itch.io

I see that you uploaded a zip file for offline use (presumaby)?

I would love the option to purchase a copy.

Would one assume that the licence would stay the same as the website (CC0), or would the zip file be released under a different licence?

We can thank the numerous reaction youtubers who popularise horror games with the teen/preteen market.

Even without the theme of horror, this market drastically changes the nature of how a game is interpreted. Take Minecraft for example*.

I'm not sure if anyone else here has played the Narrow One; but it too is plagued with its own issues. All-in-all, the main issue is that there are very different types of people visiting itch. Keeping the front page needs to cater to the kinds of gamer who doesn't want to explore for themselves. Such people are mostly underage kids. We know itch to have so much diversity and creativity. And you are correct in pointing out that an intial impact sets the tone for all but the most adventurous.

But the subsumation of the existing main page into an alternative user experience would result in rage for the current users for whom the popular offerings appeal to. A bigger question can be for where itch gets the most value. Of the current users being catered to, are they more likely to spend more overall than the average user? Is there another meaningful metric we can look at instead?

*: A novel sandbox. Appealing in it's ease of controlling space. Of use to those who had an interest in architectural aesthetic. Then it gained increasing popularity in gamified form. The ability to be used as an intellectual tool never changed. However the ability to hold serious discussion on subjects like adjacency and negative space, with Minecraft as the medium, became cheapened somewhat. You'd have to move into specialised forums than be a conversation in situ as part of the medium.

Sounds like you're using a bug bounty system?

While a team first writing specifications before writing code is a serious time sink, you end up with less trouble during debugging phases. As automated testing can only catch the most glaring errors. While the game seems to be single player, are you seeking contribution to stress test server/network load?

Where are you in the development cycle? Still working on prototying, or are you finalising a major rollout?

Here's some A.I. generated fan art of someone entering/leaving L-space.

I feel of the wonky proportions helps add to the madness somewhat.

Pretty cool game. I can see how this would lead to an addiction-fueled consumption of time!

H O W E V E R
It appears this demo is another one of those 'steam wishlist' games, for when the commercial game is out, there won't be upload any full seperate version for purchase here on itch.

The game has been on steam since June 9th, 2022. There's no chance of it being available. Not everyone wants (or is able) to use Steam; but also, developers quite resonably don't want users having access to source code to something that should earn them money. Something Steam's DRM protects.

Hopefully the developer might decide to eventually upload a full (paid) version to itch if sales on Steam taper off.

Thanks for reading.

Very interesting! You've set up a solid premise for the storylines to write themselves.

That failure ending alone should earn this RPG a place in a Game Master's scenario library.

If you had enough memory cards and yellow cards; I wonder how the game would handle having an NPC who doesn't have any cards left in their deck to play?

It is extremely difficult to write games with flirtation interaction that involves the player.

The tonal shift from 'Player's character doesn't want to be at work' into a 'Player's character is vulnerable to be flirted with' came across a little disjointed.

Without the setup of character building, it feels like the player is meant to personally be won over with how the text is written rather than putting ourselves into the shoes of Kate and how she sees the world.

As a suggestion, it might be possible to lay out a little groundwork on the life of this Player Character (Kate) beforehand. Perhaps having us play through a few bar shifts? Understanding what it's like to be in the role, revealing bits of exposition, setting up plot hooks for Kate to have curiosity about the intimate nature of people; the player is then aware of the intended premise when the main antagonist arrives.

Final note: At the 'always playing it safe' dialogue, I really wanted to yell at the computer about how it's a choice based on defining ourselves in a chaotic world. Even the overly simplified good person / bad person narrative for how the world is, is part of this choice of defining self. heh. Ah well.

Thanks for making this game :)

Great game!

Reminds me a little of Robert Asprin's 'Dragon Poker' (from the novel 'Little Myth Marker' in his Myth series.)

I love the concept of playing a game vastly beyond one's ability to control it. But best of all, the devloper has managed to keep it fairly approachable and fun to play out different combinations!

The only issue I have is that this game plays more like a combination of Vingt-Et-Un and Blackjack (rather than strictly Blackjack).

I would offer a suggestion to the developer to encode and graph the various complications or system balancing will end up as an impossible task.

