itch.io

A game combining 70s shoujo manga with Phantom of the Opera and lesbians is so incredibly my kind of niche that of course I'm gonna enjoy this VN lol. 

This game's visuals do a wonderful job of emulating the visual style of Ryoko Ikeda's shoujo work; I believe the team primarily looked at Rose of Versailles, but Tomiko definitely has vibes of a character in Ikeda's other manga Onii-sama/Dear Big Brother. My favorite things about work trying to imitate Ryoko Ikeda's work is not just how they emulate the art style, but how they depict her abstract patterns and lines that she regularly used to suggest a specific mood or intensity from the scene and the characters. This game actually goes through the effort of emulating that aspect with motion design around the character sprites, and I'm really a big fan of the results! It's definitely something I'd love to figure out how to emulate in my own work.

Managed to complete the game! It's a very cute demo and a really fun puzzle game! It's a cute premise to begin with, and the sense of humor slowly emerges over time as you realize just how mean these fairies can be to each other :y There was a good build up of difficulty in the first world while you teach the basic mechanics, and the information slides do a good job of getting you thinking in the right direction regarding solution options early on. The puzzles near the end definitely got a lot trickier, but I did manage to solve them on my own with some creative thinking on my part. 

For anyone in the future who might turn to the comments for any reason: there are 2 worlds at the moment, there is a save feature implemented since that original comment, and you can use the escape key at any time during the level to restart/leave to the main menu/overworld.

While the red fairies can cancel their throws, it would be nice if there was a key to put down the fairy entirely (press x twice in a row?). I feel like there could be  clearer way to switch between fairies; when they stand close to one another it can be hard to tell which fairy you have selected, and since the x key is so close to the action key z, it's easy to end up doing an action when I meant to switch, and vice versa. There's been a few times where I pressed the enter key out of habit, and while that seems to work on the 'continue' button screens, there's not any other functions tied into the enter button as far as I'm aware. Maybe it would make more sense to have the action button tied in with the enter key? I also think if the character highlight ring changed depending on fairy type (so green when with the blue fairy, pink when with the red fairy), that could possibly help address the situation.

Hope some of this managed to be of help! I'm very curious to see what the rest of the game might end up looking like!

Thank you for checking out my comics on my birthday! :>

Oh, I'm glad my comment was able to help you find a bug! I was willing to account that to me not figuring out what Candide would like lol

I'm really impressed that you dedicated so much time to creating a diverse range of looks for the protagonist, and didn't tie any of it to any specific gender! I also appreciate that you did actually make it tricky to achieve endings with characters; I'm still trying to figure out how to end up with Candice, as well as get all the achievements. The characters are already engaging enough, and it would be nice to see them with more fleshed out dialogue so we can see more of them!

Haha, glad you liked that scene! It was originally placeholder text that I decided to keep :)

The concept makes me laugh a lot, and the visuals are lovely! Moving and interacting is a bit awkward, but it's a really fun idea!

I was surprised at how long the download was taking, but seeing all that's in the final game, it's no wonder! I'm really impressed your team managed to include 3D models & environments, and even cutscenes with voiced lines! It took me a moment to realize it was the titular squid talking in that first cutscene (I was thinking it was one of those 'humans sound like gibberish' deals), but the artwork in these scenes are lovely. 

Thank you for the comment! I wanted to use this game for a more ambitious game idea I had, which is Very Much inspired by RPG Maker horror games. I based the parents heavily on my own, so I'm glad you like them lol. 

It's definitely harder to make portraits in GameMaker  lol....I know a lot of folks who managed to make some special games with Ren'py, so I'd definitely like to give it a try one day!

Good on you for adjusting your focus! The script is the heard of the visual novel, but it's important to know the other gears needed to make it!

Thank you Queenie!! I appreciate all the encouragement you gave me during this project, and I'm sorry about the windows only, that seems to be Gamemaker's default mode :') I used to be in the no windows club for a long while, so I wanna see if I can figure out if I can export it so it can play in browser!

Wow!! I never heard of GB studio before, but you got a really cool demo out of it! I love that you've even went to the effort of making a little box art cover for it, the visuals are Really On Point. The visuals are a bit confusing in that I didn't expect to be able to move freely around the space when the windows and lamps gave the impression that I'd only be able to move on the ground. It was only getting that 'you can't fly any higher!' that I realized that Impsie was supposed to be flying. Maybe if the fly command was it's own separate button, it might've helped me register that Impsie was flying? I also wanna know who that dog with the arrow is! Who is she!!!

