itch.io

Cool short little game. It always impresses me how RPGmaker is utilized in creative ways.

Very enjoyable little game. I liked the visuals, the ost, and the story. It felt frantic and quick but as someone who spent a couple years in the service industry, I can speak from experience that that time flies by way too fast. I'm not super into visual novels but this is a special little game. Good on ya. 

This looks like its got hella effort put into it. Gonna download and play this later. 

I'm a pretty big Hotline Miami fan so I thought it was a pretty neat concept.

Pretty neat little game. Felt pretty cozy. Storykeeper is kind of a baddie. 

I feel like the font and tiny cows don't really fit the chunky pixel aesthetic but everything else is serviceable. Thought the ending was unexpectedly funny. It caught me off guard. I did not expect that. 

Neat little game. Haven't finished it yet. Not a big fan of the combat, it feels like it's a little slow, but style is very unique. Elle is pretty chill. 

Thank you for making this. Despite its length and simplicity this is still one of my favorite RPGmaker games. 

Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed. As for the dialogue skip, it's part of the YEP_MessageCore plugin. I guess it's be wise to make that a different key other than sprint. Also yeah I really need to fix that fly bug. Thank again for commenting. Appreciate it. 

Hey Terry, there's a new chapter. It's just a small demo but I hope you can take the time to play it. 

Hey Aka. Been a minute. There's a new chapter if you wanted to play it. Would love to hear your feedback. 

Thank you. I always appreciate your support. 

Glad you guys were able to get a 1.0 release.  Really proud of the team. I haven't had a chance to play it yet but I will once I get some time. :D

I really have to read my emails. 

Big improvement from your last games. Keep up the good work. 

I know this has probably been said already but goddamn this is good. I downloaded it expecting the usual workplace horror trope but found myself pleasantly surprised by the fundamental understanding of horror and the genuine fear I had playing it.  I was so entertained by the game that I replayed it 4 times to try to get every ending. This has been one of my favorite games I've played on Itch.io. I look forward to your future works. 

Hah?

The dialogue is incredibly slow. I feel like the delay between finishing the dialogue and being able to skip it is too long. The game was really dark. When the lights were off I couldn't see a thing, and I couldn't tell what was happening in the final cutscene. It also doesn't help that there isn't a flashlight. At some point I got stuck on the rail at the bottom of the stairs and had to start from the last checkpoint. That being said the checkpoints were appreciated. There are a lot of games out there that I got soft locked in and had to restart the entire thing. So I liked having checkpoints in the game. Overall it functions, it just needs some work. 

But keep making games and don't get discouraged. I look forward to future developments. 

Oh no! no need to apologize. I get where you're coming from. If you wanted to speak with me just contact me on Instagram. I'm not very knowledgeable about programming so maybe you could help if I had some questions. 

Uh, hey there. I'm not really sure how to respond to this. I was planning to make a second chapter to this game but because of some personal issues I was having at the time the project is on an indefinite hiatus. I have improved a lot since this project but it's not something I'm willing to jump back into.  At the moment I'm currently developing a small demo for My Sister's Keeper (my second project), that will hopefully be attached to a larger game.

If you wanted you could contact me on my Instagram. It's in my bio. I'd love to talk more about your portfolio. It's uh, definitely interesting. Or we could just share knowledge or something like that. 

I'll be okay. I'll just use Rogue. Thank you so much for the lovely art. I love it so much. I'll be sure to credit you. Did you want me to credit your youtube channel or did you have something else you wanted me to credit? 

Thank you so much for playing my game. I love the thumbnail so much. It made me tear up seeing my girls.

Would you mind if I used your art as my profile picture? 

This game really got under my skin in a way that a lot of games fail at doing. I love your style so much. You're so good at mixing photos, digital art, and pixel art. It all blends together so well. This game builds so much tension and made me feel so uneasy.

Both this game and It's Snowing do such a good job making me feel nasty by the end (in a good way).  Glad to see something new from you. :)

Pretty cute. Surprised you did this with RPGmaker. 

Thank you for playing my game. And I'm glad you enjoyed it for the most part. I'm glad you enjoyed the art and the characters. It's what I spent the most time on in the game. I've gotten a lot of complaints that the combat is pretty lacking because a  lot of the skills are overpowered and can easily kill enemies, and while I would liked to balance it more, I didn't want to make it difficult either. I didn't think it would've been as easy as it was but I'm glad people like you are helping with all the feedback.  I've also gotten complaints about the message box sound. In all honesty I just chose some random sound effect from my last game and turned my volume down, not knowing how annoying it'd be. Oops.  The designs of the main area was mostly like that from the beginning. I made that map and then designed everything around it. I told myself that they were placeholder assets and I'd eventually replace them but I got so distracted with everything that I had forgotten about them.   The tileset for the outside of the houses are from my last game and while I didn't like it I had forgotten to make new tiles.   

