As someone who’s tried to make an actual operating system, with a built-in but not terribly good kernel debugger, I kinda had to try this one. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I liked it.

Some thoughts (categorised to mostly match the rating categories):

Story and theme: The story is cute, spooky, OS-themed and fun. And it uses the Halloween theme in an interesting way. The writing style is also pretty fun.

Audio: I think you did pretty well here, both with the music and the sound effects, although I would have liked if there was a way to adjust the volume from within the game. And the music both fits the old computer theme and the fun writing style in the VN.

Characters and art: Cute, theme-fitting characters (they’re cuter than Clippy, and spooky like Clippy, what more can I ask for?). And the art, while simple, works pretty well: both the cute sprites and the haunted “screenshots”. The dithering also feels like a good fit for an old computer.

UI and accessibility: I think the UI looks like something that could be in a real OS (in fact, I think Ubuntu’s window decorations used to look a bit like the ones in that textbox). The font feels a bit modern, but still fits the retro-and-cute aesthetic of the game. The different characters having different text colours isa nice touch. But I would have loved to have a back or history button, and perhaps skipping or saveslots. It does seem like I can speed up the text animation by clicking before it finishes, although another thing I would have liked would be the ability to advance the text with the keyboard instead of having to use the mouse. And when the text characters are dancing around it can be a bit hard to read.

Marketing: I like the logo and think it does a good job at showing what to expect from the game (although I probably expected a bit more interactivity, but yeah, it looks cute and spooky but fun. The page also seems pretty well-designed, and I love how it’s a “downloadable OS” for Windows. The log line seems like a pretty good description that made me want to play the game.

Pretty short, so I played it five times to try different choice combinations. (Also, on my first two playthroughs, I’d forgotten to plug in my headphones, so I had to replay it anyway).

Being a short game I think I’ll conflate some of the rating categories instead of trying to write feedback for each one:

Theme and story: pretty good, although when there’s several choices I tend to try the different combinations, especially in a short game like this, and it seems each choice only affected a smaller part of the game rather than there being combinations doing different things (other than whatever happens if you let the timer run out: it jumped all the way to the next choice and ended up drawing the door partially in front of the MC which I don’t think was intended).

Audio: Nice, especially the music, but also the sound effects (though I feel like it would be nice if there were an option to turn down the volume of the “typing” sound).

Characters and art: I think the art is pretty good. And I think you managed to build an interesting relationship between the characters in a fairly short story.

UI and accessibility: The UI seems bit basic (perhaps the choice buttons could have a texture like the textbox, and having options like “auto” and “back” would probably be nice too). For such a short VN it’s not a big deal, but being able to go one line back and re-read it would be nice, or at least make it so that when I reach the end I could go back to the beginning without reloading the tab. And there’s lines of text at the beginning that show after one another without me having to press anything, so if I were a bit slower at reading I could have struggled with those. At least the white text on the black background is easy to read.

Marketing: I’m not sure the logline “unfinished eerie stories of the Mei’s family” says much about which genre this is, and the logo almost has a sci-fi look to it. The game page does look interesting, but even that one could do with more text so that people have a clue what type of game to expect before they click “play”.

What I liked most: The dialogue and music. What I’d suggest changing: adding an option to restart the game.

Yeah, I would have included voice acting and singing if I’d had more time. I also intended to translate the dialogue into Danish and Spanish (hopefully I haven’t made that too hard for myself with all that singing).

I think line 623351 (“I’ve heard stories of a witch going here and hiding a treasure.”) while not a bad line on its own, would definitely have benefitted from a bit more context, such as a line later in the story saying that the witch made the bridge collapse in order to hear the characters sing or something like that.

The shark has one line of dialogue, which you can see if you play a wrong note, but I guess you’ve probably seen it already (but if you do want a quick way to get from the main menu into to the minigame, its password is “33”). I might add a different shark line for those who try to play “DABF” instead of “FEDCBABC”, but the obvious pun to make in that case might be hard to translate into Danish and Spanish (and I don’t want to replace it with a joke about the translation process).

Nice writing, I love seeing poetry in VNs, especially when it isn’t love poetry. And I love the cute cartoonish art too. (I played this like two days ago, but played a few more entries before writing this feedback, to have something to compare it to.

There’s so many categories to rate this year, so going in detail about each of them would probably make this comment really long, but here’s a summary of what I thought about when rating this entry:

Theme: a witch summoning a demon on Halloween seems like a pretty good fit for the theme. I might even replay this one on Halloween to see more of the demons, especially if it gets updated in the meantime.

Story: Really good (especially because I like poetry).

Audio categories: I might play this one again to give it another listen, but it seems to fit the game. It was a bit quiet though, at least when there aren’t other sounds playing. If the things the gods do would make noise I think that noise could be nice to hear.

Characters and art: Pretty good. The MC behaves like a YouTuber and I’d probably click that subscribe button if it were there (well, I clicked the follow button). And the cute art is nice to see and fits the story well. And I like the cat that sits there and sees everything but is probably used to weird things happening so it doesn’t even both to blink. And I like the particle effects.

UI and accessibility: I like the YouTube-inspired UI, including the textbox looking like subtitles. I like when YouTube videos have good subtitles. But I guess I’d have liked it had a play/pause button that toggled autoplay, a transcription button that shows a history screen in the side, and so on (but yeah, I know customising UI in Ren’Py can be trickier than it seems, and I’d guess the accessibility in this one is probably better than the vast majority of non-Ren’Py games in this jam; the main reason I’m mentioning wanting buttons instead of just using the keyboard shortcuts is that people playing on a phone might not be able to use the keyboard shortcuts).

Marketing: The page is bit short, but I like the demons on it. As for the thumbnail, it shows the artstyle and fits the game, but I feel like the text looks cut-off. The image is not as wide as a YouTube video thumbnail, so if you could move the last lines a bit to the left, it might be easier to not read “Demon” as “Demo”. And together with the log line saying “choose your demon VN” I think it does a good job t showing why one would want to play it.

What I liked most: the writing and art. What I’d suggest changing: have sound effects.

Nice writing, I love seeing poetry in VNs, especially when it isn’t love poetry. And I love the cute cartoonish art too. (I played this like two days ago, but played a few more entries before writing this feedback, to have something to compare it to.

There’s so many categories to rate this year, so going in detail about each of them would probably make this comment really long, but here’s a summary of what I thought about when rating this entry:

Theme: a witch summoning a demon on Halloween seems like a pretty good fit for the theme. I might even replay this one on Halloween to see more of the demons, especially if it gets updated in the meantime.

Story: Really good (especially because I like poetry).

Audio categories: I might play this one again to give it another listen, but it seems to fit the game. It was a bit quiet though, at least when there aren’t other sounds playing. If the things the gods do would make noise I think that noise could be nice to hear.

Characters and art: Pretty good. The MC behaves like a YouTuber and I’d probably click that subscribe button if it were there (well, I clicked the follow button). And the cute art is nice to see and fits the story well. And I like the cat that sits there and sees everything but is probably used to weird things happening so it doesn’t even both to blink. And I like the particle effects.

UI and accessibility: I like the YouTube-inspired UI, including the textbox looking like subtitles. I like when YouTube videos have good subtitles. But I guess I’d have liked it had a play/pause button that toggled autoplay, a transcription button that shows a history screen in the side, and so on (but yeah, I know customising UI in Ren’Py can be trickier than it seems, and I’d guess the accessibility in this one is probably better than the vast majority of non-Ren’Py games in this jam).

Marketing: The page is bit short, but I like the demons on it. As for the thumbnail, it shows the artstyle and fits the game, but I feel like the text looks cut-off. The image is not as wide as a YouTube video thumbnail, so if you could move the last lines a bit to the left, it might be easier to not read “Demon” as “Demo”. And together with the log line saying “choose your demon VN” I think it does a good job t showing why one would want to play it.

What I liked most: the writing and art. What I’d suggest changing: have sound effects.

Nice writing, I love seeing poetry in VNs, especially when it isn’t love poetry. And I love the cute cartoonish art too. (I played this like two days ago, but played a few more entries before writing this feedback, to have something to compare it to.

There’s so many categories to rate this year, so going in detail about each of them would probably make this comment really long, but here’s a summary of what I thought about when rating this entry:

Theme: a witch summoning a demon on Halloween seems like a pretty good fit for the theme. I might even replay this one on Halloween to see more of the demons, especially if it gets updated in the meantime.

Story: Really good (especially because I like poetry).

Audio categories: I might play this one again to give it another listen, but it seems to fit the game. It was a bit quiet though, at least when there aren’t other sounds playing. If the things the gods do would make noise I think that noise could be nice to hear.

Characters and art: Pretty good. The MC behaves like a YouTuber and I’d probably click that subscribe button if it were there (well, I clicked the follow button). And the cute art is nice to see and fits the story well. And I like the cat that sits there and sees everything but is probably used to weird things happening so it doesn’t even both to blink. And I like the particle effects.

UI and accessibility: I like the YouTube-inspired UI, including the textbox looking like subtitles. I like when YouTube videos have good subtitles. But I guess I’d have liked it had a play/pause button that toggled autoplay, a transcription button that shows a history screen in the side, and so on (but yeah, I know customising UI in Ren’Py can be trickier than it seems, and I’d guess the accessibility in this one is probably better than the vast majority of non-Ren’Py games in this jam).

Marketing: The page is bit short, but I like the demons on it. As for the thumbnail, it shows the artstyle and fits the game, but I feel like the text looks cut-off. The image is not as wide as a YouTube video thumbnail, so if you could move the last lines a bit to the left, it might be easier to not read “Demon” as “Demo”. And together with the log line saying “choose your demon VN” I think it does a good job t showing why one would want to play it.

What I liked most: the writing and art. What I’d suggest changing: have sound effects.

I liked the story (I hope you continue working on it), the painterly art and the menu music (I haven’t sat and listened to it while typing this comment though, since it pauses whenever I view another tab, but seeing as the game seems like it’s being worked on I figured I’ll probably play this game again later). And I can’t get music in-game to sound right (or perhaps I could if I tried to enable the music while it’s in the game.

The UI is nice too (and I’ve seen other years that Unity VNs tended to struggle with UI, though this is only the second Unity VN I play from this jam this year, so I don’t know yet what the average will be like).

What I liked most: the art and the writing there is.

What I’d suggest improving: probably continuing the story. If I notice that there’s updates I’ll probably play it again.

Another thing that I’ve seen not working in Godot 4 games is the “View random submissions” button on jams. I haven’t used that button a lot recently, so I don’t know if it’s been fixed in the meantime, but last time I submitted a game to a jam and played some random submissions there was at least one game that didn’t work until I opened its submission page in a new tab and then opened the game page in that tab.

Edit: I just tried using it, and it showed the following text:

Error The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: Cross Origin Isolation - Check web server configuration (send correct headers) SharedArrayBuffer - Check web server configuration (send correct headers)

whereas the same game, if I control-click the submission to button and then go back to the game in the new tab it works fine.

Thanks!

Thanks!

I wasn’t, but now I am. Looks like version 1.5 should be usable although it might lack rollback. Version 2 seems usable for things like RPGs as long as you don’t enable the history button and don’t show any other buttons on screen during dialogue (because clicking on the screen advances the dialogue, and guess what happens if you click on a button on the screen: it does whatever the button does and then it advances the dialogue too). Until they fix the click handling (and probably add built-in support for rollback), I don’t think Dialogic 2 is ready to be used in VNs, especially if you want those VNs to get shortlisted in the competition aspect of this jam (lacking rollback will be a serious disadvantage, as will the double-handling of clicks on buttons, and while history might sometimes be an acceptable fix for lacking rollback, a history screen that shows lines from previous playthroughs probably won’t cut it).