The premise for this game is so cute! It definitely needs a lot of work to address bugs; I noticed the businessman straight up note on his sprite explaining that he's bugged, and the 'don't have enough points!' dialogue in the shop menu gets hidden by the 'buy' buttons and is hard to read in general. But I do love the metaphor of literally reeling in folks for you to show off in front of and get compliments from. Helps that the main character is really cute!!

Satyr Girl and the Escape from Hell

You play a Satyr Girl who doesn't fit in with her family in hell, and wants to find a way to escape. A passing angel seems to be your best hope, but is it really the best choice to make?

Game is family friendly, but there is a single optional screen with a cuss.

https://puffyartist.itch.io/satyr-girl-and-the-escape-from-hell

This is an extremely cute premise with incredibly charming models! The game seems to run incredibly slowly on my computer however; the opening dialogue took a solid minute to get through due to how slowly the dialogue was unfurling. I hope if you do explore the idea further, that you're able to find ways to help the game run more smoothly so I can fully explore around more easily!

I'm really impressed; I didn't think anyone would try to do a rhythm focused game for this kind of jam! The screen is Really Huge; it made going through the tutorial difficult, and going into full screen mode made it more difficult as information would be cut off. I did manage to figure out my way through it thankfully, and that last puzzle actually took me some time to figure out! 

My computer has a hard time running the game smoothly, which makes movement a bit janky and thus makes the stuff like the platformer sections a lot more challenging to do then what was likely intended. That said: I love that someone made something based on the 'Moon's Haunted' meme, and I'm impressed at how much your team managed to get done in 2 weeks!

This was really cute, and I especially liked how the UI on the main menu/dialogue boxes turned out! I'm impressed you managed to get a speaker avatar show up when speaking; that was something I wanted in my own game but couldn't get figured out. Do you plan to continue the story in your own time? I was a bit sad when I realized I hit the end of the demo, but the story was far from done.

I like the concept of a frozen soul! It's fun seeing the results of that effect on a person across the different endings.

Thank you for the kind words! I feel like I have a deeper appreciation for all the things I'd take for granted in a game, like 'the ability to select which option you want to choose', 'displaying a portrait next to the text', or even 'text fades into the scene' lol

Man, when I first made this topic I had some hope that I might be able to do regular updates. What ended up happening is that between work and family, I had a limited amount of time to work on the game, and most of that time was dedicated to just wrapping my head around figuring out how to code what I wanted.

I'm familiar with some basics of coding logic, but it's been a struggle to figure out how to piece everything together. There's a lot of guides online, which I definitely used heavily and was incredibly useful. An issue I kept running into, however, is discovering that an approach/code one guide touted as the way to achieve this action ends up being limiting if I want to do something else. I first encountered it when I was coding the walking, but the more devastating example was the dialogue. 

It took me a long time to figure out how to have dialogue for different characters that the player could scroll through. A lot of guides I was using did not seem to offer much help; they either showed how to have a single line of text appear once, without any changes, or they had their text display in unusual methods that I did not want. When I finally came across a guide that seemed to offer what I wanted to achieve, and even explained the logic of the steps that I could follow along, I was so happy. With the dialogue finally working, I was ready to do the next step I wanted to learn: making dialogue choices the player could choose from. The original guide I used did not cover dialogue choices, so I had to look elsewhere. Nearly every guide I found mentioned it would be easiest to have all the dialogue in an array. I realized that the code I was using for the dialogue worked with the idea that every bit of text turned into a queue. 

At this point I had 3 options: I could redo my dialogue code entirely, starting from scratch, I could wrack my brain for hours to see if I could find ways to make dialogue choices with a queue, or I could give up on dialogue choices entirely and just have the player choose between 2 objects to change the end. This was near the very end of the jam, so guess what I ended  up choosing.

My past me would be disappointed that I wasn't able to implement something as seemingly simple as dialogue choices, but at least by making the choices into a physical thing you choose between, it leads to my favorite bit of dialogue in this demo game:

This game jam ended up being a really good lesson in scale; I knew I wouldn't be able to do my -dream game-, but I thought my originals plans were attainable. I underestimated just how much time it would take for me to get a handle on the basics of coding in gamemaker, or the variety of different approaches people take to coding what you think are extremely  basic game mechanics. Maybe if I didn't have my job or if my family wasn't around I would have been able to get farther along in my original plan, but I do like having a steady salary job and I do enjoy my family. I'm glad that I was able to have a complete game package at the end, with players able to get different endings.

