Hello!

The rest of the sub-Q team and I all love your art style, and wondered if you would be interested in doing some (paying) art work for our magazine.

Can you please e-mail me at stewart@sub-q.com so we can talk about that further?

Thanks! :)

Stewart

Hello, and congratulations!

This game was selected as one of our "judges' choice" games for the subQjam game jam.

Can you please e-mail me at stewart@sub-q.com so we can talk about republishing it in our February issue?

Thanks! :)

Stewart

Hello, and congratulations!

This game was selected as one of our "judges' choice" games for the subQjam game jam.

Can you please e-mail me at stewart@sub-q.com so we can talk about republishing it in our February issue?

Thanks! :)

Stewart

You read that right!

The competition here was so strong we've decided to award publication to not one, but two additional entries.

First up, with an average judge rating of 4.8, "Unmaking, Unmade" by Grim 👁️ Curio.

And just behind that with an average judge rating of 4.2, "at 3am I didn't think of you" by cairirie.

(Also, if user odris_den is reading this, we would love to talk about purchasing some art from you for our issue covers in 2019!)

If you're one of the three people above, I will leave a message your page soon, and hopefully you can get in touch with me about next steps. (Or, if you're reading this now, you can contact me by e-mailing stewart@sub-q.com)

Over the next week, I'll be going around and leaving more anonymous judge feedback on all the entries. (This is our first time doing this, and we weren't quite expecting itch.io to handle judge voting quite like it did, so things have been a bit of a muddle.)

Even if you didn't snatch one of those coveted publication slots, don't despair! All the games we received for the jam were great, and we were blown away with how widely all you lovely entrants interpreted our theme--and impressed with how you all somehow managed it in under 1000 words, to say the least.

Also over the next week, I'll be sharing out links to your entries on Twitter so that more people can play what you've created. If you have a one-sentence teaser on your game page, I'll use that in the Tweet. Likewise, if you have a Twitter account or some other website you use, make sure it's listed on your itch.io profile so I can link to you on the Tweet as well.

We do plan on another one of these next year, and with a different theme. What might that theme be?  You'll just have to tune in then to find out. :)    (Or you can follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/subQmag and keep an eye on that space for updates.)

Last, but not least, I'd like to thank the sub-Q team for all the work they've put into this and all our issues:

Tory, PJ, Devi, Natalia, Gail, Jeremy, Mary, and Brian--none of this would happen without you. Thank you all!

Thank you for taking part! :D

Hi again all,

We did it! We reached the end of the game jam's voting period.

Thanks so much--again--to all of you who took part. You're what made this jam a success, and we're all really happy with that.

Our first place winner was Olivia C Dunlap, for her game "Pretend You Love Each Other." Congratulations, Olivia!  I will be in touch soon to work out the details of publishing the game in our February issue.

For the "judges' choice" selection, our judges are all hard at work, and we'll likely come to a decision some time in the next few days. I'll make another post here as soon as we know, so keep an eye out for that!

As I've said, this was a great experience, and we'd love to do it again next December with a different theme. We hope to see you all back next year for round two. :)

Stewart

Hi again folks,

We're up to at least 11 votes per entry now, which is fantastic!

If you haven't had a chance to check out your fellow entrants' games yet, there's still about a week left to do that.

Thanks!

Hi everyone! 

I'm Stewart (editor-in-chief over at sub-Q), and I'm just leaving a quick message about voting.

First of all, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank PJ, editor extraordinaire and the person who set this all up for us in itch.io's system. She's done a lot of work behind the scenes to get everything running smoothly, so: Thanks, PJ!

Second, thanks as well to everyone who's participated in the jam! It's been really wonderful to see all the great entries--and gratifying to get such a high number of entries for our first game jam. We've all been impressed with the high quality of the games you all have put together. That can't have been easy with such a tight word-count requirement, so I want to give a hearty congratulations to everyone who completed an entry. Nice job!

Now, on to voting: lots of you have been rating games already--each entry has at least six votes on it, which is awesome.

If you haven't gotten around to looking at your fellow entrants work yet, no worries! You have until 9pm on December 30th (Pacific time) to get those votes in.

I know it's holiday season for many, which may involve some travel and other requirements. I'd love it if everyone could vote on every game that's not their own--but if that's not possible, please don't stress over it.