But I'm glad your liked some of the game, and the world the story takes place in.  And thank you for your words of encouragement, I've been pretty discouraged about making my games lately and I'm glad you took the time to play mine. I've met so many cool people on here and I'm glad to be part of the community of people that will be truthful and take time to help me become a better developer. 

After playing through it a couple times and getting what I assume are both endings to the game, I feel like I can adequately review this game. It's a very strange game in a sense that it isn't strange enough. Like I feel like it doesn't provide any questions or mystery surrounding our job despite the weird circumstances such as: the weird people in our office, our weird boss. the ominously tall building, etc. There are hints of something happening but they never really go anywhere. The people on our floor are just that. They aren't fleshed out or given much to say. Even people we do talk to, like the cigarette lady, don't have much to say. I feel like the vending machine has a lot more to say with the amount of drinks and descriptions of said drinks than the patients or characters. It might just be me since I'm not a big reader but I feel like a lot of these things can be shown with a shorter description to each drink. But I also don't feel like it provides a lot and is more so just a way to put in some quirky writing, which could be good, but I never feel like the tone of the game ever sticks to anything solid. It never feels serious that would contrast the zany moments and it never reaches that level of wacky that would make these moments fit well into the story it is trying to tell. 

In terms of gameplay, I appreciate the effort put into the combat at the custom UI  for the battles but with no explanation or guidance I found myself confused. Skills I would use would often be undone by the patient resulting in a very frustrating experience. The balancing in this game feels all over the place and I never felt like it was in my favor. I found myself not using a lot of the skills because they don't provide a very meaningful description as to  what they lower and what they raise.  The way I passed the majority of the sessions was by using my cooldown skill followed by a skill to lower whatever bad bar was higher. I was able to help 3 of the patients with this method but I still failed 2 of them. The patient does more damage to themselves than I am ever able to fix, especially with the freakouts they have halfway through getting their self love up. I'm not sure if that on purpose to try to say something but it definitely messes up the balancing. I was also not sure if the patients were purposely not fleshed out at all to make em feel less important, like you're just getting something done rather than taking the time to help someone. Which would be cool, but I feel like if the focus of your game is helping mentally ill patients you could at least flesh them out a little. 

Now, onto what I did like. Although this game technically takes place on 1 map I do like the plugin for the map that simulates a 3d environment. It provides a really moody graphical fidelity similar to old school dungeon crawlers. I thought the art was really cute and although taking a break wasn't really necessary to progress the game I still did so to see what was happening in the breakroom. I enjoyed aspects of the game here and there. And even thought it needs works you still tried. and that's what counts. Don't get discouraged, every moment is one for learning. 

I'll be sure to look out for any updates on Dichotomy. Despite its flaws I still enjoyed it. And I enjoyed the little secret dev log room. I thought that was pretty cute. 

I'll also be sure to check out your other game. Keep up the good work. 

Before anything thank you for playing. I'm really happy people are still downloading and playing this. 

As for the combat, I've received similar complaints about never switching out of Formation B. Players would be able to stay in formation B by stun locking the enemy with Headbutt and/or Hammer Strike for the duration of the fight. I didn't account for how much damage Form A would output when play testing or how easy the game would become when spamming hammer strike. I was originally going to add smaller enemies to the encounter that were more easily taken out with melee but I ran out of time. Towards the end I noticed that there wasn't a lot of strategy to the game, and while I definitely would've loved to make the game more difficult, I didn't want to frustrate the player and prevent progress. So I decided to leave it somewhat easy. There was a thought in the back of my mind that the player had far too much ammunition during combat, but my love of guns outweighed those doubts in my mind so I stuck with a somewhat realistic approach to the ammo count. Pariah's Fanning ability was actually a last minute addition. I tried balancing out how powerful the skill was by making her Hit Rate a lot lower than that of her sisters'. But because of the Take Aim skill this balance is easily put in the player's favor.

 As for the twist I'm willing to admit that this thought sounded a lot better on paper.  A lot of ideas I had I just rolled with, for better or for worse. More than anything I wanted to have a "what the f*ck" moment but I feel I could've done better. In all honesty I was going to cut the 4th wall break from the game entirely, but I felt that I didn't properly establish a character or foreshadow the events of day 4. I don't regret it, I feel like it at least put a neat little bow on everything but I also feel like I let it limit my creativity as a writer by working within my own f*cked up guidelines. 