As difficult as it was, doing the coding for this game has been super rewarding. I feel like I'm taking actual steps to bringing some of my game ideas to life, and that makes me really excited. I think it would be nice to keep on working on this game to see if I can make my original plans for it into a reality. If I could enact my original vision for this game, while making the code a bit smoother & organized in a way that makes my brain happy, I think it would be an excellent demo for the more ambitious game idea I had. 

All in all: I'm really glad I finally pushed myself to do this!! I wanna keep it up!!

For years I thought it'd be fun to try out game making, and I even got an old copy of gamemaker back in a old humble bumble, but getting myself to sit down and work on it has been a hard thing to do. I signed up to be notified about this jam years ago, but every time it came up, I always seemed to have something going on that I would use as a justification to not participate. This year I do have things that will eat up my free time, but I think I have a bit more willpower this time around to see it through despite the other things going on in my life. 

My copy of Gamemaker is old enough that it's no longer getting updated (V1.4). I'm not sure if that's gonna be a source of any trouble in the future, but I think it should be fine for this jam. This jam for me is all about figuring out a work process that I like and learning some basic coding that's related to a more ambitious game idea I've had in mind. If I can at least figure out a work flow, then I'll be happy. I think if I can get the code for that down in the 1st week, then I could maybe use the 2nd week to give it some polish and make a short standalone that's hopefully at least interesting to check out. We'll see how that plan works out!

The mechanic I have in mind is your character will be chased around by enemies who can hurt you, and you can fight back and run away. If you put on a disguise, however, then all the enemies become friendly NPCs that you can actually talk to. The instant your disguise is gone, whether you take it off by choice or it comes apart by accident, the NPCs will immediately become hostile and attack again. I originally came up with this concept for a RPG horror game idea, but for this jam it's gonna be a lot more light hearted. I thought this standalone demo would be a fun chance to use a Satyr Girl I drew for fun earlier this  year, as pictured below.

The basic plot would be her trying to leave the hellscape she lives in with her family to go to a more heavenly place that she thinks she'd fit in better with. In this case, the enemies 'attacking' her might be relatives and neighbors badgering her about leaving. The disguise would be her appearing like the more typical satyrs in the area, and no one bothers her as they think she's finally stopped being all weird and conformed. There's probably gonna be a line from a old lady going 'oh you look so much better in red dearie!'

I planned just to start with the basics today, set up the room, a few sprites, a walking mechanic. I ended up discovering something unusual about Gamemaker, however. 

https://imgur.com/a/bl75qGT (Sorry, I'm new to capturing gifs as well, and the files I get are too large to upload directly in itchio. I'm still troubleshooting, but for now I'll link to gifs in imgur)

Before the jam, I was reviewing some Gamemaker guides on youtube, and I made a test project to practice alongside in. I had no intention of using any of this test code in the jam, but then as I was setting up my Jam file, I wanted to pull up my old test project to refer to something. Apparently if you have a open project in GM and you pull up a different GM project, instead of opening up a new screen for just that different project, that different project combines with your open project. I'm not sure if I did anything extra, or if it's a quirk of GM 1.4, but I ended up writing over my original Jam setup work with my old project. Whoops! I'm Very Glad I learnt all of this now, and not a week from now. 

As a plus side, a lot of the walking code is in place! I'm keeping the test bullet code in place for now, since I might be able to refer to and rework that code to be a different sort of attack. 

https://imgur.com/a/wZu4Eul

I was originally planning for a more  RPG feel where walking is based on tiles, but I like how smooth this test walk turned out. I think it might work out better for the mechanic I had in mind, so I'm keeping it as is for now. This room will be the starting point where the Satyr girl decides to leave home. I'll need to update the background, make her parents into actual objects, and set up more room boundaries. If I can get a new room to load when she walks right, and maybe even set up the corner where she can put on her disguise, that would be some good progress.  It might also be a good chance to get text boxes set up so the  talking mechanic is in place.

Sorry for the lengthy post! I doubt all of my devlogs will be this in-depth, especially during the work week. I'm hoping to have at least a little bit of progress each day, however! 

Thank you so much for letting me know!! I don't know what happened there, but it should be up now!

Thank you for the comment, I'm happy you enjoyed the comic! :> I don't think I'll make another full-blown Splatoon zine anytime soon, but I do post quick short comics featuring Sky (Agent 8) and Hazel (Agent 4) on my twitter here! https://twitter.com/i/moments/1035655560375554054 Now that Agent 3 has been introduced, she might appear in future short comics I post online :>