itch.io

Really outstanding job. Thank you for sharing this ambitious project. I thought the storytelling and pacing were handled really so well throughout the majority of the game, even if the ending felt a bit abrupt. It felt open-ended but tragic and left quite an impact.  I appreciated the way the story escalated with each interaction with the journal pages. I also liked the way you implemented some mechanical elements with the slingshot. They felt in-line with the tone of the game.

This would be a good project to polish up (working out the technical issues, perhaps the pacing at towards the end, and adding some sound.) Please let me know if you revisit it!

This is a fun narrative with an enjoyable light-hearted tone but it seems to end before it really even gets started. Perhaps there's a technical issue, but it seemed to end immediately after I started talking to the other character. The concept is interesting but it feels underutilized/unfinished in its current state.

Really excellent! The virtual pet theme was executed so well. Excellent visuals and sound. The tone was consistent and fun and the length/depth was perfect. It didn't leave me wanting. I really appreciated the many funny options for interacting with my dear lucy and seeing my lucy enjoying their star, or refusing pets. So charming!

Wow, very ambitious and impressive work! Sound and visuals were well-crafted and worked so well with the narrative. The story had a great opening and kept me engaged throughout. It had a great voice and I really felt for the character's internal struggle to feel like they were somehow contributing to the world in a positive way.  It ended rather abruptly for me and I think it would feel good to be allowed to linger on the train a little while to let it soak in.  I struggled with the font choice because it often felt cramped and out of place with the hand drawn aesthetics. Also, one thing you probably didn't catch is that the black box to fade in is too short to completely fill a 16:10 display. Excellent job Barbara and Toby!

I thought this was a really interesting narrative and it was interesting to imagine how this connects up to your thesis work. There's a dryness to the experience which has something to do with the monotony of the character's daily routines. I found that this made the dreams feel particularly surreal, vivid, and disturbing. The pacing was a little uneven at times, in which I lingered in parts of the narrative that didn't lead me anywhere notable, and other moments which felt abbreviated and perfunctory. But something tells me that this was an intentional choice. Good work.

Really wonderful narrative game. I was intrigued by the relationship between these two characters and appreciated that focus on the senses. There were mysterious elements such as the candles which I still don't have a firm grasp on but they were effective in capturing my imagination and giving me a small sense of agency and consent within the space. I got the Wonderland ending and felt satisfied with the experience so I didn't replay it with an effort to arrive somewhere different. Great work!

Really great game! It turned out so well.  The humorous tone was really successful and felt consistent and in-character throughout. I felt incentivized to see if I could ever get Rina to take me on as a partner. Maybe one day! The way you integrated Ink to display avatars and the name cards was really well-done. The game has a great look to it. 

Two small areas of improvement: 

Move the instructions out of the controls menu. They are not immediately obvious and no one ever visits a Controls page when starting a new game. 

Another option would be to make the buttons clickable with the mouse. I omitted something from the code demoed in class, so reach out and remind me to show you/post the fix if you want to go this route.

Okay... one extra one. Have the opening dialogue box open automatically. Let me know if you need assistance.

Great job!

This was a really ambitious concept executed with a lot of care. The details were well-considered and kept me engaged even though I knew my time in each form was limited. I think the new choices added a sense of fatigue to the scenario which seem more in line with the joyful yet melancholy feeling you described last week. Really great job!

Really gripping narrative. I thought the pacing was excellent and the details were vivid enough to be disturbing without feeling labored. The game had the feeling of a old ghost story, particularly with the ending not giving me any resolution or answering any questions. I feel haunted!

Where'd this come from?! Quite a departure from last week, but also, it connected with the original concept so well. I really appreciated the annoying, persistent voice of the computer and really felt the exhaustion as the player/character.  Really engaging and enjoyable work! Also, the offline aspect was really nice and I wonder if it really needed the prompt to go somewhere if we had not already?

Really wonderful.

In this game I have a job to help Tod the quail overcome some social anxiety to make friends. I played through a couple of times and each time successfully navigated Tod to friendship.