Another tool, Dialogue Manager might work better than Dialogic 2. But yeah, these are primarily designed for games like RPGs where things like rollback and skipping are less essential.

My own tool does support rollback, skipping and auto, but the only way it can currently play audio is to play animations that play it. And if you add choices you’ll need to make changes to how rollback and history work. I’m not even using my own tool in Spooktober this year, although one of the reasons for that is that its documentation is a bit limited atm and if I’m the one that made it I obviously know how to use every feature including features the documentation doesn’t explain well, so I don’t want to have such an advantage. I do plan on using it in some less competitive jam after this one, and in the process I’ll probably make it easier to use.

Part three of rule four seems to say this:

Third Party resources are exempt from this rule as long as they are also available for usage/purchase by other participants.

What counts as “third-party resources” here?

My first thought was it would mean “made by someone else”. Under the first definition, it would mean I can use Ren’Py, Unity, Naninvel, Tyranobuilder, Godot, Unreal Engine and Visual Novel Machinery, but not Basket Letter Vibe since I made the latter myself before the jam (and released it under the MIT license; well, I’ll be happy if I see other Godot users using it to add accessbility features to their VNs, Godot VNs usually seem to have interesting mechanics or animations, so combining that with Ren’Py-like accessibility tools would be nice). It also means people who have contributed to open-source engines in the past would probably not be allowed to use those engines other than using older versions from before their contributions. So that would benefit people who haven’t made anything for others to use, while it would make things harder for engine developers, who would then have to use each other’s engines. So would that be good or bad?

• Since engine developers know their own engines really well, probably better than others, I suppose it makes sense to restrict them in some way, but I’m not sure how much they should be restricted.
• We also have general-purpose knowledge about things like programming languages, which we might be able to use even when using another engine.
• Someone could have advanced knowledge of an engine without being one of its developers, in which case they’d still be allowed to use that engine.
• People who spend money on things others can’t afford would still have an advantage over those who can’t afford the same resources.

But I’ve also seen discussion on the DevTalk Discord server suggesting it would mean “not made specifically for one team”. In that case, as long as it was published before the jam under a license that would let any team use it (especially if it was available for free; otherwise the developers would have to “pay themselves” to be able to use their own tools).

Also, I assume “resources” means stuff used in the game itself. If things like written-down knowledge about the real world (like researching a historical period to write about events set in that period) might cause issues.

For now I’ll probably make my prototype in Godot and initially use Basket Letter Vibe, but not work on the minigame until I know whether I can use that. That way, if I get told not to use BLV, I can switch to Ren’Py more or less easily (the minigame would be the hardest thing to convert between engines).

Since I’m using Godot and it doesn’t have VN accessibility features built-in, I tried implementing those myself. I’ve been trying to make it support the same keyboard shortcuts as Ren’Py (though I realize I didn’t add H to hide the UI, but I guess people who want that could add it themselves, or I guess so could I during the jam if I really want). Here’s the GitHub repository with the Godot 4 project: Basket Letter Vibe (the name means “the whiff makes (a?) lapwing take off” in Danish. People will probably need some knowledge of Godot’s scripting language GDScript to use this, since the would have to write a few lines of code for each sprite they add.

It’s localized in Danish, Spanish and English, but most people should probably remove Danish and Spanish (edit the function get_initial_language to force the language to English (“en”), then remove the language option from create_main_menu), then delete files with names ending in _da.txt or _es.txt. The reason I’m including the localization is because I alredy made it for Sheep Monologue and I don’t want to retranslate text I already translated (my new translation would probably end up being kinda similar to the old one anyway).

Also, people might want to change the value of vn_savedata_filename to something specific to their game.

The dialogue was nice to read, and the animation and particles worked really well. And the music sounds nice and fits both the style of the story and somehow also the historical period it’s set in (sure, it sounds like a weird mix of modern music and baroque music, but the story is also about a character being “in the wrong time”, and while the story is set in a time where Romantic music would probably be more common, baroque music certainly still existed, just like Romantic music still exists nowadays).

I like the art, although you don’t get to see the background for very long before most of the screen ends up covered by the sprite and effects. Its painted style fits the setting pretty well.

And I like the UI art too, the calligraphy certainly reminds me of the 19th century. The arrows on the sides of the namebox made me try to click them to see if the right arrow advanced the dialogue and the left one undid it, but yeah, most Godot VNs that I’ve seen don’t have a back button, so I guess I’m not too surprised to see that those arrows were just decorations. If you do make them into actual buttons you’d probably want to draw some sort of shape around them to make them look a bit more like buttons.

Also, I like that I can change the font of the dialogue, but it would be nice if it also changed the font used in the choice menus.

What I liked most: The particle effects. And the dialogue.

What I’d suggest changing if you make a post-jam version: Apply font changes to the choice menu. Also, right now I have to interact with menus using the mouse but advance the dialogue with the keyboard. Being able to advance the text using the mouse would be nice (either through a visible forwards button or a big invisible button filling most or all of the screen).

I like the minimalist style with the black background.

The white text on the black background fits well together with the piano music, perhaps because a piano has black and white keys, but also because the minimal graphics and O2A2 limitation fit well together with having music played on a single instrument. And I like the music. It’s simple but not too simple. And next to the text it sounds poetic.

And Ren’Py’s default UI, while generic-looking, definitely has some readability and simplicity that suit this VN. When not playing in fullscreen, I can still read the text but it feels a bit small, but I see the point of having the text at the default size where it looks like the flame in a sea of darkness. (And I can press shift-A and change the font size if I really want to make it bigger.)

What I liked most: the music and the text together.

What I’d suggest changing if you make a post-jam version: On the main menu there’s a flame sprite, and I think it could have made sense to show it somewhere in the script. Perhaps when showing the last line. But I’m not really sure. Having no sprites can work well for the minimalist style, although I guess it’s also possible to make things too empty, so do whatever you want.

That was a cute story, and everything seems well-polished. Well, the music made me check if my headphones were properly connected, but I get that it’s meant to sound like an old analog recording. I do like the music and think it’s cozy, it just got me thinking something was wrong because the noise reminded me of the hardware problem that had led to my own entry for this jam having to lack audio.

I can tell that the sprite and background have different artstyles (the sprite having a more anime look to it and the background looking like a filtered photograph; but since the foreground is supposed to be what we’re looking at it’s actually nice that the background is a bit blurry). But the lighting makes them fit together nicely. The particles help make it feel like an attic and even make it feel more cozy. The UI and logo also work really well together.

In the browser version, the sprite gets pixelated some of the times it changes expressions, but I guess there isn’t really much you could do about that (well, replacing just small overlays rather than the whole sprite might help, and/or you could try displaying the overlays before they’re needed but make them invisible such as by hiding them behind the main sprite where they wouldn’t be visible, then moving them to the be in front when you actually want the player to see them) but yeah, it’s not really that distracting.

What I liked most: The UI with the namebox being a bookmark.

What I’d suggest changing if you make a post-jam version: Make the transparency of the particles depend on their position on screen so that they’re least transparent when close to the window but barely visible when next to the right edge of the screen. (Yeah, that’s a bit of a random suggestion, but I thought I should write a suggestion for each VN that I write feedback for from this jam, and this was the first thing I thought of when trying to come up with things that could be improved.)

Thanks!

Sorry for asking kinda late, but what if the narrator sings a song? I could leave out other music so there’s just that song and no instruments or ambient sounds, and I would count the sung words as words too, but if the song is longer than one “line of dialogue”, it would probably have to pause after each line until the player clicks or presses a key to play the next line. Would that still count as one piece of music? (And if not, can I leave the text as poetry so I don’t have to rewrite it in prose?)

There’s also what happens if you… .

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Lose at the eye-clicking minigame by running out of time :)

I played in English first and in German afterwards. I’ve spent more time playing in English than in German, and I haven’t been checking sentence-for-sentence if the translation was accurate (not that I think I have to).

When it said I had to pick a name for the MC my first thought was “how do I pick a name for a character I initially know nothing about?” but then there was a default. Thanks for that. And if you intended for the MC to be male and want that to be obvious before people even find the game, you can give it the “male protagonist” tag. And another tag you might want to give it is “bishoujo”, which means a game/VN about interacting with cute girls, mainly aimed at guys. I hadn’t played other bishojos before this one, so I can’t really compare it to other such VNs at this point. Also, the demo ends a bit early, so comparing it to longer VNs might be a bit unfair.

Also, sorry if this review is a bit long. And sorry if the writing might be a bit less polished than some VN reviews I’ve written before. I got worried it was taking so long to write it that you’d end up releasing a new version of the demo before I finished, and then I decided to post it in its current form.

Story

The story has been interesting so far. New Year’s Eve of year 2000 seems like a good time to start a story considering how many people were worried about Y2K bugs, and having the MC suddenly be pulled back in time later as if time itself got buggy seemed fun, and the fact that it happens not at the millennium change but at some later time mimics how real world computers store times in binary numbers where the actual overflow will happen at various other times such as 19th of January 2038.

And the main choice aside from the name seems to be which subject I want the MC to learn. I tried all three options. I could say what I thought about each option, but I think that’s kind of an unnecessary spoiler here. And the demo ends shortly after the choice, before you get to see which consequences it has. As for the non-spoiler-free version of what I thought about the options, I might post that in another place where I think you (the developer) might see it.

Art

First, here’s the spoiler-free version of this section. The art looks pretty good, at least in general (there were things that AI did better than others), and I like how it turned out and how there were fun details that could be easy to miss. But in the browser version things might briefly look pixelated at times (this is most noticeable when a character changes poses several times in a short while).

And now for the more complete one (might point out details that not all players are meant to notice):

The AI generally did a good job. But it does seem to struggle with a few things:

• Buildings: it’s hard to generate two images of the same building from different angles. And you have a tower floating in the treetops. Or maybe the tower in the treetops is there for plot reasons.
• Keyboards: I’d try inpainting with “grid keyboard” but I don’t know if it would work.
• Transparent backgrounds: if you look at Petra’s hair in the tutorial, I think you can see what I mean. Some VNs have a border around the borders around characters (to make sure they will contrast well against any background), but another easy solution is to lock the alpha channel and paint a dark colour into the spots that should be dark.
• Are the fonts AI-generated? They look pretty good, but as someone who has made fonts I might as well roast them. (Read this in Sylvia’s voice, I mean whatever you imagine it sounding like.) Just look at the words “Silversee Castle” with the s’s oddly detached from the r and the a. And the main font appears to be designed for lower-resolution screens.

I like how you switch to sepia for some scenes where the MC talks about the past where they were still going to school.

And next to the rotary phone there are pieces of paper that seem to have handwritten text on them, and a “phone number” that reminds me of something I remember learning about in school: pi.

In the browser build, the images pixelate when changing. This is most obvious in the case of Petra/Patti talking to the MC, as her poses change all the time.

Also, on a more amusing note, I don’t know if you did something on purrpose or not, but there’s a cat face in the fireworks CG. It definitely adds some cuteness to the game.

And I might as well mention a fireworks-related suggestion: if you’re able to separate the “year 2000 New Year’s Eve” image into two layers you could make the buildings slide in at a different speed than the fireworks.

