itch.io

A 600 MB car.wav file is a questionable decision. I would recommend compressing it to something more reasonable in a more lightweight format.

"Fish are a sometimes food... let me in, let me in"?

That's what I'm hoping for, yeah!
On a side note, it might be useful if you put somewhere on this page or in the game a link to your video (the art exhibition one), where you nicely explained the expensive fashion aspect in the story, and how it is connected to the South Korean culture and Seoul. That was interesting to learn for me.

The game looks rather pleasant to the eye, and the storytelling is engaging and eventful so far.  Though, the story feels like feverish nonsense in certain scenes (all this fashion items obsession, playing as a 'german' main character who fought 'russians', jumping from construction site accidents to vomiting in gucci to being chased by shark-soldier-ex-dude to applying to be a stripper all in 20 minutes of reading). This might be an attempt to portray the delirious state of mind the main character is in, but I simply felt slightly annoyed at him. In essence, for me, the game looks promising, but in the first build neither the story nor any of the characters managed to fully grab my attention. The game so far is very unique in the vn genre, I'll give it that.

Btw, first, I thought the game was called "Shining", but then found out that I was a bit off, and it's actually "Shadows".

Very impressed with the first build! Caught some Twin Peaks vibes from all that's happening. The characters all seem to have some depth to them already, with their little backstories and well-written interactions. The art is great, I'm especially ready to thoroughly investigate Raymond and Otto. Something that would be great to see in a feature build is a bit more backstory for Markus, with him being a detective in a detective story, moreover a close friend to main character. Looking forward to next parts of the story!

I very much enjoyed this game. The art style, the general atmosphere and the writing are all great. With the game being a jam submission, this is an amazing vn made in a short amount of time, and I truly applaud the result. I think it will be great, if the game gets some sort of sequel in this setting. Or a different game entirely - the art and the writing prove that the author can deliver a banging story visually and plot wise.

The cg in the greenhouse is absolutely beautiful. After being submerged in this bleak atmosphere with cold color tones, it was really great to see such a warm and tender color palette on screen with the good boy in the center.

Now if I were to share some of the weaker points in this game in my opinion, I would say that the beginning is rather slow. There is a lot of information, with little visual aid, which made me basically read diagonally until MC got to the Institute where we later meet mister Zverko. From that point onward I was invested enough to even pay attention to discussion of political themes, though not too closely if I'm being honest. The names are interesting, by the way, I felt like I was playing in an Eastern European space colony kinda setting. Another thing, which was definitely not manageable in short time during development, but would greatly improve the overall appeal, is just more art. I really liked what is in the game as is, but there is always room for more of such amazing art in vns :)

As others already said, keep up the hard work, and thank you for releasing this game.

Oh cool, it does do that. Fits perfectly fine, thanks.

With monitor aspect ratios other than 16:9, itch's web player probably won't scale and/or fit the viewport properly.

Yep, you got it. Thanks! Great first chapter, I like the unique atmosphere and setting you portrayed

Could you, please, mark the "*-pc.zip" file as a Windows and Linux build and the second file as the Mac build, so that they could be installed via the Itch.io app

The wip looks great. Glad you managed to invite such a great artist to work with you, looking forward to new content in the future.

Took another look at your sketch - nose or not, I think this kinda skeletal profile looks right for the purpose of being a menacing mecha, so my opinion is that no tweaks are needed.

Front view looks great, on the side view there is like an absence of a nose in my opinion. Hence why it looks somewhat skeletal / voldemort ish to me. Maybe It's just that I still remember the otter from my recent visit to the zoo (pic related)

No no, I fixed it. My wording was misleading, I guess. As I said, this error is resolved by installing gconf package. I'm on manjaro and the package is available in official repo. The one that is suggested in the manjaro forum is probably fine too, but not everyone might have AUR repos available (Ubuntu won't have it, for example).

If anyone has problems running the linux build, and the error output is 

error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

when run from the terminal, then try installing gconf package. It's no longer included in linux distros for it's been obsolete for 8 years, but the rpgmaker uses it.

Man this build is amazing, all of the action scenes are so dynamic, just unbelievable! If this idea of animating portions of scenes is actually feasible, then it is so worth the effort. Thanks for your hard work.

Thanks for sharing, I like reading devlogs and technical details. The reason I was interested is because I saw the ren'py extension for VS Code the other day (I've been using VS Code for all my programming for about a year now), and immediately thought that it would be interesting to know what the workflow with ren'py looks like. With grammar checker and great python support (snippets, debugger, etc.) it feels like a potentially nice tool to compliment whatever ren'py development suite offers. I guess Atom is similar in that regard, I remember it having tons of extensions too, though I'm never touching that piece of software again in the near future, not after having to manually clean appdata folders and even registry for it to completely uninstall )) 

I've heard about the discord server, but I'm not looking into actual development right now (it's an interesting idea, but the lack of time and writing/drawing skills make me lose interest), I just wanted to hear your take, since I think you implemented some cool visuals compared to some more barebones VNs out there. Either way, thanks for taking your time to satisfy my curiosity )

I see, that's insightful. The idea of giving the player options in regards to romance is a nice one, though I don't know whether it's worth your while, given how you planned the timeframes for the project. Either way, I'm now looking forward to John's and Charles' routes to see what kind of development they will receive compared to Mike.

