I also wish it were longer... but I am working on finishing it very slowly now. Please look forward to seeing scenes of Felix fall down the stairs in new and novel ways, it was very fun to write him and Horace.
ojosama
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Hello, thanks for playing the game and apologies for the late reply! Thank you for the feedback as well.
The game was designed around multiple playthroughs (a single run is about an hour long), so the player should learn the mechanics of the gam e as they try out different options over the span of several runs. I'm personally not a fan of in-game tutorials myself. That said, I'd consider putting in a short image manual for players to explain what the different parts of the interface represent. I am considering putting in non-combat segments between the battles too, since I have had a lot of people comment on how drawn-out the game feels--having something like that would definitely help with the feeling of being overwhelmed by the amount of battles.
The font issue seems to be caused both by not having the font installed and not having it in the folder; I'll have to include it in the next release of the game.
Thanks for playing, and apologies for the late response!
I took a look at all the bugs you mentioned and hopefully they should all be fixed now; thank you very much for the feedback! If you happen to try the game again, please let me know if you come across any other bugs.
For skill acquisition, it's actually based off the number of times you've defeated an enemy, but looking back at it again, the number is a high so I've adjusted the numbers a little.
I don't think I'll add in any content updates to this game unfortunately, but I'll definitely try to update the game to fix bugs.
Thanks for playing!
Here's a map of the 2nd floor. You have to visit all the three doors marked in red and interact with them. After you visit all of them, you'll be able to face the final boss.
Thank you for playing and posting your thoughts! Yeah, I do really wish I had added more content into the game, but (as always) that's just the nature of jams, unfortunately. If I ever finish Lotus Eater as a series, a compilation of all the games with added content will definitely be on the table.
(By the way, I am looking forward to your next game, whenever you end up releasing it. ASDC was kino...)
Thank you for playing Lament and writing such a thoughtful post about it!
Nothing brings me more joy than knowing that somebody has been impacted by one of my games in such a way.
I'm glad that people like the protagonist so much, definitely a fun character to write.
They look a lot like the typical anti-hero, but I wanted to emphasize that they're absolutely still human.
A character like this should have a little moe to them instead of just being cool all the time.
Funny thing, the plot of Lament was based off of a small passage in a novel.
It's been a few years since I've read it, but it's been haunting me for a long time.
If this game has given you even a third of the feelings that I got from that small passage, then I'm glad.
Thank you for playing! I'm glad the intro of the game really left an impression on people. I wasn't sure how people were going to react to *that* part at first, but it seems like I was able to ruse several people with it. Inna will be back in the eventual crossover game with the other characters, maybe not with her head fully intact at all times, but she will be there for more than 10 minutes!
Making the CBS was, surprisingly, not as difficult as expected. Of course, there were some snags along the way, but the simplicity of the battle system along with the Show String Picture feature helped make it a smooth process. I didn't test the game balance too well, but thankfully it looks like it has the right amount of difficulty.
The open-ended gameplay was a nice change of pace for me, since most of my games before were mostly linear. I'm a fan of more open-ended games like Demon King Chronicle and Black Souls, but I wasn't sure how I'd make it work here. In the end, I'm pretty glad I made the game open-ended, I think letting the player explore freely without nagging them about where to go next adds to the feel of the game. I was tempted to make the castle painful with some of its traps, but I decided to hold back. Also, I had no idea there was an empty chest in the cave. Checking the cave, I think I messed up an event somewhere there... I'll have to fix that later.
Thanks for the thorough bug report, I'll be fixing these in the next update!
Thanks a lot for playing Sleepless!
There were definitely a few easter eggs/sidequests in there that a player could have reasonably missed, with the amount of classrooms and all. You could go the entire game without finding the secret shop on the first floor, which really isn't a huge problem since you can finish the game with just the equipment you have. At first I considered putting in an (optional) quest marker for NPCs that would give out side quests, but I figured that it would just encourage players to talk to the quest-givers and ignore all the other NPCs. A future update would probably have a rumormonger student that would hint toward the side-quests that are available on a certain floor and a way to track quests that are in-progress.
I'm glad you enjoyed the various classrooms and all the different students who populated them! I did put a fair amount of effort into NOT just copy and pasting everything, though I can't really say the same for the hallways. I was considering putting lockers into the hallways to decorate them a little, but I thought it clashed with the look and feeling of the school.
Thanks for playing through Sleepless and giving your thoughts on it!
Yeah, this is definitely my most ambitious and gameplay-focused game so far, but with that came a lot of bugs! I severely underestimated the amount of playtesting I needed to do for the game, so the initial release just had bugs left and right. I have nothing but eternal gratitude for those who played through the game in its earlier versions and put up with all the bugs in it.
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but there's also more than a few cut features, like a crafting system to spend extra souls and a map that filled up as you went through every room (that's why the maps in the first floor are split up like that), but time constraints meant that I could only release what I had so far. Also, yeah, the 2nd floor is a lot worse than the first in several ways, also due to dreaded time constraints. If I had a bit more time to work on the game, then there'd be school problems on each of the doors on the 2nd floor that you had to solve correctly within a time limit to unlock (this might actually be more annoying to some players than what's currently there).
I had a ton of fun writing all the conversations for the encounters AND also all the various students. That was probably the most time consuming part of it all. If somebody got a laugh or a smile out of what I wrote, then I'm glad.
If possible, I'd like to do a sequel to this game that expands on and refines its systems, because I love SMT-style negotiation systems and also sticking a ton of different skills onto a character. Maybe in a later jam...
Thanks a ton for playing through Sleepless and suffering through the gamebreaking bugs! I swear I playtested it a little...but probably not enough for a game of this scale. Next time, I'll devote a lot more time to playtesting everything.
I've pushed out an update that should fix things like getting two encounters in a row while also lowering the encounter rate, but you might still get ambushed by enemies after you exit a room. I wanted to put in features like a map and quest log from the start, but time constraints meant that the game was released without much QoL features. If I went and worked some more on the game, though, those will definitely be in there, along with an optional indicator for "important" NPCs. There's a lot of unused enemy designs too if you look in the enemies folder.
I'm glad you enjoyed the characters! I had a lot of fun writing them all, but I definitely wish I put some more time into making scenes and writing social links for them. Currently, the only character support that's finished is Nora and Koneru, but I had a draft of one between Xinmei and Tristia. There was supposed to be a sort of rivalry between them, with Xinmei being the chaos rep and Tristia being the law rep of the game. Xinmei definitely is best girl.
Thank you for the kind words and feedback!
Yeah, I definitely wish that I could have added more scenes of the party (and other characters) interacting with each other--I slacked off a little in the first week of development and ended up doing most of the actual game development (as in, working gameplay and maps out in RPGM and not just making outlines of the story and sketches of the graphical assets) in the latter half, so the game isn't as fleshed out as I would've liked. I said this when I finished my last game as well, but next time I definitely want to make a game with a lot more "meat" on it.