UI/UX

The custom UI looks good and the paper background fits the setting. It did make some text a bit harder to read than I’d prefer it though:

• The font might be a little bit small. Maybe you could make it bigger by default. (Or I could press shift-A and increase the size myself. It seems the amount of text you show at a time is small enough that I can do that without causing the text to flow out of the box.)
• Despite the small font size, the Options button in the bottom-right corner in German is partially cut off. I can see the left side of the n but not the right side of it.
• The main menu shows blue text on a semi-transparent bluish background.

I also noticed that in the downloadable version the tutorial only shows the first time you play. Being able to replay it would be nice, especially considering I think I noticed something weird about the English translation in that part.

When asking for the name, maybe show the menu with options while showing the question. I think you can do that with something like:

    menu:
        petra "What should the MC's first name be?"
        "Daniel":
             jump daniel
        "Something else":
             jump other_name

That way the answers would appear at the same time as the question, and seeing the question won’t cause people to attempt to type a name before getting the options.

every time the text stops, you can continue by clicking on the mouse (left button,) or by pressing the space bar

Normally I use the enter key for that. And it works in this game too. But I guess those who have played plenty of VNs before and got used to enter will just use enter and then it doesn’t matter that you aren’t mentioning that key.

And speaking of using the keyboard for things that can be done with the mouse, keyboard navigation of the language menu might be a bit confusing: I can select or unselect English but German never gets “highlighted”. I’m still able to select it though, maybe because it’s what gets selected if nothing is selected.

I might also want to mention that I can’t rollback with the mouse wheel. Neither in-browser nor in the downloadable version.

Another thing, I love that I can choose between text outlines and a background. If I also had a opacity slider for the background I’d probably make it a bit less transparent, but I can read it just fine and I can also easily read the text with the outline.

And while it’s not really a part of the game, some text on the website (I mean the news section) is a bit hard to read on my laptop due to some of the white text flowing into the white margin on the right. My default text size might be larger than most people’s since I tend to read text while a bit far from the screen.

Music

When I viewed the about screen, I could see that most of the art was AI generated, and it didn’t say much about the music. And this section too might contain spoilers (names of specific pieces of music, as well as how I think they relate to the characters that are shown when it plays, I think nothing of it is plot twists though).

Most of the music sounds fun. And then there’s two pieces I knew, well, not the exact versions played here, but I knew the melodies they were based on. One is Liszt’s mourning march which plays when the MC remembers that his father is dead. It sets a sad tone, and its name has to do with mourning. (And if any of the characters in the story had been a music nerd, this is where I’d have imagined that character making a joke about “morning” music.)

And this remix of Pachelbel’s canon sounds friendly: I think the fact that not all the instruments end up playing at the same time helps make it cosy. The instruments leave gaps for each other to shine through. And since it starts playing when a new character first speaks, it might contribute to making her seem friendly.

Other audio

The ambiance does a good job at showing what the weather is like, and I also like the sound that plays when the MC gets pulled back in time.

And the voice audio in the beginning sound good too, although I think for the sake of players with worse hearing than mine you might want to include subtitles. And it seems that in the browser version this audio either doesn’t play or it stops playing too early. I think that’s something that sometimes happens in HTML5 builds of Ren’Py games and sometimes it can be fixed by adding a short delay before playing the audio. But in this case I notice that the music that should play in the background does play when the voice audio should be playing, so I’m guessing it might help to take the music and voice tracks and edit them together to form combined tracks. And it’s not even noticeable that the voice is AI.

Translation

I like that there’s two languages to play in. That way I have a good excuse to play twice. And I think the translation is pretty good. I’m sorta guessing you wrote in German first and then translated into English, or at least that whoever wrote it in English knew German. I’m not sure all speakers of English would know what WV refers to when it comes to cars, and while I think “uncool” is a cool word to use in English and it’s obvious what it means I think those who don’t speak German would probably just have said “not cool”. But I like the word “uncool” and how it looks like it should be a normal English word. It sounds like the kind of word a human would use. Even though it’s translated by AI.

And I notice the name of one of the characters changes. The girl in the physics class gets called “Petra” in German but “Patti” in English. Unlike all the other characters. Yeah, finding names that work in several languages isn’t easy, and English-and-German isn’t even the worst combination in that regard. I think you did a good job with “Daniel” there. I assume the decision to give Petra/Patti a different name in English was yours and not the AI’s.

My thoughts

I think my favourite parts of the demo are the story and the audio. And yeah, I think I the slice-of-life-vibed mystery works well so far. As for the characters, I love that place where one of the girls makes a comment about another one’s favourite subject: it’s a nice way to make a “quiet girl” not seem completely irrelevant.

As for what I’d suggest changing, I’d probably let players roll back (and forward) with the mouse wheel like Ren’Py does by default. But that might be because my laptop keyboard doesn’t have a page-up key, and many VNs have a smaller back button that’s slightly harder to click, which has got me used to just scrolling up when I want to go back.

Oh, a Doom-like game but with cards. That’s an interesting thing. I do feel like fast-paced action is hard to play strategically for me, and FPS games aren’t really something I play lot, and as a result I’m also not very good at them.

I’m playing the browser version. (I’m on Linux).

Graphics: The game uses sprites and a pretty low-poly environment that, although I haven’t played Doom or the games from the nineties that were inspired by that game, I can see it fitting into the era. Even the blurry moon could have fit into the era, although the way the blur is achieved looks modern. A more retro way would have been to use vertex colours. A cool side effect of doing it that way would have been getting “rays” going out of the moon sorta like sunrays.

Sound: I notice two pieces of music: one that plays when picking cards and one that plays in the FPS section. I think both tracks are good, and they fit together too. And they both fit their respective type of gameplay. I do feel like the deck planning music isn’t meant to be listened to for many minutes in a row though. And speaking of early FPS games, I think the FPS music fits into that.

Fun: Clicking on anything captures the mouse, and then the clikable buttons don’t seem to work… until I uncapture the mouse, then buttons do work as intended and suddenly become “clickable” with the keyboard. Maybe you could make it so that whenever you show clickable buttons on the screen one of them gets highlighted by default so that pressing enter or space would activate that one and pressing the arrow keys highlights other buttons (as the game is now, once you click “Randomize Deck”, it leaves that button highlighted and allows you to reach “Ready” and “Reset” using arrow keys).

And I’ve occasionally got a bug where moving the mouse seems to do nothing but the keyboard does work. And after playing a couple of times I think the game crashed. In fact, the game crashed more times as I got better at it.

Nineties: I didn’t personally play first-person shooters in the nineties, but I know the genre became popular thanks to Doom and the games that were inspired by it. You had a sloped piece of ground that was textured, and I’m not sure Doom’s engine could do that, but Quake’s certainly could. And there’s some lighting effects that I think also feel more Quake-like than Doom-like, but both Doom ad Quake were 32-bit, so a game that lands somewhere between the two does seem like it fits this theme.

What I liked most: The graphics and sound.

What I’d suggest changing: I’d probably try to make the game not crash that often.

Fun game, simple but fun. And short.

Button mashing: Pressing the same button over and over multiple times per second reminded me of a game that I had to take a break from playing because it made my right thumb hurt. I don’t think people will be likely to play this one for long enough to get that sort of issue though.

Graphics: The colourful art fits such a fun game, I particularly like the fish. The gun having lighting on it is nice too, but the background image is perhaps a bit too flat-coloured. And some of those shapes make me think they should be animated (probably only animate some parts of the background, and

Sound: The music is pretty interesting without being distracting from the game, and its past-paced like the game is. And the choice of instrument seems good: none of the fish or gunshots make piano-like sounds, so I’m not going to mistake music sounds for SFX.

And it’s generated? It does sound pretty good (and I’ve been listening to it while typing this feedback). I think because music generating software can generate a lot of music in a short amount of time it’s useful for game jams. In fact, I did generate music for a game jam recently although I generated the melody using a tool that I wrote during the jam and then I played it on a real instrument. It wasn’t for this jam though.

As for the sound effects, there’s two: the gunshot, and the sound of fish crashing into the gun. So a shooting sound and a death sound, two sounds that fit a shooter. And the gunshot does sound a bit like it could be underwater. Unfortunately, when lots of them happen in quick succession the sounds overlap making them seem louder, and then they drown the music (no pun intended). I think the easy solution would be to make the shot quieter and the more complex one would be to make the volume of each shot be lower if it happens less than some fraction of a second after the previous one.

GUI sounds could have been a nice addition.

Fun: It’s fun for a short while, but I do get bored quickly from doing the same one thing over and over. It does have some replayability, but that ends after a short while. For a jam game it’s nice that some games are like this though, since I can see everything quickly and move on and get to rate and comment on more games.

Nineties: The gun rotates has 3D lighting, and the fish sprites are rotated too. I’d say this feels like it could have run on an arcade machine back when 32 bit CPUs were being used in arcade machines but not yet in game consoles. I would have expected an animated background on those machines, or one with more details and colours.

What I liked most: The music and the sprites.

What I’d suggest changing: I’d probably make the background animated.

You wrote the game’s name in some weird characters. That can make the game hard to find if someone’s trying to find it by searching for it, since typing the title probably won’t find it. (Sure, maybe some search engines are able to figure out that “𝕔𝕣𝕪𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕝 𝕤𝕖𝕖𝕜𝕖𝕣 𝟚” is the same as “Crystal Seeker 2”, but then they usually have trouble telling different words apart, like thinking “ŝafo” is closer to “safo” than to “sxafo”.) To make the game easier to find and still have it look interesting, I’d recommend writing it in normal characters and instead creating a cover image, such as by editing screenshots of the game. Then you can use a stylized font in the cover image.

Flickering: I just thought I’d mention this, not sure it would actually even be close to being able to cause epileptic seizures in some people, but some triangles flicker quite a bit as you try to make the game look nineties by faking rounding errors. I don’t think actual PS1 games flickered things that much, especially such large triangles.

Sound: Usually I put the graphics section before the sound section. But this time I’m putting the sections in a different order. The music reminds me of Spyro. It sounds nice, but I’d prefer something that reminded me more of the nineties rather than reminding me of a particular game. I mean, the instruments sound the same and the melody is either one I’ve heard before or something made to match the pretty specific patterns that I think are kinda rare outside that series. And I saw a comment about it being stolen, so yeah, I don’t know which level it’s from (could be from one of the sequels I haven’t played) but I don’t think it’s allowed in the jam, and even if you’ve somehow just imitated the patterns that the different pieces do have in common, maybe even got an instrument library that you could use and that happened to also have been used by those games

Things that seem like they should make sounds do make sounds. And the sounds fit the visuals and story. The point counting at the end of levels certainly feels nineties. And yeah, that sound too makes me think of Spyro the Dragon’s gem counting when exiting levels. Not like the first Crash Bandicoot game didn’t have a box counting thing. But that game had a sorta bad implementation that they ended up scrapping in a sequel because the box counting was slowing down exiting levels.

Graphics: Low-poly characters in a sorta high-poly environment. I’d prefer it the opposite way around. And I think you misunderstood what nineties means. Polygons did occasionally draw in the wrong order, but game developers new how to avoid it a lot of the time. You’d see it when an enemy got very close to the edge of a platform, you would rarely see parts of the platform itself get in the way of each other. And while the graphics setting can be set to high or low, even the low settings look very modern. You could do rounded corners on 32-bit hardware, but then the corners would be sprites and each side of the polygon would require an extra polygon of its own. And polygons show in front of the polygons behind them quite a bit more often than that would happen on 32-bit hardware.

But the top-downish view was nice. I’ve seen plenty of games that put the camera further down and then the camera crashes into objects or they get in the way of the camera.

