itch.io

Thank you so much, I'm glad you enjoyed my character art, the story, and how I implemented the reflection!

I also appreciate the feedback -- I think I know what's causing that. The sound is probably too long, and I think Dialogic assumes that it's meant to be short. I'll keep that in mind for next time I try making voice-esque audio like this for the dialogue!

Absolutely -- the commercialization of the world (and to an extension art) can be super depressing sometimes. But that's why we indie folks are here! We exist to communicate and connect.

Always glad to see another bug lover! I'm so glad you liked the little mechanics I added in, I felt like they added a lot to the story :)

Thank you! I'm glad I made it so apparent, I tend to think about that outsider-looking-in experience a lot when I'm taking photos of insects/wildlife and it seemed like a great thing to make a game out of.

Thanks so much! I love looking for critters too, it feels like each time I do I discover something new :)

Thanks, I'm super glad it made you laugh as much as it made me laugh making it! :D

Five!

Always happy to encounter someone who sees art the same way I do! Glad it resonated with you so well :)

So true, as we all deserve!!

Thanks so much to you too and no problem at all! The connection between an artist and their audience is so deep, and I'm glad this has been reaffirming of that to others. I also can't think of anything else I'd rather spend my time on -- I've done so many art forms and this medium has stuck with me more than any others.

I'm so so glad I made you feel blessed and inspired you to enter the Manifesto Jam! I think a lot of us do things out of love -- I've always been very motivated by love, and I think your manifesto highlights that part of me well. I actually like the simpleness of yours, so definitely don't worry about yours not being detailed -- it's very punchy and the formatting is wonderful! You are a part of this and despite how large the Manifesto Jam ended up being (wow I have a LOOOOT of reading material to go through once I finish my Slay the Princess runs today) it wouldn't be the same without your or really anybody's entries. 

Thank you so much! I'm super glad you adored this and that it hit the mark of what I was going for. I do really love my audience, too, I may not know exactly who most of them is but they're people like me and they're who I create for :)

Thank you so much! I'm so glad this reached someone like me, honestly, as I'm in a similar boat. I'm so so glad that you've found the place you belong like I have, and it's so awesome to hear that you made a little test project too! Love you too man <3

Thank you! Yeah felt, I've always had these kinds of thoughts when looking around outside for animals to photograph. And no problem at all! Yeah, especially with Twine games I've found that using a Google Doc for word counting and separating each passage with line breaks has been very useful. I'm glad I gave you inspiration for that! :)

Thank you so much! I definitely wanted it to feel like that, since the sun was meant to be slowly rising :)

The technical answer is that this is an unranked jam with a busy host, so no real rewards.

To add on to what blueice15 said, I join jams to get practice. I started my game dev journey only two months ago! Since then, I've entered four jams with two more on the way, and I learn something new each time. werewolf minesweeper was my first time using a heavy-ish amount of CSS in Twine, for example. I also join just for the joy of creating and the deadlines that help motivate me, since game dev is something that helps me more than I can express as someone with psychiatric disabilities and is a part of my self-care.

What you get out of a jam, is ultimately, a game. And that game can be a reward in itself, if you look at it right. :)

I haven't been able to play your game or anybody's games yet (planning on doing so tomorrow I hope!), but I do wanna tell you that even though you don't feel it, you did do an accomplishment! And so did everyone else in this jam; the act of creation is a wonderful thing, even when it's intentionally bad! And also I accept you and everyone's games. 

I hope this isn't annoying or anything! I just like to be encouraging with these sorts of things :)

Thanks! So glad you have enjoyed my softlocking magnum opus!

Thanks! Always glad to inflict suffering on someone who plays this awful game!

I'm super glad to hear she's ok and safe now! I absolutely agree, we can continue on even if she is ultimately unable to moderate. Thanks for asking around! I considered doing so but was worried about overstepping.