I didn't experience any technical issues which hindered the game. There was one sound effect that felt truncated (the yahoo, I think)

The audio and visuals were excellent and used very smartly to great effect. I enjoyed the small changes in the drawings when I would make my choices. I also really liked the sound effect you chose. They gave the game a lot of personality.

My favorite moments were...

1. When the narrator starts acknowledging the white void. 

2. The sound when the sun appears after, once again, mentioning the white void!

Not far enough along to leave any serious feedback, but it's a good start. Please get it done as soon as possible after the break and inform me when it is finished. Happy to play it!

I am a bored cashier who has an experience with a blood soaked priest during their night shift. There are a few different outcomes including one in which I flirt with the priest and get his phone number. I also experienced a different path where there was no priest but I fell asleep and woke to the store being trashed.

There weren't any significant technical issues. The formatting of the text was really odd, especially when playing full screen. Perhaps in trying to remove the overflow: hidden property you accidentally deleted the container? It looked better and was easier to read in the small window.

The visuals were very charming and did a good job of highlighting the story in fun ways. The one sound effect was very jarring, but it did make me wonder if there were other opportunities to use small sounds to highlight moments throughout the story.

The branching paths felt quite uneven, with the ones featuring interactions with the priest being most interesting, and the one where I fall asleep being the least memorable.

The most memorable moment for me was the option to flirt with the priest. Repeatedly. It was confusing tonally (is this game supposed to be funny, spooky, or ominous? A mix?) but was also the most satisfying ending I experienced by far.

Definitely unfinished, but a really strong start.

I'm a highschooler and I find myself enlisted as a hero to save Cloud City. Perhaps it's a dream? There were moments where fantastic things were happening interspersed with everyday vignettes like doing homework or going to school. Things fizzled out and I think the ending was that Cloud City was destroyed, but I couldn't tell you how I got there since it was still in an underdeveloped state.

The writing was fun and I enjoyed doing things like like solving a math problem. Additionally, the images you used were great companions to the text and I hope you will continue to expand this part of the experience.

Please let us know when this is done. Would love to keep playing it more.

Interesting game!

I am someone who starts out lost at sea and is then lost in a forest and then lost in a bakery, in search of a friend. I got two different endings, both where I was left alone.

The game has a surreal, dream-like quality which is really disorienting. I had to play it twice to follow what was going on, but even then it was very fragmented like a memory. This is something I really enjoyed about the game.

I didn't run into any technical issues. There are a good number of spelling and grammar issues throughout and I would like you to have someone proofread your work in the future (the writing center can help with this!) The page is very dark, which makes sense initially given the narrative. However, it is also a little challenging to read, especially with black text on a dark blue background. Consider tweaking this a little.

The visual elements were nice illustrations of my feelings at particular moments and I appreciated that they were as abstract in character as the text was. They also served as a good break in the text. I think you could also experiment with using the CLEAR tag to adjust the pacing of the game.

I am a young child named Lia who is living in some version of the future after the world has experienced some sort of climate crises. Lia doesn't seem to know what to make of the information from her parents and ultimately decides to have a bake sale to help people out.

There were issues with capitalization and spelling throughout, which I didn't think was intentional, but then I got to a part where Lia is misspelling fruit names and assumed it must have been a stylistic choice. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this, but it did help remind me that this is from the voice of a small child.  Perhaps the mistakes could be more consistent or pointed out in more obvious ways throughout the story?

The inclusion of the drawing was a nice touch and I think it would be interesting to explore more of that throughout the narrative. I was also confused about the ending and was unclear if it there was more that I couldn't see beyond the frame (please check the box to enable fullscreen from the itch.io dashboard when uploading your game). Aside from that, it felt a bit jarring because it suddenly ended the experience without giving me any greater insight or resolution to anything I was experiencing throughout the game.  What would you like players to leave the experience with?