I can’t set the sound effects volume to roughly 100% because I can’t see the right side of the slider: it’s outside the screen.

Fun and nineties: The loading screen is a bit slow. Or maybe it’s just slow to mimic a slow CD-ROM. Anyway, I could have got all the collectables in the first level, but after getting some and dying, I didn’t want to collect them again if I didn’t have to. And the second level constantly pushing me out of the level before I could see the thing that was shooting felt a bit mean. I ended up giving up, since apparently I’m supposed to rush through as many games as possible and I’ve already spent several hours today just playing two of them.

And the credits screen is empty. But I did get a slightly less empty credits screen after the first level. Still I think you should mention who made that music.

I know it’s kinda low-poly, and I can see you’re trying to sort triangles rather than sort pixels like modern games do… except the polygons get drawn in the wrong order quite a bit more often than would happen in games from the nineties. And that skybox looks pretty detailed and doesn’t wrap around properly. Also, based on how the triangles are changing colours I’m guessing you added slightly too many fake rounding errors.

The audio sounds nineties too, but the spyroness kinda takes away from it.

What I liked most: The camera being high-up enough to not crash into things or get things between it and the player. What I’d suggest changing: Don’t use people’s work in the game without mentioning them in the credits (and you probably also need their permission, I hope you had that).

A cute and colourful 2D platformer with 3D graphics.

Graphics: I think the MC (Celly) looks like a cute and fun Chtulhu… I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true. And its animations are good at conveying what you’re doing while fitting the character. And maybe the character is a bit detailed for something 32-bit, but the environment is a bit simple for that, so I guess that at least partially makes up for the amount of detail on the character.

The planet and the platforms are plain but playful, and yeah, I like them too. I do think the platforms look rather artificial, not really looking like they’re made of something from the planet they are on, but I like how colourful the game looks, and the platforms help a lot with that.

Audio: I know the game is set in space where air is thin if even there, but I think audio would still have been a nice thing to have in the game. All I heard was the sound of my keyboard keys going up and down, with the spacebar being the loudest of them.

Fun: The platforming is fun, and so is the environment art, and I like that the character reacts quickly to my keypresses, but I would have preferred if it could also react to slightly mistimed jumps (adding coyote time and allowing me to jump of a platform the moment I land on it if I was holding the jump button the moment I landed would probably be nice). I guess the way you did jumps makes it slightly harder to implement coyote time.

I got through the upper sections, nothing left to collect on the ground or above it, so I decided to fall down and see if there was anything below the ground. There was, but there was a time I couldn’t see the platform I was standing on. Also, I came from the right side, but I wonder if I should have come from the left side instead. The jump doesn’t seem to immediately turn into a fall when hitting a roof, but you do hit the roof pretty quickly. And sometimes you can get “stuck” touching a platform boundary without actually being able to get up on it. Sorry that I didn’t feel like I haven’t beaten the game. But if I don’t beat it in the first try and I have to start over completely next time I usually don’t bother, especially when the rating period is as short as it is in this jam.

Nineties: The MC looks a bit detailed, and the environment a bit simple, but I guess that just compensates for the amount of detail on the MC. I think if the MC were a bit more low-poly you could have made most of the planet a bit more detailed: when the camera moves on a 2D plane and doesn’t rotate, culling gets pretty simple, which usually means you could have more stuff on screen.

What I liked most: The colourful environment and the animations.

What I think could have made the game even more fun: I’d like to hear some audio and maybe have a way to restart the game from within the game itself.

This one took me a little bit of practise to get used to, but I managed to play through it without dying. But nicely enough, it brought me back to the starting screen, so I just tried to play again and let one of the yellow spirits attack me over and over. No death animation, and the game over screen doesn’t let me replay without reloading the page or frame…. Oh, apparently it just took a while. A pretty long while though, and after that the controls didn’t work properly until I had paused and unpaused the game.

Graphics: The characters and environments look nice, although I feel like the vector art (if that’s what it is) on the loading screen looks a bit too modern at the high resolution it shows at. I’m guessing the UI being shown at a higher resolution is intentional to make it easier to see read. But maybe you could make the pause menu text also use the high resolution if that’s not too hard.

The trinkets look nice too, especially after you rescue them. But their spinning animation looks a bit flat. I think I would have preferred if they were 2D animated sprites made from prerendered 3D spinning objects.

I liked that the camera wasn’t constantly spinning around when colliding with things, but I think the trees got in between the camera and the character rather often. Maybe that was on purpose to make the game scarier by making it hard to see what was lurking behind the trees. But I think I would have preferred a slightly more top-downish view. I do think it’s nice to have a third person 3D camera that isn’t constantly spinning every time it gets close to a wall or other object.

The font used for the title, menu options and character names feels stylish yet easy to read. And the font used for dialogue looks a bit more generic but still stylish and easy to read. The italics font looks a bit like it’s just a slanted version of the normal dialogue font. And I think if you put italicized lines in brackets you might want the brackets to be italic too.

Pressing “Play” shows some text written in a generic sans-serif font, going all the way to the edges of the screen. I think having margins would be nice… Oh, now I played it again and it does have margins. I hope it was some “happens once” issue and not that you fixed it during the rating period, unless of course you asked Ro and got permission.

Oh, and I love the art on the project page. Those spirits look cute and fun.

Audio: The music sounds fun and fits the game. And it also has some nice ninetiesness to it. And the sound effect give the game some spirit too.

There’s quite a few sound effects, and a few voice lines. I like both, and I think those little voice lines make the character more interesting. And it feels somewhat nineties too. I would probably have turned down the volume of the music whenever voice audio was playing and turned it up again when it stopped.

Fun: Running around and catching spirits was pretty fun, and reading the dialogue, especially that with the trinkets, was fun too. And I guess going forth and back between doing one thing and another helps avoid getting bored of just doing just one thing. I think if I found a trinket I could read its text but if I went back to the forest and then back home again I couldn’t re-read it. Maybe you can change that after the jam.

And maybe I should mention that you added a credits screen but left it blank.

Nineties: I feel like the forest itself looks nineties but the home looks more 2002ish. And the solid black walls look like empty space. I’d probably have had a horizontal line across all of them, or some sort of texture, especially on the back wall.

The shadow below the MC is probably done with something modern, but considering Crash Bandicoot pulled of animated shadows I know it at least was possible to have such a detailed shadow below a character.

And about the particle effects, those would probably have been sprite animations. That way you can have plenty of particles on screen since each emitter would only be a single animated sprite. In the case of trinket sprites you might even take advantage of the background being black, and have particles fade to black as they go up, faking semi-transparency.

Oh, and actual semi-transparency was possible on the PS1 but would have been one bit of transparency, so 50% transparent. There were other blending modes though (additive and subtractive, and you could multiply textures by vertex colours but not by each other). The Sega Saturn also had some limitations to do with semi-transparency, although I don’t know them exactly.

The audio too fits the nineties theme. I suppose it could have been better if all the dialogue was voiced, but I know that’s a lot of work (casting, recording, editing and then testing it in game).

What I liked most: the sound effects (including the voice acting), art and writing. Something I think could have made the game even better: I guess that depends on what you want the game to feel like. But being able to easily continue or at least restart after a game over would be nice.

[Edit: fix typo and add a sentence in the end which I had intended to put there but forgotten to write.]

A fun runner that uses both optional themes. I think the highest score I got was 11500.

Graphics: Colourful and fun. I particularly like the enemies.

The title, end and tutorial screens keep the style of the game and I like the tutorial screen although it would have been nice if it also showed images of the obstacles and said what they were.

I do wonder why so many games I’ve seen over the years have coins as a collectable, but I guess it’s become so common I just have to accept it.

And the enemies are cute.

Sound: There’s only one track of music, but it fits the pace of the game and considering a run can be kinda short it’s nice that it doesn’t start and stop every time you die. And it’s interesting enough to listen to that I’m leaving it playing while I type this feedback. And pretty nineties too.

The sound effects too add to the fun. There’s even several ones for the different types of enemies, and one for the coins too.

Fun: This game is pretty simple, but pretty fun. And after each round I can quickly do another one, yet I do always get to see the score even if I were pressing space to switch worlds the moment I died.

Nineties: Those enemies aren’t extremely detailed, so I guess they could probably work. And if there had to be a lot of them on screen at once I’m guessing the ones furthest away could be replaced by sprites without it being very noticeable. Or maybe this game would be running on something else than a console… an arcade machine, maybe? I think those were still common in the nineties.

Optional themes: I see you used both of them. You even built them into the controls. You press space to go to to space and to go back from it. Thankfully the ship controls the same way in both environments.

What I liked most: flying around and switching dimensions… and those sound effects.

What I’d suggest changing: Letting me view the tutorial again without reloading the page or frame.

This feels like a cute 3D platformer, and a hard one at that. And just like console games from the nineties, it manages to look good while sticking to the hardware limitations (or look like it does, anyway). I didn’t beat it, as I never got past that spinning obstacle.

Graphics: The art feels authentic for the era, although I’d have preferred if the MC had a face with eyes and a mouth. Either as a texture or by changing the colours of the geometry. Or maybe even have flat eyes in front of the place where they’d be, sorta like glasses. And I’m not really a big fan of the red cap: that feels a bit too Marioey.

And I love that water effect. Vertex lighting feels really nineties. But if I may suggest an improvement, I think it might look even better if the Y coordinates of each vertex were used a bit more directly. If a vertex is further down than the average of its neighbours, darken it a bit (if you use directional lighting, have the “height darkening” affect the ambient light). Unfortunately, getting the heights of the neighbouring vertices can be tricky in modern game engines, so you might want to just use some arbitrary height instead (if the entire water mesh moves up and down, have an arbitrary height plus the position of the whole mesh). I’d also say the shadows on the water are a bit too perfect. The water is made of big polygons, so I’d just manually set some of their vertices to always be treated as in shadow, which would make nice soft shadows and would work on a 32-bit console.

I think if I had to change something about the visuals, I’d probably make it so that the checkpoints change their appearance when the player activates them.

Sound: The music sounds fun, and fits the era. I do feel like I ended up getting a bit tired constantly hearing it while I was typing this feedback though. And the sound effects too add to the fun.

Fun: The platforming was fun, but I found it a bit hard to control the camera. In some places it kept trying to reposition itself, either to place itself behind the MC or to avoid obstacles. Maybe you could move the camera higher up so that it doesn’t have as many things to collide with.

Also, I noticed the wooden slope doesn’t seem to have colission. So if I fall down, it looks like I’m intended to use that slope to get back up, but I just fall through it.

I also think I saw some water go above one of the platforms once. Or maybe I was just seeing things. It’s one of those “I think it happened once” things, that are really hard to know whether to mention in feedback.

And yeah, I noticed I could climb a wall. That was fun, so maybe don’t fix that one, okay?

90’s: The gameplay, audio and graphics definitely fit the era. And as I said above, I loved that water effect.

I guess in the nineties a game like this would have had collectables. And maybe this one had some too and I just never reached them.

Lifes definitely feel nineties. But I think games from the nineties also scattered some through the levels as power-ups.

What I liked most: the water effect and the music.

What I’d suggest changing: I’d probably fix the collision on the wooden slope.

Flashing lights: When you lose, the game shows three red flashes. Those could perhaps be an issue for people with photosensitive epilepsia. So I’d probably either slow them down or reduce the amount of flashes to two.