The Gun seems to have been disabled now.

I got as far as I could without knowing that I needed a planter/gardening-pot,
(One already has dirt and can grow trees, that such a gardening container never came to mind.) Or which to summon an animal, you need to prepare an appropriate environment.

It's way too easy to get caught up trying to exhaust new creations than taking things methodically. The fact that the seeds were 'mixed' was a good clue that they contained different things that activated in different ways.

I don't mind abstract symbolism. However the final few combinations relied on guessing what the developer had in mind; than adhering to a learned consistency. The animal puzzles required more patience than applying the game's logic. By the end of the game, my thoughts lingered on combinations never realised. Which becomes a great source of inspiration for others to draw from.

All in all, a really neat game! :)

This was a fun little game!

It has potential to be taken even further. :)

The Queen Bee's gimmick is using honey dice to pump up dice values when placed on the specifc tiles on the board.

However, You are correct in that if the honey claims your shield dice, you're going to be out of luck when the big attack happens.

I feel the best you can do is to ensure you have only 2 of each colour type. More dice means more chance of having an unfavourable streak of dice you don't want for a given situation.

The levels have gotten a bit tricky now, so I'm sure you'll only need a hint instead of a solution here.

I'll assume you've already cleared one of the three gates on the right. As soon as you move that box to weigh down a button, there's no real way (nor any need) to move it again; so you must choose which makes most sense. Both character's arms are long enough to do what you need. At least that bottom character won't be needing to move that box.

The hard part is knowing that all three buttons need to be weighted down somehow. You've done the first and can work out the second, but how will you get the third?

Thank you very much for releasing this!

Saw a track of yours listed on Pixabay, but only 'Unknown Realm' was featured as CC0. Glad you linked your itch packs on your website!

I always try to find the creative's explicitly stated licence. 

What's meant to happen when you die with the 'game over' screen?
(The game glitches out and doesn't continue back to the entrance screen)

try shooting it with the paint gun!

... or not.

I'm curious as to where or from whom these vocals are from.

(There are a lot of Koreans named Kim. And the K-pop scene is huge, so I'm not sure I can find the right one.)

The text content is good. However, I am currently seeking a printable version.

Tried to manually brighten the parchment background by placing a semi-transparent (page sized) white rectangle between the text elements and the background on each page. However, my PDF editing programme isn't good enough to prevent the text boxes from becoming misaligned.

If you'd like to offer a printable version, I'd be most grateful!  I've found that setting a white rectangle overlay underlay middle-lay transparency at 25% (that is 75% opaque), seems to be adequate for printing while retaining all the flourishes and lines in the original pagework design.

Would be interesting to see someone speedrun this game.
It should technically be possible.

Anyway... * * * S P O I L E R S -- B E L O W * * *

10.

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A map of the trail

Agreed with the boat confusion.

Perhaps the minimap should be slowly filled when discoveries are made?

3D rendered models are really hard to make. Especially models rigged with poseable limbs!

On your vroid website, I'm specially impressed with your yumeko character.

I've never used vroid myself; what tips would you recommend importing these assets into a developer workflow?

Creatives deserve to be paid for the work they do

Great atmosphere and fantastic theme.

As for getting into the game world in order to feel the logic of the puzzles, it unfortunately falls a bit short. Case in point; objects held up to the face can be considered as some sort of information decoding method based on filtering a scene with too much information to be useful into related concepts (when held a particular way).

The blue giraffe puzzle, based on obtaining a physical asset based on perspective feels a little overly convoluted. One might quite reasonably see the similarity with the blue shape in the environment and think "oh boy, I can't wait to see the third piece of this puzzle which gives these compnents the context they need to solve it".

Additionally for people who have played enough escape rooms, sometimes clunky directions are given in order to prevent the play being corrupted. The flow diagram can quite rightly be considered a puzzle order sequence. Sadly, that first fish tank is not where the player needs to start. Bored, players may try other puzzles to see what they can do; but that expectation of things seemingly being out of intended order.

And I think this is what can cause frustration. Because otherwise, this is a pretty perfect game. Even the Myst series was imperfect in places.

At least it's not Mountain Dew!

I really appreciate you taking this info onboard.
I'm all too familar with how complicated programming has become!