The pairing of the insight regarding what is going on in the world with the limited understanding of the child is interesting. I think it could be expanded upon even further with moments in which we, as the intelligent players/readers, can clearly understand details about the circumstances that the child just doesn't understand. Perhaps a combination of written and visual narrative?

I am an artificial lifeform talking to a girl about something terrible that happened to a place called Palladium. After viewing a video archive the artificial lifeform takes itself offline.

There's one broken image related to looking through Palladium files. Otherwise, the images were a good addition to this game and added some really nice moments of levity. The use of an animated image as a video of Palladium was a great choice. It was hard to see what was so dire about it, but I assumed it was smoke based on the response.

I like the way you were creating distinctions between the two characters' voices with things like Lay-PT being more expressive with their use of all the WOAAAH!! and AHHH! and STARS!! Oddly, I can't tell whose perspective the story is being told from, as it begins with VAL and ends with LAY. Interesting.

Good improvements with this revision!

Really good stuff.

I am on a date with Sybil, who is some sort of vampire (I think). My character seems really enamored with them. I eventually end up as their pet.

I didn't run into any technical issues. The use of the background image was really good at creating some context for the narrative. At some points the candle would make the writing hard to read, so perhaps it just needs to be darked a little more.

The writing was great. The descriptions were very rich and they gave me a good sense that my character was hypnotized by their date. I also enjoyed the ways in which you highlighted the awkwardness of a first date, even though it was never ambiguous that my partner was some sort of monster. It also highlighted the differences between the two characters; one being exquisite and the other feeling out-of-their-league.

I am interested in your choice to leave things hanging with a question and initially felt quite insistent that the lack of choice was a bug (I even zoomed out the page). Perhaps it all happened so fast towards the end that I was expecting things to be drawn out a little more?

This was very dark and also quite funny.

I am a new employee at a job with a weird boss that abducts me into the woods where there are other bosses(?) and then I am burned to death. 

I didn't run into any major technical issues, though there was There was one choice in which I was asked what my favorite color was (I picked green) and it immediately switched to the next day without any response. Perhaps unintended? Also, there were only two audio clips that I recall playing (a typing sound and a scream). Were there more? The scream was very loud and jarring (but also kind of funny in the way it was dragged out). Some people will probably find this unpleasant and if that is important to you, you may consider adding a warning in the description. 

The image of the bosses weird grin was haunting and is a good demonstration of the balancing act you're doing with creepiness and humor in the game.  At some point, I decided to play through this by placating my boss to see if I could possibly get out of the situation alive, but it didn't seem to have much impact.  I still died. But that weird grin...

I'm a tiny person who has wandered into a dangerous human house that I must escape from. I die many, many times. I was crushed, I forgot to prop open the door and was stepped on, but I also eventually escaped!

The sound is great. I like the small sound effects and think they work well with the animated gifs to create a dark, visceral, and ominous experience.

I ran into a small number of typos (dinning) and grammatical errors early on, but not throughout.

The length is good. I played through multiple times and it was just big enough for me to recall my choices from prior playthroughs. One suggestion I have is to have the Restart choice clear the screen before beginning again. The dark humor is also well-executed and it kept my gruesome ends feeling satisfying each time.

Really fun and engaging game!

Very enjoyable game. I played the role of someone who decided to turn off a very chatty computer, and despite its pleas, I shut that computer down. I didn't encounter any technical issues, but there was one notable typo (unencrtypting). The audio did a good job of reinforcing the theme. 

The pacing of the game was good. I enjoyed the humor and also tended to follow each prompt for more information. I was curious about the voice of the computer... It may have felt more human than my own character? Perhaps that was by design to keep me from turning it off. I'm not sure any of its statements dissuaded me from turning it off at any point, but since its a short narrative, I just didn't feel that sympathetic with what it was saying. I also think once it told me that it killed the others for being "dead weight" it lost any sort of good will with me. Also, it took me a few minutes to understand the title, and when I did I felt "smart"

I was born into an anti-RESETTER family, but they relented when I insisted on being fitted with a RESETTER so that I could be like my peers. To gain favor with my parents I began working at church, but my life is cut short as it informs me that I am participating in illegal activities and it explodes.