Graphics: The 3D models looked nice, and I like that some things were left untextured. But once that camera did move, that floor texture shaked quite a bit and even flickered parts of the screen black for a moment.. And maybe that building could have been more detailed. I mean, if you model the shape of a window into a model and the lighting makes it possible to see that you have geometry for the window frame, making it brown instead of white wouldn’t have taken more polygons. And solid-coloured polygons were pretty fast to draw on 32-bit hardware.

But I got a different idea, maybe a bit crazy, but I it would have worked on real hardware so it’s not unrealistic: When the camera isn’t moving, use a prerendered backgound. You can have as many details in that as you want as long as they fit into the game’s resolution (which should probably not be more than 640x480). And when the player loses and the camera starts moving, it’s always following the same path, and there don’t seem to be changing elements, so that might as well be a prerendered video.

So how would you display the monsters if the background was a 2D image? Then you coud even have more detailed monsters.

The text itself to be typed looks like text typed on a typewriter, which fits the game. It’s also pretty high-resolution, although I guess text made of polygons could be kinda high-res.

And the title screen looks spoopy like the game itself.

Sound: The music feels fast-paced, like the player has to type fast. Which they do.

And no sound effects. You could have had a death sound or maybe even a sound that played for each letter you typed right and another sound for each letter you typed wrong. Maybe even have it so that each letter in a word makes a different sound than the previous one, like notes playing a tune. And if you want it to be more interesting, you could have some different music for the title screen and endscreen.

Fun: I feel like the waiting between words could be shorter. And English is my third language. I don’t have words like raths at the tips of my fingers. (That word’s from a poem, isn’t it?)

Also, being able to replay the game without having to reload the page or the frame would be nice. Like after it shows the score, maybe allow me to restart it by pressing space, or if really you want to make sure I’m not pressing space by mistake you could say type "new" to retry. I kinda doubt console manufacturers would like a game that requires resetting the console to restart it. And yeah, I think this is a type of games that people would be likely to want to play more than once.

Another crazy idea I had while playing was that as long as you avoided words that sounded very similar to other words it could maybe make sense to have an option to hear the words and type them instead of see them and type them. But I wouldn’t force players to do that, lest deaf people come after me.

90’s: The graphics could probably have worked on a 32-bit console, and I’d think it should be possible to make them look even better and still be able to run on those. Especially if you take advantage of prerendered graphics or 2D animation.

In terms of controls, I think this feels more like a PC game than a console game, but it could still be from the nineties. (Because you wouldn’t be likely to connect a keyboard to a 32-bit console, but if you had a 32-bit PC from the same era, you’d have been more likely to have a keyboard for it than a controller for it.) In fact, PC games were probably more limited than console games when it came to playing FMVs.

I noticed some banding, so I thought I’d mention the PS1 could make smooth gradients with dithering. And it also had a truecolour mode (24-bit) which might be a bit hard to use for gameplay (it’s not compatible with realtime 3D or transparency effects), but it might work well for the title screen.

What I liked most: the animation and title screen. What I’d suggest changing: add an option to replay the game after it ends.

I don’t remember how long I waited for the browser version to load, but it stayed black for a while before I downloaded the Windows build. I guess I could have tried in another browser (I used Firefox, maybe I should have used something else).

And I don’t know much about TyranoBuilder, so I’m not sure how to make the buttons keyboard-accessible, but it’s nice to know that you had tried.

Sorry for writing this feedback a bit quickly and not catching every fish before I finish writing it. But I spent several hours playing this game already, and apparently I should be writing feedback during the rating period rather than take my time and write more complete feedback.

Graphics: The environment was interesting, although a bit sameish. Water and rocks everywhere. It was easy to get lost. But after a while I knew a few landmarks: the dock on the lower ground, the tower/lighthouse, the rocks that can later be destroyed, the bones… And once I knew those I could navigate my way around.

And I think the logo looks pretty and fits the game being set in an environment where handwriting is still common, and the horizontal lines above the words sorta suggest the surface of the water, but I feel like it could have looked better without the horizontal line on the word “the” (and the diamond above the e in that word). And maybe I’d replace the diamonds over the “ee” in “deep” with boats, removed the horizontal line above “ones” and replaced the diamonds above and below “ones” with fish. (I also sorta feel like that font is trying to look like the text is in another language.) Maybe making waves on the horizontal lines could help representing the ocean.

Sound: The music was interesting, changing between areas, and the sound effects worked well too.

Fun: The game was fun for a while, but having to catch lots of fish over and over to save up to be able to maybe find a particular fish when it’s determined by what seems to be RNG gets boring quickly if the RNG keeps giving you other fish instead.

I found both keys, and then got capsized and told to look for some mind fish that was near the bones of its prey. I tried to find it near the place where it had got me, as well as in the place where there’s visible bones, but it didn’t appear again. I did try with various items, but getting all items and having to get some of them over and over seemed like it could take a long time, and with the rules saying everyone must play every game I can’t quite put as much time into testing each game as I’d like to. And with no way to continue from where I left off, I’d have to start over completely, which seems kinda slow.

Nineties: I like the fog that still lets me see silhouettes of fairly distant objects. Without those silhouettes, it would be easy to get lost, in fact it happened a few times. The water animation too looks good and nineties. I would maybe have preferred that animation to have a slightly higher framerate.

What I liked most: The fog and the font.

What I’d suggest changing: A way to save progress.

Happy Halloween! (I wrote most of this feedback last night.)

I couldn’t get the Linux build working. I did try right-clicking some files and marking them as executable. I suspect they might have lost the executable flag when you added the baking recipe into the zip file (or extracted them from the zip file and put them into a new zip file). After I attempted to fix that, I got a black window with a menu bar that had a single option, in Japanese, which closes the program. Running it from a terminal showed the following output:

{
  name: 'tyranogame',
  version: '1.0.0',
  description: 'TyranoScript｜ティラノスクリプト　Ver5（C）ShikemokuMK http://tyrano.jp',
  main: 'main.js',
  dependencies: { 'fs-extra': '^8.1.0', 'adm-zip': '^0.4.13' },
  devDependencies: {},
  scripts: { test: 'echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1' },
  window: {
    title: 'ティラノスタジオ',
    width: '1280',
    height: '720',
    min_width: 100,
    min_height: 100,
    resize: true,
    devtools: false
  },
  keywords: [],
  author: '',
  license: 'ISC'
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{
  title: 'ティラノスタジオ',
  width: '1280',
  height: '720',
  min_width: 100,
  min_height: 100,
  resize: true,
  devtools: false
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(electron) 'getUserAgent function' is deprecated and will be removed. Please use 'userAgent property' instead.
(electron) 'setUserAgent function' is deprecated and will be removed. Please use 'userAgent property' instead.
[14557:1101/011757.553899:ERROR:buffer_manager.cc(488)] [.DisplayCompositor]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glBufferData: <- error from previous GL command
[14557:1101/011831.671345:ERROR:buffer_manager.cc(488)] [.DisplayCompositor]GL ERROR :GL_INVALID_OPERATION : glBufferData: <- error from previous GL command

So in the end I used a tool called Wine to run the Windows build on Linux. That seemed to work, but I can’t rule out that some things could have worked differently than they would on Windows.

Writing: A cute and fun story. And it was fun to try different choices. I didn’t figure out what the different types of candy were for until I looked in the guide though… and even then I kept getting either Marta or Woodwose.

And not only do I like the story, I also like the writing. I thought I’d mention that. And English might be my third language but I didn’t have any trouble reading this one.

Theme: It is about ghosts. And it takes place during Halloween. There’s even trick-or-treating. So I’d say this entry is pretty halloweeny. (And I have seen the jam results, it did pretty well in the candy category. Probably because it’s a sweet VN that involves sweets.)

Audio: I like the music, it fits both the mood of the story and the fact that the MC plays a guitar. And some of it feels spooky and cozy at the same time, which also fits the story. And also it’s simple in a way that feels homemade, which fits the idea of the character playing some of it. And while there is different music in different parts of the story, they go well together too.

And I also that we get to hear the guitar as he practises and gets better, and a ghost sound in the end.

Art: I think the art fits well with the story and the audio. It has some homemadeness to it too, and the sprites and backgrounds fit together even though they do look like they were maybe made with different tools (but the sprites have smaller details whereas the backgrounds have broader strokes for the most part, as if the characters are in focus and the backgrounds get a bit of, well, not really bokeh, but the use of broader strokes seems intentional.

The little bits of animation (main menu, match) are nice too.

And the sprites with poses are nice. I’ve seen plenty of sprites that change facial expressions in this jam, but seeing them also move their arms and heads is a nice change.

The UI looks sorta generic even though I don’t know what that the engine uses by default, but it does feel like it puts more emphasis on keeping text readable than stylizing it and its background. I would say I tend to prefer that over stylising things to the point where they make text hard to read.

And speaking of UI, I like that I can advance the text with the spacebar, enter key or left mouse button like I’m used to (not sure if the engine does that by default, but the engine that most people seemed to use at this jam does work like that by default, and I like when I see entries stick to that convention despite using other engines). I would have liked to be able to re-read text after advancing, either through a back button (typically associated with page up or mousewheel scroll up) or a history button (usually accessed through a button or a menu option, although I think there might be some keyboard shortcut I just don’t remember). And when playing a VN over and over to try different choices I would appreciate if I could skip lines I’ve already seen and it could automatically stop skipping after choices (I usually hold the control button when I want to skip stuff I’ve already seen. And usually the VNs keep track of what I’ve seen in previous playthroughs so that they can stop me from accidentally skipping something I haven’t seen before). And I like being able to highlight buttons with the arrow keys and then “click” them with the enter key. But using a mouse wasn’t too bothersome. If I mention all this stuff it’s just because I’m kinda used to using keyboard shortcuts.

And yeah, I guess this too is UI-art-related: The achievements screen has a back icon in the top right corner, but it’s sorta dark for the black background. I think making the icon lighter would make it easier to see. Another thing you could do here would be to make it possible to go back from the achievements screen by pressing the escape key on the keyboard.

Fun: I found this one pretty fun, although there were some endings I wasn’t getting. Maybe this could have to do with Wine? Or it could also be me misunderstanding the guide.

One time, adding salt and then going to the shop to get some strings got me stuck watching the truck, only one button on screen and even that one doesn’t work, and I think I waited at least half a minute before I ended up closing the window. This problem only happened once, and it could be related to Wine.

I do think I had fun, even though I didn’t get more than two endings. And I chose to play this today and write feedback tonight… maybe I should wait until tomorrow before sending the feedback though.

And you did writing, art, music and programming as a soloist developer, and I think you did well at everything… And yeah, I know it’s called a solo developer. A soloist is someone who plays a musical instrument alone or as a lead, and I guess you did that with the guitar. Sorry, I thought maybe I should use some pun here.

What I liked most: The sweet story and music.

What I’d suggest changing: Perhaps make it possible to select choices with the keyboard instead of having to select them with a mouse.

I wrote this over the course of several days, so hopefully I’ve managed to keep my writing style consistent and had time to prune out any typos I might have made so I’m not mentioning “pint-and-click sequences”. And hopefully the fact that I wrote some of it during evenings where I was a bit tired hasn’t made me write like I liked the VN less than I did.

Writing: I like the story and the characters… and I just realized this might be a sequel to another VN you made. I guess I’ll read that one, probably after this month, since this month I want to read as many as possible of the entries from this jam.

Theme: It takes place during Halloween, and quite a few scary things happen. So it fits.

Audio: The music seems pretty good, although a lot of the entries I’ve played from this jam had good music, so maybe I should refer to it as average instead. And there was some piece that sounded like it had been longer and then made shorter, unless of course that was an attempt at making it spookier by having it sound like that only purpose.