But again thank you so much for playing. I'm really glad you liked the characters. The writing is what I spent the most time on so to hear that getting praise makes me happy. Making this project and meeting people in the RPGmaker community has made me really glad that I worked on this project. And thank you for helping me improve by critiquing my work. It means a lot. 

PS I accidentally refreshed/closed this tab a total of 3 times while writing this. I am an idiot. :,D 

Glad I could make you feel better.  And don't get discouraged. Every moment is one for improvement. 

PSA: While the game jam is active I am not allowed to upload a new update for the game addressing the current bugs. Forgive me if you run into any. But seeing as I don't want anyone else to get stuck some of the biggest bugs are: 

1) Interacting with the slide from anywhere but the bottom. Will lock your character in place. Preventing Progress

2) Interacting with the tent on the final day (DAY 4) will play the previous conversation from day 3 and lock the player in the EMPTY SPACE map. Preventing progress.

The other bugs can be seen on the Itch.io page. They're all visual or do not heed progress. Sorry for those that played and got stuck. I truly am sorry. And thank you for bringing these bugs to my attention. 

Here's a picture of Usagi I downloaded off of the Chiikawa Wiki and had to convert to a PNG because it was a WEBP file. I hate you WEBP!

Great game. sweet azz visuals, really cool puzzles, and really unique mechanics I don't think I've ever seen in an RPGmaker game.  I wasn't the biggest fan of the block pushing puzzles but I managed and I liked every other puzzle. I wasn't the biggest fan of having a lot of the things I needed to interact with be activated by player touch, I found myself running into a couple things and accidentally interacting with them. But I assume this is because the interact key is being used by the magnet claw. It's a minor complaint. I the last puzzle before you repair engine somewhat annoying because I didn’t think the magnetic arm would be able to go through the wall to access the last area. It took me longer than I’d like to admit. But everything else for the most part was fine. I loved the final resident evil style run through all the maps. The fact that the maps can be progressed through forwards and backwards just shows how good the mapping was. I ended up getting the best ending. 5 different endings is pretty wild so good on that. 

 Great game. Keep up the good work. 

PS Amaru reminded me of Karen from Spongebob. 

Yeah I hear that's a pretty big problem, sorry about that. I was planning on adding an autosave feature with a plugin but I didn't know where to put it at the time and it was getting late, I wish I added it now that people are getting softlocked lol. And thank you for the recommendation on the plugin. I always found it annoying how easily it is to accidentally make choices. Hopefully I can roll out a QoL update when the game jam ends to fix the issues. But I'm glad you liked the characters. These characters were meant to be one off enemies from my other game but over the process of developing this game I've come to like them a lot more. I hope in the future to make more chapters with these characters.  And thank you so much for playing my game. It means a lot. :,) 

While it is in a rough state I respect the attempt at trying something different. And I will always respect someone for trying a new medium. Some feedback on the game. I recommend starting with the basics first, lower the scale of what you’re trying to do before expanding. Don’t be ashamed to learn something new. Take your time. It’s okay if you have a slow work ethic or busy schedule, just work on what you can. Try using the functions that come with RPGmaker, like learning damage formulas, how to make skills, how to balance enemies. Making combat fun is never easy, especially with Turn Based combat but sometimes it’s better to start with something basic rather than having a gimmick. The introduction for example where you introduce characters can be an autorun event. Rather than having 3 separate events that each individually trigger when the player touches them. This video goes over Autorun events. They essentially automatically trigger and repeat until you say otherwise. I also recommend watching the rest of the series. RPG Maker MV Tutorial #18 - Autorun Events! The default resolution for RPGmaker MV is 816x624, so don’t work in resolutions that are way too high because you’re eventually going to have to resize them. Which isn’t a problem, just take this into account because there’s gonna be quality loss when resizing from really big resolutions. For pixel art, if you choose to use it I recommend using Aseprite. It’s really helpful when making pixel art and while it might be clunky at first it’s one of the most useful tools when making RPGmaker games. I wouldn’t have made a game without it. For non-pixel l art I recommend using Krita or another program of your choice. Just remember to use the correct resolution when working. Most of the resolutions can be cross referenced with the prepackaged assets that come with the game. This his isn't the way, there are devs a lot better than me that work in RPGmaker so take everything with a grain of salt. For some reason rapid slashes hit like 10 times but did 0 damage. This could be because the damage formula accounts for defense and the Cultist’s defense is too high, or the damage formula is incorrect. Damage formulas account for stats of players and enemies. The most basic formula is “a.atk * 4 - b.def * 2”. This is your basic attack skill. This essentially translates to “user attack × 4 - target defense × 2”. The list of stats that can be used in the formula box can be seen if you hover over the damage formula box which are all shortened. The numbers in the damage formula can be switched out for higher or lower numbers depending on what you want. The reason your Thief’s skill might not work is again, probably the damage formula. Could be a typo or an incorrect letter placed somewhere in there. 