Hmm. Now that you've mentioned it, it seems like the creator of this jam may be inactive? I could be wrong, but I'm looking for signs of life on Manon's socials and most of her activity statuses and posts on other websites dates back to August (including IntFiction and IFDB, which both have potential involvements with this jam so that's worrying) and the latest activity I can find anywhere dates back to February.

I don't bring this up out of malice or to tell people to not enter, by the way, just concerned about her even though we've never interacted. I genuinely hope she's alright.

I'm a thnake!

Thank you so much again!!

Thanks so much!

Thank you, I'm always happy to make someone smile!!

Thank you!! What's friendship about a good ol' fight to the death every now and then, right?

Thanks so much!! I love the knife rat so much, I had to use them. Always happy to make someone laugh!

Hooray for money!!!

Thanks so much!! So glad you liked my little bits throughout!

I can't believe you somehow managed to add Heaven's Choir to the game OST. That sounds utterly beautiful /lhj (Alas I do not have access to any Keynotes but I can somehow hear that in my head so clearly anyways)

Also I can confirm the utter confusion at what was going on without playing Morality! made it funny on its own! (although I will also add that one to my list of things to play eventually when I'm not on my finals grind)

Thanks for your kind words!! I'm surprised it came off relatively polished honestly with how fast I did this, so it's very nice to hear that! I'm also glad you enjoyed the fight scene, waiting for an exact minute, and also the endings!!

As for the waiting, you're 100% right, that doesn't make sense because that's a good ol' bug. It's supposed to be skipping straight to the fight sequence, like clicking Yes does. I'll get that fixed up!

Thank you for your kind words!! I love getting to make people laugh, it's my favorite thing ever. I'm so so glad you enjoyed it!!

Thanks for the kind words, I'm so glad you enjoyed it!! I'm glad someone enjoyed the Yosemite Convention and species input jokes, I was super proud of myself for those ones when I wrote this in the middle of my nonfiction class lol.  And I'm glad you thought the asset choices were great!! Adversus's signs really do pair amazingly with text to the point I could use it for all of the buttons and the textbox, and I got the whole idea of this game once I saw the knife rat on the expansion pack thread and went "omg wait I could cook with this and the snake"!

I'm also glad you enjoyed picking No! Yeah, a stretch goal of mine if I had the time was adding more dialogue for that where the poor Rat and Snake would get progressively madder each time you clicked on it, but alas, I didn't get the chance to expand that joke. 

No problem at all, I'm a senior in English so I'm a massive dweeb for these kinds of conversations! (Also don't worry this all still made sense to me!)

I completely missed the afterword I can't lie (I was playing all of the games one after the other on call with a friend so I didn't read the credits too well, that's my bad!). That definitely rules out the ending being something like suicide, but I think running away or contacting someone who can help (in a more positive light than I was originally thinking of) is still pretty plausible!

As for the kid not doing anything intense to potentially get in trouble, I'm looking at this beginning again and I read "you don't know what triggered it" as the "it" being the meltdown. I say meltdown, because as I'm rereading it, this is ringing autism bells in my head due to the passages following it: that the mother doesn't like it when the kid shuts down, goes quiet, doesn't look at her face, doesn't seem to listen, all of this being highlighted in red text... those are like, textbook autism symptoms (and potentially ADHD as well but I am not as well informed in that realm since that's not my personal diagnosis).  Also, what may seem as normal for someone who's autistic or neurodivergent in general may seem strange, out of the ordinary, or even offensive to someone neurotypical*, so the kid is a tiny bit unreliable in this sense without the context of what actually went on. If it wasn't a meltdown (which it isn't specified and I agree with you that it's just as plausible that your reading of that sentence is correct and the poor kid didn't actually do anything that intense), I feel like it may have been something a little too blunt or rude, "talking back" when the kid was just trying to be honest, which would explain why the kid doesn't seem to understand in your reading.

EDIT: Wait I just read a bit further and the kid does mentions that they didn't know what happened. Disregard that about the meltdown!