Also, didn’t I turn the volume up? (Plays through the VN more times, realizing that the music volume gets reset between playthroughs.) You can set the defaults once, you don’t need to set them again every time I replay it. That’s what config.default_music_volume is for. Another way to adjust the volume would be to edit the audio files themselves.

Sound effects? Are there any? I didn’t hear any. Well, you had voice acting, which is actually harder to make. And I’d say VA also adds more to a VN than SFX, especially full VA like in this one.

I like the voice acting a lot, although I wonder if you meant for some characters to be louder than others. I guess it makes sense that Sesame/Poppy is a bit shy and therefore more quiet than Nora, but I think I’d have toned down the difference a little bit. And Koko seems to be about as loud as Poppy too. That sort of stuff is usually easiest to address by editing the audio.

Art: There’s obviously more than one artstyle in there, but the way they’re used together feels nice.

Those animal drawings at the start are cute. They’re black-and-white in an otherwise colourful VN, but that fits it being a character talking about her past. And yeah, it’s not the most common type of CG in this jam, but it’s pretty nice to see black-and-white drawings from time to time. (I’ve seen four entries with black-and-white CGs, including mine, and I think the ones in this one are my favourite black-and-white CGs so far.)

The backgrounds were nice to. They look painted and the sprites look drawn, but I don’t really mind. And they’re full of Halloween decorations.

I like the sprites too. Cartoonish, but I’m sorta used to cartoonish sprites on realistic backgrounds (it’s way more common than the other way around). And they have different expressions. And I really like that it’s easy to see who is speaking just by the sprite being larger, or in front of the text.

And the creature fading out, even though it’s not a particularly hard effect to make, works pretty well.

And with the foregrounds being cartoonish and the backgrounds painterly, I guess I don’t want anything to break that. And fortunately it didn’t get broken. The CGs have the characters drawn cartoonishly and the backgrounds blurry.

The textbox is slightly blurry, which makes it seem a bit like it’s meant to go with the backgrounds rather than the foregrounds. Or maybe it’s a way to show that the foregrounds are behind the textbox but in front of the background.

And the icon is cute too. I’m a bit puzzled by the choice of a rabbit. And “downy ears”. I guess maybe Poppy is a half-rabbit or something and that’s been mentioned in that other VN I haven’t read yet but which I found out this one might be a sequel to.

And at some point while writing this feedback I wanted to see the hand CG, so I started at the start, skipped until it, and accidentally skipped one step past it. And the back button didn’t work. It stays there, even in a colour that makes it easier to read than the other buttons, but when I click it it goes forwards rather than backwards. And CGs don’t show up in the history screen. And I don’t see a “gallery” option anyway (some VNs have that, a list of all the backgrounds and CGs you’ve seen so far, including in previous playthroughs). It seems this happens in many but not all location changes, for example it doesn’t happen when Nora and Sesame enter the café (I got unsure if I’d understood the last line before that location change, and now I know why: it has to do with the word “before”).

Fun: The story was interesting, and point-and-clicking was fun too. And I’d say the art and VA added to the fun.

The point-and-click sequences were fun but they also seemed to have some bugs:

• Remember that locked door that says “password incorrect” and stuff like that? A non-clickable version of its sprite appears in some point-and-click sequences where I don’t think it was meant to appear. Like it got added when it was needed, and then it just stays on all point-and-click screens after those.
• It’s possible to softlock some point-and-click sequences by rewinding and some items suddenly being missing in the inventory. And perhaps even more annoyingly, in that fight scene where you can pick various objects to attack with, picking the lantern second can cause it to end up being drawn on top of another object, at which point you become unable to pick that object. Another thing that can happen when rewinding is that Nora’s sprite gets stuck on later point-and-click sequences. I’m not usually a big fan of disabling the back button, but disabling it during and right after point-and-click sequences to work around a bug might be better than having the bug trigger if people rewind at those times. (I’m aware it could be a bug in Ren’Py itself, although I sorta hope it isn’t because I imagine you might find the bug harder to fix if it’s in the engine than if it’s your code.)
• Not so much a bug as a feature suggestion, but Ren’Py tries to make point-and-click stuff controllable with a keyboard, and in this one it somehow fails so the only thing that can be “clicked” with the keyboard is the satchel. Personally I prefer using a mouse on the first playthrough and the keyboard on later playthroughs, but I know that the keyboard feature is meant to be usable by people who can’t use a mouse (or are blind), so I guess for the sake of those people it might be useful to let players use it. I’m not sure why it doesn’t let me use the keyboard to highlight other objects (maybe there’s several screens on the screen and it has trouble jumping between them if they overlap or something).

I remember that in the fight I kinda thought the lantern could maybe be used as a weapon, and then I saw the character come to the same conclusion. I think it was nice to figure out something a moment before the character figured it out. I guess the door password could have worked like that too, except I didn’t know that that character had that name, so I couldn’t have guessed the first one.

What I liked most: the voice acting, the drawings, the story… it’s hard to choose.

What I’d suggest changing: The programming issues, especially the softlocks and the audio volume issue.

Writing: An interesting story, and the choices are fun too, maybe some more than others (I haven’t tried all combinations, sorry about that).

Theme: A ghost trying to attach himself/herself/themself/itself to a new body and to the soul that was already in that body? I think that’s spooky and cool.

Audio: There seems to be several pieces of music, and they’re consistent with each other. And they fit the mood and setting of the story.

Sound effects? I ended up taking off the headphones at some point so I’m not sure I heard all of them, but I did hear the knock. I think there could have been more though. Like footsteps when people walk into and out of rooms, and maybe a scream near the start (although the scream would maybe count as VA, but if it’s just the scream and none of the speech I’d probably still consider it an SFX).

Art: The backgrounds seem pretty, but a bit hard to see when the characters are covering most of them. And the characters match the style of the background, and they even have expressions… and if you let Ben and Nancy go to the attic, you’ll briefly see Ben and Ben return.

The font fits the story without being hard to read, and I love that animated text background. And I like that it gets a bit darker when it’s just narration, although I imagine it could make the narration slightly harder to read for people whose eyes don’t see so well.

Fun: I had some fun playing with the choices although rewinding was a bit difficult. (Well, at least I could save and load, but there’s no option to go to the main menu without finishing the story.)

Most VNs I’ve played let me advance the text by pressing enter or by clicking on the text or background. A clickable “→” button (possibly stylized in various ways, such as an arrow-shaped leaf, a jack-o-lantern or whatever fits the VN) is less common but I’ve seen some of those too. But this one seems to only advance when I press space. It does have a history button and a save button, so I guess it’s still better than some Unity VNs I’ve seen, but I’d still suggest adding the ability to advance text by clicking or pressing enter, maybe an auto-advance (each string staying on screen for N seconds plus some amount that depends on the length of the text, I’d say 1 second plus 0.6 seconds per character might work), and maybe a back button too. (Back buttons can be tricky to implement though.)

What I liked most: The art and characters.

What I’d suggest changing: Probably add the ability to advance the text with the mouse or the enter key and add an option to return to the main menu from within the options menu.

Writing: I looked at the list of submissions, and the short description of this one piqued my interest (I almost wrote “picked”… I guess I’m no better at English than the witch that says “my curiosity was peaked”… sorry for nit-picking on the spelling of that one word. I actually had to peek into a dictionary to be sure how to spell it. I don’t think I noticed any other words being misspelled.

The story is interesting although it ends a bit soon. But it’s nice to know that the VN won’t punish me for not caring about romance. So many VN genres are about romance. (And strangely enough, it’s quite common in fiction for MCs to fall in love with others who sometimes don’t fall in love with the MC, but the other way around is kinda uncommon, but I think mathematically it kinda has to be just as common).

Audio: The music is nice to listen to and fits the story. And yeah, it’s also pretty consistent with itself. The different pieces sound like they do fit into the same “style” even though there are obviously some. I tend to listen to the music while typing feedback, and the music in this VN was suitable for that, so that’s nice.

The flask sounds on the main menu fit the game well, and there’s also GUI sounds in the game itself. And there is of course a sound effect when something wakes up the witch. And when I saw “[T]here’s a light clinking of potions. The sudden noise startles the stranger” I expected a sound, but oddly enough I didn’t hear one. Turns out it was drowned by the music. Maybe that sound is a bit dim. And I guess “A large avian creature gives an abrupt honk” seems like a kind of thing I would maybe have wanted to make a sound… but I guess it’s kinda hard to have sounds for all the things that could make sounds. And I think other than that volume issue (maybe you can edit that sound to be louder), the sound effects worked pretty well. I think the sound effects in this one are probably better than the average of the jam.

And yeah, I feel a bit dumb for how often I play entries without VA and suggest that VA could have worked well, but since this one seems to only have two speaking characters (unless you’re adding more later on) I think it could be a good addition. If so, consider also voicing each menu option, especially in the main menu because I can’t easily see which flask is highlighted if I’m highlighting them with the keyboard rather than the mouse.

Art: I like the backgrounds, especially those multi-layer backgrounds that move when yo move the mouse. I almost missed that effect though, because I was using the keyboard and not touching the mouse.

And that green creature is nice too and fits into the same style as the backgrounds (actually, if you look carefully at the outline colouring, there might be some inconsistency between poses… but I guess I only spotted that because I was comparing them to the background. And the different expressions and poses are nice too.

Fun: Sorry for saying something you probably already know, but I think the story is interesting but a bit short. It’ll be interesting to see when you expand on it.

And this is where I should probably mention a small issue with the main menu. I liked those flasks, they fit the game, they move when you point at them and when you stop pointing at them, that’s nice. But some are upright when not selected and then there’s some that are upright when selected. If for some reason you can’t see the mouse (or you’re selecting them with the keyboard instead of using a mouse), you can’t always easily see which one is selected.

Accessibility: I do see and hear well (at least if the audio is balanced properly… I can miss things if the music is louder than the other sounds, or if I’m in a noisy place while playing). But I decided to try enabling some of those accessibility features anway.

Changing the font seems to work for the normal text but not for some buttons (main menu and quick menu). In the case of the options menu, the menu has to be reloaded for it to work, but then it does work. Self-voicing also doesn’t read those buttons aloud. Are they image buttons? If so, I’d probably consider making them contain icons and/or make different sounds when hovered. (Note: I already said this in the audio section, but it’s hard to see which items on the main menu are highlighted with the keyboard. Maybe I’d add a white border around the highlighted flask or something like that).

I’m not sure if the font colour change does anything. I didn’t notice a difference though. Maybe it’s not working as intended?

The “image descriptions” also seems to do nothing. Not even text mentioning when there’s screen shakes. I believe the example that comes with the template you use does show some way to have screen shakes described… Okay, I found it:

    $ shake()

    show eileen surprised with dissolve

    ic "The room shakes."

That’s certainly one way to do it, but maybe instead of using the ic character for it you might want to add another character and use that, for example:

# This is based on the template's ic character, but changed so that it always shows up if screenshakes are disabled:
define shc = Character(_(None),condition="persistent.image_captions or _preferences.self_voicing or persistent.screenshake")

And about audio captions, they seem to work but with two cavets:

1. When a sound effect and a music change happen at the same time, only one of the two things gets shown. I’m not sure what’s the best way to solve this, but it would probably involve editing accessibility.rpy to create some function that plays a sound and some music at the same time while showing a message about both actions.
2. Some of the music descriptions are a bit long for how little time they’re shown. If you look for “screen notify” in screens.rpy and read the next couple of lines you should be able to change the delay by changing a number there. I think there is a way to make the time change depending on the length on the text, but I haven’t tried looking into that. Sorry.