Sorry if this is a lot of reading. Just some advice on the current code. If you want any more pointers, advice or ideas I'm always willing to help someone out. Just don't get discouraged. Keep at it. Improvement comes with time and practice. On a final note, the download size of the game is really big and I'm not sure why. The file for some reason had 2 "game" files in it. One in the regular main folder and another in the "www" folder, which is usually where your images, SFX, and data goes.  I think you might have repeat folders inside of that one.  Which is something you might want to fix. I'm not sure if this will cause some discrepancies but when deploying your game you can checkmark the box "exclude unused files" to save space. It'll make the game smaller by only deploying assets you used.

Oooo I like the new banner.

Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed them. The first Duskfall was more so practice but it was still a stepping stone to this. 

I look forward to your future projects. I'd really love to see what you can make with no time constraints or deadlines. 

It's like a good burger from a place you went as a kid. It's all somewhat reminiscent of an older game compressed into about 30 minutes and it never overstays its welcome. 

It's a little hard to get to that level before beating the game so maybe have you get a skill every level or at the very least every other level. It helps with the flow of game play. 

and yeah I was a little upset they disabled uploads cause there are some issues in my game that need fixing but I guess I'll have to wait. 

In all honesty I found this one very frustrating and I'm not sure how much is on purpose. Items like logs weigh 50 (more than half of your starter weight) and are worthless while others items weigh like 0.5 and cost more. I'm not sure what the idea is behind making these items' weight so ridiculously far apart. Weight was almost never an issue because I knew exactly what to throw out first every time. I feel like there shouldn't be a limit on weight but rather a debuff. Similar to Lethal where you move slower. I know this is easier said than done but I feel like it'd help. Especially with items like the Chunks of Uranium Crystal. I'm not sure why but even with all 4 party members I wasn't able to pick up this item. The max carry weight with every party member is 180 and the crystals weigh 215. I might've missed a max carry weight upgrade of some sort. Which I probably wouldn't have gotten anyways because I never had enough money. They're strict as hell with your allowance. You'll usually end up with a little over 1000 dollars by the end of your first day plus a small bonus if you exceed quota by however much the game wants you to.  Which is never enough to buy a lot. The most important thing to get feels like party members, which cost about 1000 each.  Which is a common number in the shop. I often felt like everything in the shop eats through all of your allowance.  Even one use items that you feel would give you a little bit of an edge in combat like throwables and consumables cost the same amount as a person. Which makes sense for the world but locks you into what you can and cannot buy. Which doesn't help with a constantly rotating pool of new items each day. Combat feels intense and not in a good way. The enemies are either numerous, strong, or just really annoying. I never felt like I was prepared for any fight. I found myself escaping from almost every single encounter I came across because of how deadly every encounter can end. This also in turn despawns the enemy until you leave and come back. Which is something that always seemed to work. At its worst you'd run into a troop of 5 bats who all get an attack in before you can escape. At its best you run into a slow enemy and are able to escape without a scratch. Speaking of that I wasn't the biggest fan of the QTE for almost every skill. While it does keep the player engaged in the combat it also gets old after doing it against a troop of 5 bats. At some point I got lost and bored of the looting gameplay and just kept fighting everything til I died.

I know I had a lot of negatives here but I think you have a really really really good base for a game here. A grimy setting, a weight system, quota mechanics,  great presentation and randomization. It has a good core, it just needs some balancing. Which makes sense considering the small amount of time you had to make this. Every added mechanic takes a lot of play testing to get perfect and there are a lot you have to account for. There are a lot of moving parts here and it's okay if they aren't all oiled. For what it is I find this very impressive. I just think you need to reevaluate the focus of the game. Like it'd be really cool to take inspiration from something like darkest dungeon, where it's more battle focused and the treasure is a side objective. Because as it stands right now  it's not very fun to run away from every enemy and collect random things you find. But for now I really like what you made and look forward to seeing this updated. Don't get discouraged.  Every moment is one for improvement. Keep up the good work.