Itch.io also have their own particular way they display html5 games.

For the itch games of yours I've played, you do good work!

Most likely I'm just an outlier; but I can do a network scan to identify browser page activity when the issue happens on my end. And from replays it appears to crash randomly. If you have no objections, I'll paste it here (ie. I can remove data if it's sensitive for your programe's code.)
------
As the game starts, I see the following issue (the text quoted is directly from the browser):

<quote>
A page or script is accessing at least one of navigator.userAgent, navigator.appVersion, and navigator.platform. Starting in Chrome 101, the amount of information available in the User Agent string will be reduced.

To fix this issue, replace the usage of navigator.userAgent, navigator.appVersion, and navigator.platform with feature detection, progressive enhancement, or migrate to navigator.userAgentData.

Note that for performance reasons, only the first access to one of the properties is shown.

AFFECTED RESOURCES
2 sources

1. jquery.maskMoney.js:1

   index.html:1

<endquote>

And in the network, I  find the following packet:

<quote>

Request URL: https://cattrigger.itch.io/dr-brain/rp/eyJpZCI6MjI1MjkyOSwibSI6MTY5NzA4NjI3Nywid...

Request Method: GET
Status Code: 204 No Content

Remote Address: 173.255.250.[xx]:443 (NOTE: address censored)

Referrer Policy: no-referrer-when-downgrade

Connection: keep-alive

Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 04:51:21 GMT

Server: lapis

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Request Headers
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: itchio_token=WyJOdlVCIiwxNjgyNDcxNzYxLCJmcWE4aTQwZ1BMaEY1UlAiXQ%3d%3d%2eOkOVqvnL2QHdHtzVzA9U4r3qXmI%3d; ref%3aregister%3areferrer=https%3a%2f%2fwww%2eqwant%2ecom%2f; _ga_YDZPBSSQ45=GS1.1.16825...
<endquote>

Chromium browser running on a BSD operating system.

The crash isn't browser breaking. Simply that the HTML canvas is suddenly a broken widget. Is it possible you read or write to localStorage, or use some OpenGL library when that sequence occurs? I have tightened security settings that prevent some other itch games from running. But it's rare for something to stop working in the middle of playing without issues!

Game crashes when the 'run to the stairs' section begins.

Great game, Napas!
Do you think you might eventually sell the complete version of your game here on itch? (some people don't like the steam platform)

Have you played Fear and Hunger?

It's an RPG. Plenty of combat. Plenty of Horror.

Oh dear! I think I'm trapped!?

Just collected the river otter but cannot continue past the pit. :/

Edit: changed image to prevent spoilers (unless someone clicks 'see more')

To get to that level, one does have to cheese it!

Not too bad! Nice listing your asset sources as well!

Found a sheltered spot on the map to make it easy.

Highly recommend zooming out before playing. Browser might not be able to resize the playfield whilst the game is in motion. (Esc to come back to this page, resize, then resume game.)

Hotline Miami is an interesting game, as the character makes the decisions to be bloodthirsty (and the game's checkpoints feed into this lack of control). Additionally, the plot twists need to convey a number of meanings simultaneously.

Perhaps a voiced protagonist could work; but it's extremely difficult. Content writing is a difficult artform.

If Chell had cutscene memories, perhaps she might feel more like a protagonist again?

How far can you get without any upgrades?

So far, 22 is my limit. (15 doesn't die after a single headshot)

The level 'up' becomes disheartening owing to the control responsiveness lag. I don't mind the lag if it feels like the challenge is solid.

However, subframes are meant for speedrunners, not casual players.

Really polished game otherwise!

Some time ago, I would have made an argument that memes were an example of NC. But with imgflip and A.I. scraping art from publicly available sources; I'm having a difficult time considering how NC is a helpful descriptor.

An academic using a work on an educational slide for their class... an educational reason (with purpose of critique) overrides more general copyright protections; but simply for a decoration reason might now be considered a commercial use (as the class notes are part of the package of what the academic institution uses to tuition students for money).

I'd advise the artist to choose a licence system such as one of the options offered by Creative Commons or another. (Probably not MIT licence as it also allows selling of that work to 3rd parties)