll have a server in common and this should enable DM/invite.