Oh, and if I may throw in an accessibility-related suggestion, maybe when you’re done writing the text in English you can add a translation into some easier-to-read variant of English. I’m mainly thinking of words like “critter”, “jiggly” and “trellis” maybe being a bit hard for non-native speakers to understand. (I think I didn’t know “trellis” before seeing it in some other entry from this jam that I read before this one.) Not that I had time to add such a feature to my entry either (in fact, I didn’t have time to add any accessibility features other than what’s built into Ren’Py by default).

What I liked most: The story and art.

What I’d suggest changing: Other than continuing the story? I guess you could add some white borders around highlighted flasks in the main menu and fix the issue with audio captions getting in the way of each other.

And I just realized I’m writing feedback this during the ace week. I wasn’t even aware of that week until it had started. Well, to those who celebrate it somehow, happy ace week!

I think I played this one on the 1st of November before ratings worked, so now I’m playing it again just to remind myself of it…

Writing: The bit at the start is fun, especially that it asks me if I understand and want to proceed, but if I reply no it tells me that I have to proceed anyway… which is probably good because I’m not a big fan of VNs being full of “early ends”, although I’d say the most annoying ones are things like “go left” and “go right” with “go right” being “there randomly happens to be a hungry werewolf there, bad ending” when there were no hints about which option was right or wrong.

I think it would be fun if I could say things like “I like animals too, but my favourite animals are hedgehogs” or something like that… well, I guess handling all the things players could want to say would be a bit like making a real chatbot. It’s just that Cinder likes talking about the frogs but the player character never says anything about frogs or really anything else than answer her questions and ask her one question. I mean, I could get why you keep Cinder from being too human, but I feel like it’s almost making the player character non-human or very shy.

Theme: The part with the minigames seems almost too cozy, but the start (legal stuff, getting called pumpkin) and endings do fit the jam.

Audio: The music sounds electronic and it sounds cozy until you get to the scarier part, at which point it sounds somewhat eerie, while still seeming like it’s the same song. And I like it, although maybe I’d have preferred the main menu to have a slightly more interesting or just different version, since I tend to leave main menus on the screen when I’m typing feedback. I think the music fits something techy like that chatbot.

I do feel like the music shouldn’t necessarily restart after the credits screen.

The GUI sounds are nice too and fit the VN pretty well.

I notice the Settings menu includes a volume slider for voice. Was that supposed to be an electronic voice? Oh, I guess it’s for those who enable self-voicing. And yeah, at some point while playing that word guessing minigame I accidentally started typing a word when it wasn’t expecting me to, and as I pressed V it started reading stuff aloud. It doesn’t sound very human, but I guess if I couldn’t read it would be better than no speech. It’s not a VN with a lot of speaking characters, so I guess it wouldn’t be extremely difficult to add VA for (unless you want it to be able to say a name the player typed).

Art: I think both Cinder herself and the backgrounds look pretty good and they also fit together well. The wall and the floor seem to be fighting a bit with each other though (there’s a bit of floor on the wall and a bit of wall on the floor).

And Cinder sometimes blinkig her eyes seems like a nice touch of realism.

The logos also look pretty good, like they could be real logos.

And the UI looks like something a tech company would be proud of. It doesn’t look painted like the other stuff, but it fits the game’s theme.

Fun: The minigames are fun, although when I left self-voicing enabled one of them constantly it says a bunch of numbers aloud.

And I like the main menu too. Including the text that changes depending on when I’m playing.

And the fact that it has three endings if you win the eye minigame and another three if you lose.

Writing: A cute and fun story. And I like how the ghost seems scary and dangerous at first and then suddenly seems nice and cute instead.

Theme: It’s about a meeting a ghost in a haunted mansion.

Audio: Some of the music sounds mysterious, some spooky, some cozy, some playful, and some cheerful. And all of it seems to fit the places where it gets played. I do notice some pieces aren’t really meant for me to leave them playing while I type feedback here though. I’d say the mysterious music that plays somewhere at the beginning seems fairly good at sounding good even when I’m listening without reading, but the cozy music that plays before you play hide and seek is a bit weird constantly starting and stopping as the thing that loops is a bit short and doesn’t do much interesting between each time it loops (the mysterious piano music at least has a little change in pace where it also has some other instruments playing).

And the music that plays on the “thanks for playing” screen… does that appear somewhere else in the story or is it just for endings. If the latter, then it’s pretty good for something people will probably only hear a couple of seconds of.

The sound effects also work well, and I notice there were some GUI sounds. I think maybe there could have been more of them, but that’s probably because I’ve grown used to specifically looking for things in the text that mention things that would probably have made some sound when they happen.

And there’s no voice acting. Not that I think there needs to be that. Maybe I’m a bit grateful for that as it does take quite a lot of time to properly review a VN with VA. But yeah, this one does have the advantage of not having a lot of characters (narrators make sense to leave unvoiced, and the character that the player controls should probably sound however the player wants them to sound, which you can’t know what is, so easier to leave silent, and that leaves only Cyrus as a candidate for voicing. Well, that’s still tricky: I think there’s some place where Cyrus says the MC’s name, which was picked by the player by typing it. I could see why that could be hard to get right.

Art: When the MC was using a flashlight, it felt odd that the backgrounds looked like they were only lit by moonlight. But when the flashlight was off, I think the backgrounds were fairly good. (Though I think there was some room that didn’t quite match the description of it in the text.)

I think Cyrus turned out pretty well. He does look quite anime compared to the backgrounds that look sorta like slightly simplified photographs. But considering he appears a lot more times than any of the backgrounds, I guess it makes sense.

Having a nicely customized GUI is nice. But make sure the text stays inside the box. The fact that it happens multiple times, including at the very start of the VN makes it seem somewhat unpolished. I’d probably make that box slightly wider, and add linebreaks in the text if some line still doesn’t fit.

Also, I see there’s a place where there’s smaller text. Is it meant to be whispering or was it to fit more text? I could read it well, but I think if it were whispering I’d probably have used punctuation marks to show that, and if it were a string too long to fit in the normal font size I’d have broken it into two strings.

Oh, and I like the drawing on the main menu and the “thanks for playing” screen too.

Fun: There were quite a few choices and they do seem to change things. I can even leave the house. And I get to choose a name and I think it doesn’t really matter what I put there. I think I once pressed enter and it let me take an empty name, but I quickly went back without checking if it had any effects later on.

What I like most: The story with choices and Cyrus’ sprite.

What I’d suggest changing: Maybe make the hallway look like it’s actually lit by a flashlight.

Writing: I like the story and the characters. Kinda sad that some characters die, but I guess it’s not much worse than the real world. The real world is also full of people that harm others because of their appearance, be it because they think they’re ugly or the opposite of that… And also people like the witch, the familiar or Joan. (Don’t worry, I don’t think I am like the familiar. But I do find these characters relatable.)

And I think this place holds a special place in my hear. I read that, read the next sentence, then thought, wait, what did the previous sentence say again? And with the back button disabled I had to use the history button instead. There’s some other grammar issues, such as “an substitute” that also forced me to slow down reading. Luckily I liked the story enough that I continued reading anyway. (Maybe I should have listened to all the places where the music changed and saved the game in those places… that would have made it a bit easier to go over those again when writing the audio section of this comment.)

Oh, and I did figure out that you probably meant to write “heart” there. But I did first read it as “hear”, then wonder if you meant “ear”, maybe “head”, and then I figured out what it was meant to mean.

Theme: “This time of the year”, I wonder if that is… yep, the story does seem to take place in October, so it’s using the theme in that way. And there’s also a witch and a demon familiar. (Wait, would that mean “a familiar that is a demon” as I intended or would it mean “a demon’s familiar”? Oops, it would be able to mean both. But yeah, the meaning I intended was the familiar that is a demon.)

And about scariness, when it got a bit too scary I just took a short break from reading and then resumed.

Audio: The music is cute and some of it does sound like something people could have played in that village. But I don’t think playing the same sequence of eight notes over and over is something people in the village would be super likely to do (I’m referring to the sad piano music that plays when some people arrive at Joan’s doorstep). Then again, when Joan was trapped in an uncomfortable situation, maybe the music getting uncomfortably repetitive makes sense.

Sometimes I suggest people put the best music on the main menu where people can’t say it distracts from the text. This VN’s main menu music is… silence. Well, silence is another thing that could have fit in that place where I thought the music was a bit repetitive. Things are happening. You can’t do anything about them. And you can’t even ignore them and listen to the music because there is no music. Just like in real life there is no background music. That could have fit that part well, although I guess some people might disagree with me on that one.

No sound effects or voice acting. Maybe you could have removed the slider to adjust the volume of those channels then. I mean, you took the time to disable the back button, which is probably not easier than removing those sliders. But I get it. Maybe you intended to at least have sound effects and just didn’t have time to add them. Okay… let me load saves at various places throughout this VN and read the text in their History:

That day, the Village Chief and a group of villagers came to my doorstep.

How about adding a door-knocking sound on this line and a door opening sound on the next one?

I carefully walk around the forest to search for a place. The lack of lighting makes it difficult to see the path. Moreover, my outfit keeps getting stuck on something, making it even harder to proceed. I walk, walk, and walk.

Maybe add some sort of walking and plant rustling to the first of those lines.

I guess the place where she picks some fruits could be another good place to add a sound, or maybe have a sound when she eats them (or maybe both). And when she rubs her hands together is another place that could have a sound.

When I listen to my surroundings, there are only sounds of nature.

I hope you get the idea. Just read through the text and think of things that would make sounds, and perhaps put more sounds when the screen is black than when there’s an image on it.

And yeah, there’s no voice acting either, which I kinda expected because few entries from this jam have it and half of those that do have audio glitches related to it. (Lines playing at the wrong time, some characters speaking way louder than others…). It’s a fun thing to add, but it does take time, especially if you’re using something else than barks (sighs, hmmm, ohs… I guess hmmm would suit the familiar, it does sound a bit like a purr).

Art: I think you did a good job with those sprites. And the backgrounds are nice too, though their style seems a bit different and based on how few environments look different I’m guessing you didn’t have time to make as many as you’d hoped for. And I’m sorta guessing there’d also been more sprites if you’d had more time. But I think putting quality over quantity did work out.

And the black and white drawings were nice too. The cat might look a bit human, but that just makes it even cuter.

Fun: The name guessing game was fun, but also a bit hard. It’s not really a name you come across often outside English-speaking countries, and even in those I guess it’s not equally common in all of them.

Also, did I mention that clicking the “back” button actually goes forwards. If you don’t want the button to work, consider hiding it completely. (Also, once I’ve played through the whole thing I play through it again specifically to look at sprites, listen to the music, take notes about things to mention in the feedback, so it would have been nice if it only stays disabled until you’ve reached all the endings. (I think I’ve got three endings… but yeah, maybe there are more of them… okay, I just skimmed through the devlogs, and you mention that there are three endings.)

I did save in a couple of places, more often than I would have done if the back button wasn’t disabled. So I didn’t have to start over every time I wanted to type in a name. (Also, coming to think of it, I think Ren’Py probably auto-saves pretty often too, so I guess it wouldn’t have been too much of an issue if I hadn’t saved manually too.)

Anyway, I first tried three names before accepting the hints. None of the three names I’d chosen fit the last of the hints. Then I looked at the hints. And even then I ended up having too look up sea-related names. English is my third language, maybe that makes things harder. But yeah, once I did see a particular name on a list of sea-related names I kinda felt that was the one, and it was. I guess if I’d thought more about the second hint and typed a particular thing into Google that would have made me realize faster what the name was. And the name seems to fit that spell that makes something reappear.