On a side note, would you mind sharing what tools you use for coding with ren'py? Asking simply out of curiocity.

I liked the update, just as I like the whole plot and cast so far. I do want to ask about what you said some time ago, though. You said you wanted to slow down the romance by a lot, and playing the update made me think that the romance got even more rushed somehow. From cuddling with alien badgers in a separate room to zero-gravity making out with kissing and hard-ons, kinda makes me feel like a galactic hooker rather than network engineer.

Also, at least for me, there were some visual glitches in the last update, where the sprite in the bottom left wasn't synced with the sprite in the center, with Rex's sprite popping in in-between the dialogue lines. And some grammar mistakes here and there ("nagivation" from the top of my head), but nothing serious. 

Thanks for the update, keep it up. I really dig the visual effects and backgrounds btw.

I think digitigrade version looks a bit more fun. Maybe it's about the feet on the left version being a bit flat and more like they are bended metal sheets, rather than joints or something. That's how I see it anyway. Also I'd say I just like the version on the right more overall. Don't know if it's just me, but it seems like you gave it a bit more thiccness, like the shoulders are a bit rounder and wider, the neck looks thicker, thighs too. With all that plus the legs being animalistic, the right one looks more menacing to me. Not and expert though, so just stating my opinion 

Looks nice m8. Oh and btw because of your game I started watching Evangelion and I'm hooked so far, I like how it slowly melts my brain with it's psychedelic plot. Would love to see your VN going in the same plot-heavy direction  

Hi, Team Kanohi, thanks a lot for creating an amazing project. I just finished playing Trials of the Great Spirit, though i didn't really pass the trial since Tahu decided that his duty is to become an astronaut :)

Look at him go :)

So to try to help you replicate this here is what I did: near the end there is an area, where you get by gliding using Lewa's mask (i don't remember the correct name, sorry). There is a block that can be moved, a cannon and I think there was a button. I was trying to climb on the top platform, where the green Matoran is, to use Kopaka's Mask (again, sorry :)) and admire the view (just for fun). So I jumped on the block, then activated the Mask, then jumped towards the edge to grab it. As you can see by the pose, Tahu did grab on to it, and I also disabled the mask somewhere around mid-jump or when he grabbed the edge, but what is more important, the model started floating upwards after that and all the controls became locked. He slowly floated to the ceiling and then beyond :) I could still choose skills with 1,2,3 keys, I could open and navigate the menus (esc and tab both), but the character was unresponsive.

Another little thing I noticed: when underwater, if I swapped masks a few times, and one of the masks that I cycled through was the one that allowed to breathe underwater, the next one would not have the air bar on top of the screen. So in that situation there is no telling how much air I have left, but it is definitely only a visual bug, because after a little bit the air ran out I respawned on the nearby platform.

Everything else I found to be very well made. I liked the variety of masks, and the way their powers work is cool. Character controls are pleasant, the combat was a bit difficult. When there were two enemies, I just waited for the third ability to reload and used it several times, because it was easier. And also art is an explosion. Though I did get an fps drop during that ability - all the way to 28 fps, while never getting less than ~57 otherwise.

I really liked the visuals. Character models look amazing, I loved how light reflects from Tahu's model, especially with how smooth the curved surfaces on the model are. Just the right amount of polygons :) I'd throw in some weapon impact special effects and get rid of the yellow distant fog , but I understand that this build was not about the visuals.

Sorry for the wall of text, but I really wanted to express how I liked what you have made, and to help trace whatever little bugs I have found. The build is a very solid ground to be built upon, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys have in store for us fans :) Wish you best of luck!

Tried it out on my phone and it worked perfectly fine. Android 10, SD820 soc - no framerate drops or anything bad performance wise. Tested saving, loading, force closing, changing fonts, abusing controls - not a single issue. Absolutely stable. On a 5.5 inch screen the text looks a bit on the smaller side. It's readable and tapping menu options wasn't difficult, but I think it could be a bit bigger, especially those with even smaller phones would benefit from it. Not sure how tricky it is to implement, but an option to scale fonts (or maybe the whole UI) in the settings would be super cool, plus there is already the font type option. Though I'd put this feature pretty low on priority list with how stable and enjoyable the game already feels on mobile. You did a great job on optimizing everything.