I played multiple times but the first playthrough I described ended with 13: The Cost of Herd Mentality.

Really outstanding  worldbuilding. The details are incredibly interesting and vivid. I greatly enjoyed the kinds of choices and variety of outcomes you provided. It has a lot of depth, which left me feeling more curious after each playthrough.

Aside from some spelling and grammar issues related to shifting tenses, there weren't any things which affected the game negatively for me. Given the amount of text you have, it was good idea to visit the Writing Studio. It definitely benefited from breaking the larger passages of text into small ones over the past week.

Most memorable for me: Incredibly satisfying outcomes that rewarded my curiosity (For example, ENDING 0: Strangled in Infancy). Great work!

I am an aging adult with Alzheimer's who visits a gallery to look at paintings and then insistently discovers who the painter was. The ending I chose led me to read the name of the artist.

There weren't any aspects which negatively affected my experience.

This version took big, successful steps forward from last week. I enjoyed spending time with the paintings and I'm glad you expanded this part of the game. It had a consistent somber tone where I assumed I knew what was going on but only given ambiguous clues which kept me curious. My assumptions about the identity of the artist from the begin were teased out just enough through the entire game and I was given some resolution which felt satisfying in the end. 

I really loved the insistent choices in the text towards the end. They felt very good in context and were implemented very well. Really good work!

I awoke in a ravaged city and began making my way through it, noting the destruction as I moved along. On my first playthrough, the game abruptly ended with me making a camp and preparing to go to sleep.

I played the game three times and didn't experience anything which negatively affected the experience. There were some  long convoluted sentences that could use some revision and the title seems to be chopped short, but overall, the writing had an effective somber tone to describe what was happening.

The game seemed to end rather abruptly each playthrough, which left me wanting some sort of resolution to the experience. 

Overall, the voice in your writing was the most memorable aspect of the game. It was really excellent. You described things in such vivid detail and created an interesting and dark world to visit. Very good job.

I am a robot having a conversation with a human girl about things like food from my town which turns to the discovery of the destruction of an area called Palladium. I played through it twice and one of the times it ended with the presumed suicide of the girl.

There were some small typos that I came across (like "maman" instead of "mama") but they didn't hinder the experience. 

I enjoyed the chat log format, but I often became confused about who was speaking. The voices are sort of similar in tone. It's possible that this could be remedied a bit by continuing to break the passages into smaller chunks, separated by singular choices. You do this already quite effectively throughout the game. The longer passages are also the most dramatic, so breaking them up would help you create pacing that emphasized your emotional beats. Towards the end they get a little lost in the conversation.

I really appreciate the conversational style and the intimate discussions of things like kult-kult. They created warm moments that served as a good counterpoint to the bleak developments in the story. Nice work.

I am being broken up with after Baltimore Comic Con, but I'm not exactly sure why. Seems like I bought some prints that the other person didn't appreciate?!

The ending was a bit abrupt. I was in a fight that started to escalate but then just suddenly ended with the reasoning. 

I didn't run into anything which negatively affected the experience. There were a number of typos (for example, ur and aparpartment) as well as punctuation and capitalization issues that could be fixed by having someone else proofread your game. Please reach out to someone in the future to do this proofreading work for you. Please also make the viewport window larger and check the Fullscreen button option in the Dashboard unless you have a specific stylistic need that would require you to do something else.

Something which I thought was very effective was your ability to express how confusing and sudden an argument, or breakup, can happen. In the moments before the ending, it felt very tense and dramatic.

I work at Starbucks and have a creepy encounter with a customer who turns out to be a stalker.  I question him in a couple of different ways and end up calling my friend to drive me home.

I played through twice. Once I ended up calling my friend for a ride and in the other case I see the man waiting with a knife in the alley on my way home.