This one was short, but I guess that made it faster to play it a couple of times.

Writing: A fun little story, and I had fun trying different options. And also different names. And you can choose to be a cat? That’s cute!

Theme: It takes place during Halloween, it involves lost souls getting artificial bodies.

Audio: There’s quite a lot of music for such a short VN, and it does fit together nicely (it’s fairly consistent, no jarring genre switches). But also maybe I’m supposed to be advancing the text from time to time rather than leave the music playing until it loops: this isn’t really the type of music where there’s a lot of stuff going on. (Yeah, I guess eventful music could be seen as distracting from the text.) I do like when there’s some more eventful music on the main menu, well, there is some on the credits screen.

The music is pretty chill, which suits the story.

And I see the volume sliders let me change the volume of music, sound effects and voice. I don’t think I heard any voices. Are there sounds or voices? I’m guessing you either didn’t have time to add them or didn’t have time to remove the sliders.

Art: I think I like the sprites more than the backgrounds. Probably because the sprites look more carefully drawn and the backgrounds look like edited photographs (also, I managed to look at one of the backgrounds on its own without the textbox, and I can see that the part that’s covered by the texbox looked a bit odd… I guess it’s okay considering it’s only visible for fractions of a second, but yeah, if a surface acts as a mirror reflecting walls and it doesn’t reflect people, I wonder if those people are… people).

I like the sprites, including the pumpkin and the cat. And I wonder if there was meant to be some clothing sprite that you didn’t have time to draw.

The UI works. Maybe I’d preferred a slightly transparent background for the textbox, but I guess it helps hide a portion of the background. And having a sold background behind the text does help ensure it’s easy to read.

There weren’t images of the bodies, but now that I think about it, if they weren’t wearing clothes that could be a good thing (or they could be non-detailed).

Fun: The story was fun, and it was also nice to have to first pick a name, then pick some choices that would somehow fit that name, then pick more names that I would feel like they would make some different choices.

What I liked most: the worldbuilding and endings. What I’d suggest changing: Maybe edit the backgrounds to be closer to the style of the sprites.

I only played this one in English, since I don’t speak the other language. Also, I had Ren’Py’s documentation open in a separate tab so that I could check things like how to make the music go dimmer when other sounds play.

Writing: Having two language options is nice, but I only speak one of those languages, so I’ve only read the English version. I think Ren’Py does support making a single version that asks people which language they want to read it in so you wouldn’t need to make two versions. By the way, I saw one of the strangers at the market (I mean the market in the world that Mauro lives in) says something that looks like it’s in Chinese. Is that meant to be unreadable or is it a line that ended up in the wrong language by mistake?

There were choices too, and I like that one of them, while it did lead to a “bad ending”, put me back at the place where I’d made the choice rather than me having to manually rewind or load a save. I think more VNs should do that (if they do have bad endings, that is). But that one with the telescope was confusing: why does it let me look at the moon over and over?

I like the story and the characters. And Mauro being a monster and not wanting to be one kinda reminds me of how some people dislike some types of people because of their origin or their disabilities or whatever that isn’t really their fault or anything they can change. I wonder if Elvis is also some sort of reference to a real type of people (hopefully nice people too… the first thing that sprang to mind when I tried to think of him as a person was “maybe vampires he did become a vampire because he wanted to but he regretted it and now some magic makes him turn others into vampires, sorta like you might join a cult voluntarily but maybe then they don’t want you to leave and they want you to convert others… or maybe I’m overthinking this). The stranger that speaks a language I don’t understand reminds me of being in a country I don’t belong in, and I guess Una is in a world she doesn’t really belong in… And I feel like I partially belong in one country and partially in another, but I don’t really try to make each country be like another one. Then again, if I’m in Spain and it rains I will put on a raincoat, especially if it’s windy, whereas real Spaniards would use an umbrella and they’d use it even in a blizzard. I guess Una asking Mauro to follow some rules is a bit like her trying to keep some of her human identity. Yet she does seem to not really think a lot about the human world: if you’re used to one place and end up in another one, you’d probably wonder what’s going on in the other place.

Also, the submission page says you made the whole thing and the project page says someone else made the music, SFX, backgrounds and barks. Maybe you could add those names in the about screen (the one you renamed to “Credit”… and maybe if you do put more stuff in that screen you could rename it to “Credits” in plural). I think you can add text somewhere in options.rpy and it would show on that screen before the default text (look for gui.about).

Finally, maybe I’d suggest re-reading the English version of the part where the MC wakes up and is wearing a dress she hadn’t put on. I think I spotted a typo somewhere around there.

Theme: It starts at a Halloween party, it involves a witch, a monster and a vampire. Why do I always write a whole paragraph just about how the VNs I’m writing feedback for fit into the jam’s theme. Well, it fits, so let me go on. What’s next? Audio?

Audio: I liked the music, maybe some parts a little bit more than others. (I suspect some aren’t really meant for people to leave them playing until they loop just to hear the whole thing, but yeah, I tend to do that when I want to write feedback.) There’s quite a few styles (baroque, romantic, impressionist, lullaby, film soundtrack, something jazzy and playful, game soundtrack, boss music, and… folk?). Yet, they don’t really clash as much as you’d expect them to when they’re that different. They do fit the story, and having the music do something crazy when something crazy happens in the story seems kinda fitting.I could try to write what I think about each piece, but maybe that isn’t necessary. (I wrote most of this feedback yesterday in the evening.)

Also, the title screen has some music that loops before it finishes, and when you go from the title screen to the main menu the music restarts. And when the story finishes, it shows some text (“To be continued”, then the “Hi! I’m Raisu…” text) while it starts playing the music that sounds like baroque music, then jumps to the title screen which restarts it. I don’t know how you’re making the music play, but I know that at least in some places you can put if_changed after the name of the music to stop it from restarting if it’s already playing.

The sound effects are nice too. And by that I mean sounds from things that happen. (The speech sounds I call barks.)

The barks work well, but when the MC asks the stranger if she’s been asleep for a long time and the bark sounds like “no” but the text says “about three days” I think that is a bit odd. I mean, it could be that three days is little time for that character, but I don’t think a bark should seem like it contradicts the text.

And the balance seems to be a bit off: the music is at its maximum volume by default, sometimes masking the barks. I guess it doesn’t matter as much as it would if the barks were actual English words, but I still feel like they drown a bit sometimes. But you might consider lowering config.default_music_volume or setting preferences.emphasize_audio to True.

Art: The sprites look good too. Maybe more drawn while the backgrounds look more painted. But at least the different sprites are consistent with each other (the stranger sprite looks a bit less detailed though… but I guess that could be a way of showing it’s an unimportant character).

And also, I might want to mention that the MC’s hat is floating above her head. That’s magic before she finds out that magic exists. It also looks a bit weird when Elvis kisses her, two heads below that hat and yet it’s just floating in the background. If the hat looked like that in the real world, it would probably fall off, and if that world is anything like our world and she went outside, chances are it would at least blow off if it were windy.

And speaking of sprites and odd positioning: when the text says “Pumpkin boots, okay”, the text box maybe gets a bit in the way of too much of those boots.

There are maybe a few places where the expressions don’t quite fit the text. For example, after the line “You are the only person that can break the curse on me, and I need your magic.”, the MC replies “(???)” but is shown smiling in a way like she knows what’s going on, which is odd considering she does have other expressions that would fit better that do show up in other situations.

The backgrounds look pretty nice, and I think they’re fairly consistent with each other. I do think the first one (the MC’s room) looks like it’s a room inhabited by a person and a cat though, so I’m a bit surprised when she got told she’d been sleeping for three days she didn’t say something like “oh no, my cat must be missing me!” or something like that. Or maybe it’s just me that thinks that that thing in the left side of the image looks like something made for a cat to climb on.

I also see a bright spot in the left side in Elvis’ castle. Like a lamp, but floating in the air and with the lampshade somehow invisible… I get that light coming in from the window could hit the wall like that, but then I’d think there would be more than one bright spot.

I also like those animated sequences that appear. But When it zooms in on a part of an image, the pixels and the lack of details become a bit obvious. At least the less detailed image is only shown for a brief moment.

The UI looks nice. I like the little ghost that spins at the end of the text.

The font is cute and it’s not too hard to read. The little hearts are cute, but the number zero being slashed like an Ø might be a little bit confusing… except the text is in English where that isn’t a letter.

Maybe I would consider adding an option in the settings to change the font to something more plain, but I didn’t have trouble reading it, except when the hat got a bit in the way.

And that pumpkin mouse cursor is so cute. (I almost called it cute like a mouse, but apparently that sounds too mousy in English.) Only confusing thing about it is that I’m not quite sure where exactly it’s pointing. If I start the story, get to the name screen, then the name as Una and move the pumpkin to the OK button without clicking, I can move it to the left and right and see when the OK button gets highlighted and when it stops. Placing the pumpkin in the centre of the K and moving it up and down I see that it seems to respond to the position of the very top of the pumpkin: its stem; but putting the end of stem in the middle of the K, I find that the furthest I can move it to the left and still register is to the right of the middle of the O, whereas if I move it to the right I can move it all the way to some spot under the space between “your” and “name?” So either there’s some oddly positioned invisible border around the button or the cursor’s actual position is somewhere to the left of the stem. Maybe if the stem curled to the left it could end at the point it’s pointing at?

Fun: The fact that there’s two languages is nice. Even if I only understand one of them. And the barks help show the mood the characters are speaking in (the expressions help with that too). And I like the story, music and art too.

I notice the title shows without spaces and even with an underscore… in the titlebar. I think that makes sense for a filename, but I wanted to point out that the text in the titlebar doesn’t need to match the filename. If you want to change the title bar text, look for config.name in options.rpy.

What I liked most: The music and characters.

What I’d suggest changing: Maybe don’t let me look at the moon over and over? And maybe have some choices where some of the consequences come a while later. (And perhaps you should avoid opening brackets inside brackets (like I’m doing now), or at least make sure you close as many as you’ve opened.)

I do think this must have been a lot of work for a solo writer, especially in two languages. I only managed to finish mine in one language and even there the writing isn’t as good as I’d wanted it to be.

[Edit: while I was typing a lot of that feedback, I was listening to the main menu music. The one that sounds like baroque music. I think it’s one of those types of music you’d expect to hear in a big and fancy castle (or in a cathedral). The music sounds fancy, like the musical equivalent of a beautifully decorated, expensive chandelier that you’d also see in such a castle. And yeah, some people think VN music shouldn’t be fancy because it distracts from the text, but I don’t really mind fancy music in VNs myself. I think it’s nice to listen to something that sounds like it’s meant to be listened to and not just meant to exist as a background to keep the text in the spotlight.]

I guess this would be more of a question for the organizers, but some places I can think of are:

• The “Short description or tagline” field on the project page. I don’t remember how many characters you can fit here, but I think text put here might show on the list of the jams’s submissions, and possibly in more places, so I would probably put a short description here.
• The “Description” field in the “Details” section of the project page. This one can (and probably should) be longer. I think you can even add images in this one.
• Text files attached to the project. Here you could put longer things, such as a full transcript of the podcast if you want.
• I know that games can have a file that “will play in the browser”, and I imagine you might be able to use that to make the podcast listenable without having to “download” it. And you could theoretically also put text there.
• If the jam’s submission form has a field where it asks you to put a description there, I guess you can do that too. I wouldn’t leave the project page and short description empty though.