itch.io

hi hi, thank you for the kind words about the art and sorry to hear you're having trouble downloading our game! Are you on mac or pc (or other os)? 

also killer snoofie helpfully posted a no commentary playthrough if that's preferable to trying to troubleshoot:

Glad you enjoyed it!! Preteens are silly little guys  :)

The VAs were absolutely wonderful to work with so I'm glad you enjoyed their performance!!
Also yes, we have some amazing artists! They worked nonstop to bring everything to life and I'm thrilled to hear it paid off :DDD

 The OST is REALLY catchy, cannot agree enough :D 
(I've sent word to our awesome composer to see what we can do!)

Thank you for being hyped from the start! It means the world to us that people are responding so positively <3

We're very excited to get started on the rest of our excellent plans for our characters too!!! 

Thank you!! It has all our hearts too hehe <3
(Can't wait to hear your impressions!)

I do think we interpreted the theme in a bit of an unexpected way yes :D Thank you for the feedback!

I agree that the bubbles are a bit fast among other spider-related fixes, so it's probably going to be something we look into for future versions!

Thank you for the feedback! Glad the atmosphere came through and we're for sure going to keep your technical issues in mind when we do revisions!

adding this to my playlist of music to write to for this game :D

Thank you so much for the highly detailed feedback!
Narrative-wise, I'll be sure to go back and revise the ending for more emotional impact. And we'll definitely try to make the text boxes scale properly + tailor the dreams to match the first person portion, yes.

Glad you were inspired by the game! Your comments are going to be super helpful in generating a list of fixes/design changes for future iterations :D

Glad to hear someone made good use of the arachnophobia mode! :)

Mouse sensibility is great feedback actually-- I think we needed more playtesting from different devices to suss out all potential problems for sure, thanks.

(And as the writer/ a narrative designer, thank you for the positive feedback on the narrative design!)

Thanks for the feedback, happy to hear you enjoyed the story and concept! The music was composed by one of our programmers and I'm still in awe how he was able to pull that out of nowhere :D

We're looking into how to fix the spider sequence so your comments are super valuable, thanks.

Spider variation in terms of hit points is not something I had considered but super interesting suggestion! Thanks for the feedback :)

Thank you for the feedback, especially about the flavor text! :D
Gameplay-wise, we're looking into fixing the difficulty scaling for sure.

Thank you for the feedback! We had accessibility in mind pretty early on but I think the mechanics needed a bit more time than we had so that's something we're looking to work on in future for sure. Hopefully you'll be able to play a later iteration of it with smoother gameplay!

:')

Thank you so much! As the writer, that's very high praise and I really appreciate your feedback!

Yay a visual novel! Great job on a storyline with many classic tropes-- even if I could predict where things were going because of them, it was still fun to see how you chose to pull them off or add a twist! Like other people, it took me a bit to realize that the player is Lily but once that was cleared up I was mostly swept up in the story and it didn't bother me, personally. I do think that the sprite choice to make Mother and Spring have red eyes when they were being suspicious made the overall tone way more sinister than it actually ended up being haha

Also really appreciated the ability to immediately go back to the last choice that led to the non-true endings and to change my decisions!

Just a little thing-- I think for Buddy Up Jam there's a thing about making sure you have the legal right to use certain assets. While I don't think that the ai bg are as obvious of a problem, the main menu song is definitely copyrighted regardless of who's performance it is T.T (I would just be careful about keeping that song in as is if you plan to develop this game further!)

Really original game design! I think for me, the biggest controls problem was not having it be clearer that "right-click to move" meant that wherever I right-clicked was where people would go not that I had to right click after selecting them and  drag them over mii style haha but otherwise a fun nightclub management game! (Also lol the music was hilarious but the "PAUSE" when you pause the game was even better :D)

Loved everything about the worldbuilding from the ambient sounds to the writing (excellent tension-building too!) to the environmental art/character designs! The game design was solid overall and I can't wait to play an extended version :)

Loved the music and the background art especially the nightmare versions! And the thump of the pillow landing / the solidness of the pillow was weirdly very satisfying lol

I really liked this especially the deeper backstory of the plush and the use of minigames to do the fixing. The concept is solid and I hope you get to develop this further!

Also just noticed the special pause screens specific to each level! *applause*

I could see myself sinking a lot of time into this game just replaying the levels :D Interesting narrative and addicting gameplay with a sufficiently challenging mechanic! I also love the increasing s'more-ification of the world  in the art and storyline + the switch from acoustic to electric guitar as the stakes increase-- great design choices overall!

Bubble merch when??? (just excellent character designs all around! :D ) 

Great flavor text especially the screensaver one-- I felt very rewarded for exploring which is always nice. Also just a really cute story! I do think maybe an additional "press space to advance dialogue" would be good to add to first dialogue box to remind people to do so.

I also experienced the boss bug after dying once and in a related vein, the game could also benefit from respawning in the same room that you died! Great job overall and congrats on many of the team's first game jam!

A really cute game! Great job predicting user behaviour / questions with the tutorial signs (I really thought the gun was a spring to let you jump higher at first until the sign with shooting instructions haha).
I also had some trouble with the spike area which would have worked if the difficulty level of the rest of the game was the same but continuously dying there considering the rest wasn't too bad was a bit of a bummer. Maybe adjusting the length of the second row of spikes to give the player more room to start the jump would be good!

(Also I was so curious about the areas I couldn't get into just off screen! Not sure if there was a secret to exploring those or if it was just set decoration but they got my attention haha)

In terms of contributors to the story and gameplay, it was just a six person dev team, but we had quite a few voice actors, yes!

As Chris said, for a team of mostly new developers, everybody was surprisingly hard-working and reliable and we all wore a lot of hats with little to no miscommunication. (And on top of that, our VAs were very accommodating even when our deadline was fast approaching).

I came in as a secondary writer about halfway through the jam, but as far as I understand, everyone was following one preset, central narrative that drove every element of the game. In hindsight, I think it was the late stage attempt to stay true to the original scope of things that contributed to that stylistic dissonance you mentioned. I appreciate your valid critique though! It's given me a lot to think about regarding production and writing :) 

Yay for funky gameplay! Exactly because the VN side is a little sweeter, I wasn't sure how the nightmare parts were going to feel in comparison, so I'm super happy to hear that it was not too jarring and actually appropriately spooky for people lol (very proud of our programming and modelling team for their hard work!) 

I wrote most of the ending so very hyped that you liked it! (^∀^) *casually screenshots for my confidence boosting archives*

Also yes, shoutout to our voice actors who worked very hard for this! Very grateful for their time and energy :D

I can't speak about the technical side of things but glad that you were more spooked than frustrated :D

Also really appreciate that you enjoyed the writing! I had a lot of fun feeling out the voices between our main characters so I'm glad to hear that their chemistry seemed realistic and cute. It's also been super interesting to hear from everyone about when the plot started falling into place for them. I think the moment you highlighted is about exactly where we wanted people to be more suspicious about what was happening haha