I didn't experience anything which seriously hindered the experience but there were long passages without much choice. I think the path in which I choose not to ask about the espresso had more decisions, but I think there are a lot of opportunities to add choices or create breaks in the pause which allow the disturbing parts of the story to soak in and have more impact. It currently reads a bit like a summary.

I liked the overall writing style and thought it helped give the character a personality and specific point of view.

I am a cozy witch on a mission to heal my crow familiar with herbs that I collect from various locations. I went to a river and found an herb with a fairy and then went to town where I attempted to buy a healing potion, but it did not turn out as I hoped!

The story ended with me turning my bird into another bird. Very charming. I played it though another time and got a different ending.

I didn't come across anything that negatively affected my playthrough.

I enjoyed the friendly tone of the writing and gentle humor. The results of my actions were surprising and kept me curious about the world. My favorite moment was choosing to buy the healing potion. I suspected this would not be a simple ending and I thought the outcome of that decision was incredibly fun. It definitely inspired me to play again. Very nice!

I got a dog with my bf and named him Jerry. I raised this dog with my before we were in a terrible accident and my partner died. Jerry escaped and the world was infested with zombies. I never found Jerry, but I went to the woods and found a weird man named Jerry and things went bad. Very bad. But also funny. Very funny.

No major issues though there were a number of spelling and punctuation issues throughout. Please make sure to have someone else go through your work with the specific goal of weeding this stuff out. 

It was really enjoyable. I appreciated the way it was written and the also the humor was very effective. I'm still trying to resolve what feels like a first half (me and bf) and the second half (me and jerry + zombies). I suspected that I was being set up to meet Quinn again but then felt disappointed that I didn't.  Some of the endings were really abrupt, right from the beginning, which didn't always feel satisfying (mostly because I was enjoying the writing and humor so much).

There were many memorable moments but my favorite was probably this passage which went something like:

The moon looks so pretty tonight
Drive
Quinn is humming quietly
Drive
I'm so tired
Drive

I thought the delivery and pacing of that section was really wonderful. Good work!

I am a duck and I went on many short and wild adventures. More than one seemed to end up with car accidents? It felt very perilous but also quite funny. I appreciated the humor in this.

Many endings happened very abruptly and there were some spelling and grammatical issues. I didn't get a sense that this was a stylistic choice, but perhaps I am missing something. Either way I would recommend working with people at the Writing Studio  to ensure the writing conveys your stylistic intentions more clearly.

What I enjoyed most was just how treacherous my choices were. Such simple things became traps and the entire things was darkly funny. This kept me engaged and wanting to return to it again and again.

I decide to go fishing for a whale shark and caught a bunch of things which eventually led me to ... a basking shark! I tried it again using my new bait and was able to get the whale shark as hoped. I was pleased.

I didn't come across any issues. 

I enjoyed each moment that I would drop my line, curious as to what I might catch; which is exactly what I want from fishing! I was excited to find the basking shark and also to see the inventory expand to include the things which I caught. I played through it three times and each time I went down a different satisfying path. Nice work!

I went right, lived through some Lewis Carroll-esque logic puzzling only to be tormented by beast after beast and a fun, but antagonistic, narrator that I ultimately disappointed. I ultimately chose my ending because I felt goaded on by the narrator and I was happy to disappoint them 😇 Very pleased with my playthrough. Didn't experience any issues. For me, the most enjoyable part of the experience was the consistency of the humorous narrator. The tone was very fun, especially when I chose obviously poor choice in any given moment. Well done!

I was waiting to be executed and managed to talk my way into 5 years of exile by looking for clues from the Queen.

I played it multiple times and mostly ended with the option for exile. Once I was able to continue in servitude of the queen. I didn't experience any weird issues. I enjoyed noticing the clues. It sensitized me to the choices available to me, which actually made me consider my actions.

Really good improvements from last week. The details of the queen's behavior felt well-thought out and I wanted to see the different endings you created. This new non-looping structure works wonderfully. Great work!