As for the mother, I 100% agree that she's not well adjusted and that it could be both things at once. After all, well-adjusted parents know better than to be abusive. Quick-to-anger parents can do this sort of thing to any kid, and the mental effects of anxiety and self-doubt can happen to any kid being abused as well, so the non-neurodivergency reading is very understandable! And yeah the bathroom break thing, if I may break from my mostly semi-respectful explaining here, is super fucked up and I hope she explodes for that.

But yeah, no problem at all! Thanks for replying, I didn't expect such a well thought-out response and I'm so glad I got one because I love yapping about these things :)

Super late but I do super appreciate this comment still, thank you so so much! I definitely wanted to make it disturbing to be in the surgeon's mind, so I'm glad I pulled that off well. 

Man, what an experience. I legitimately did not know what was coming next -- I went from being stunlocked for a solid 5 minutes at "Dick was my father please call me Butt", to being genuinely interested and curious about the things in your firefox tabs, to being utterly confused at whatever was going on near the end as someone woefully uninformed about a lot of what this was about. It was a great experience though! I wish I had an Apple device to experience the audio so bad.

That was so adorable!! What a wonderfully sweet little read -- it can be hard to capture a child's voice sometimes in writing, but I think you captured it super well! This was just a genuinely heartwarming little story, I have no notes! Wonderful job!

I'm super glad you were able to get your game fixed, by the way -- I remember seeing the fact you couldn't get it fixed when I was looking around after finishing my game and feeling super bad about it. 

I'll take your curiosity about other's interpretations as an excuse to give my personal literary analysis on this story (though, quick warning, I touch on some pretty heavy topics here about child abuse, ableism, and suicide). 

This story is, in my interpretation, ultimately one about neurodivergency in youth and how some parents of neurodivergent folks tend to react. While, of course, the neurodivergency the main character has is never specified, it doesn't really matter that much which one. Many, many neurodivergent kids can be seen to, in the parent's perspective, "lash out". This lashing out could be a symptom of underlying mental illness, or perhaps an autistic meltdown or sensory-related overstimulation. Again, that's never clarified, but it's clear that's the case, considering that the story notes how frequently this has happened, and how the mother has tried to "correct" their child through more and more desperate and severe means.

This is even more clear through the "monster" thematics. Neurodivergency is often seen as the "other" in a terrible sense, and some parents of neurodiverent children don't know how to handle the fact that their kids have this sort of disability. As already mentioned, the mother has attempted to "correct" her child through more and more severe, and often abusive, means. The child and the princess, as many neurodivergent kids do, identifies that their parents do these things such as locking them away in an attempt to hide their neurodivergency -- either through telling others that their child is normal and perhaps even better than other people, or by trying to correct their behavior though punishment. But the parents do this without realizing that they are, ultimately, abusing and hurting their children. It's a sort of violence done out of love, or a misunderstanding of how their children should be, taking drastic and harmful measures towards them instead of giving them accommodations and the help they may need.

The ending is intentionally vague, I think, but either way, it connects to this sense of escape. Neurodivergent kids who are treated like this have an intense and overwhelming urge to escape. It could be running away, committing suicide, attempting to get themselves taken away by CPS, etc., but either way, that is what the ending connects to for me.

Sorry this is like nightmarishly long! I just wanted to infodump how I took this story, especially as someone who is neurodivergent and read this with that sort of POV.

Oh my God, dude. I did NOT expect a game from the Crayon and Kazoo jam to emotionally affect me so much, but here we are. I interpreted a lot of this as being about neurodivergency, especially as a child, and that so heavily affected me as someone neurodivergent myself. I loved the weaving of the tales, and indeed, I adore how you used the assets to separate the two, and then weave them together at the end. This was an amazing read!

This was a fun little game! I loved the concept, I personally am really really bad at these sorts of games so I got a solid middle of the leaderboard but hey that's better than being at the bottom! It feels like a random game I'd play at the arcade, and I do mean that in the best of ways. Also the fact you're playing as a skeleton is fun, I didn't read that part so I was pleasantly surprised when the armor went off and I saw myself in all my glory!