I would like to ask that each entrant vote on at least five other games, though. If you're only going to get a few votes in, I'd also like to ask that you look to the Games in need of ratings page itch.io provides for each game jam and vote on games with the lowest number of ratings first. This will help us ensure that each entry gets a fair shake.

If you have extra time, it's also nice if you can leave a comment on some of the game pages. If you do leave a comment, please make it constructive!

In addition to this voting, we'll be doing an "editors' choice" award as well. This will be me plus other members of the sub-Q editorial team, and it will run on the same time frame. 

itch.io will calculate the totals of both votes immediately after the voting period ends and should populate the winners immediately as well.

Once the winners of both sets of voting are made public, I will get in touch with the creators of the winning entries to work out details for payment and publication of their work in sub-Q. (This process may involve minor editing, just so you know!)

If anyone has questions, please do feel free to leave a reply to this thread or e-mail me directly at stewart@sub-q.com

Thanks again for taking part in this jam! It wouldn't be anything without all of you. :)

Hello! Is there any interactivity with this piece? All I'm seeing on my device is a static image.

Just as a heads up, I get a broken scene reference when I click the "resume" button before saving my progress. Not a big thing, but thought I'd point it out!

Hello, and glad to see you over here! :D

Just wanted to let you know that I get a broken image link at the start and end of your game for /pawprintspng.png and /sunrise%20pixabay%20c0%20transp4.png (although the "stars fall" image is working fine.)

Just as a heads up, I ran into this when hiking my stockings up: "I can't (display:) the passage '...pulled down the strap of my dress. Just a peek for dear Horst.' because it doesn't exist."

I got a "scene does not exist" error for this when trying to access the end scene, just as a heads up.

This was creepy, for sure, but I sometimes had difficulty understanding the dialogue due to the distortion. Subtitles would be a big help (and would also make this more accessible for the hearing impaired).

A neat idea, though, and definitely a unique take on interaction!

That would be neat. It definitely sets the tone!

Nicely done at this length! Creepy writing, although I kind of wanted more to do beyond repeating the same action. Still, that repeated motion added to the creepy factor 

This one was not for me, I'm afraid. Although the choices I had to make were well selected to put me in control of the game, the basic mechanics of the gameplay weren't my favorite, and the endings sometimes seemed abrupt and arbitrary. The nail in the coffin for me, though, was the game's usage of the "native American graveyard" trope, which is built upon an American cultural view of native peoples as ignorant savages with mystic tendencies and just does not sit well with me in 2018. Sorry!

I enjoyed this one a lot. Nice mix of tales, and I appreciated the ironic framing.

Hello again! I loaded this up in my browser, and it looks like it's actually using Impact, of all things, for the font...  Perhaps my browser/computer doesn't have Futura? Although that seems unlikely, it's the only thing I can think of. Anyway, just thought I'd let you know!

Good stuff!

Minor bug: I dropped the sunglasses in the lighthouse (after you know who appeared) and it gave me the same message that I received when I removed them the first time, on the beach.

Very impressive, especially for four hours! Alas, I could not discover the seventh ending, either.

This was a lot of fun, although it took me a little bit to get used to the UI.

Thanks! I'll do that. :)

hum! When I played it on my other computer it was forcing Futura on me in a very bolded form... Seems fine on my phone now, though. So never mind about that part of my comment, I guess! :D

Thank you!

I like that idea for links--will definitely implement it later on. :)

Neat concept, and I enjoyed where this went.

I did find the click-to-reveal-text thing a little tiring after a while, and thought revealing more text in one go would have been more user friendly, but that's just personal preference. Also some typos and the like to fix after the comp, as expected in this division. :)

I will take another look! :)

This one was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed the mashup of different tones and genres of storytelling.

I did think the blurred out text for unavailable choices was a little distracting. I would rather have just had it not appear, personally, until I'd unlocked it.

This one was sweet--and as someone who was born in England myself, the topic is definitely scary on both fronts!

 I do think it could use a bit more polish in terms of the prose, after the comp is over.

This was a lot of fun! 

I did notice that sometimes the verbs at the bottom stuck around when I couldn't actually use them, but haven't played enough texture games to know if that's expected behaviour

This is a fun concept for a game, and I appreciated the style of the story. 

I did, unfortunately, run into some trouble with how the game was structured. Is there a way to not make the third zone available until I can actually go to it? It was a little offputting to see that as an option, only to be told I couldn't go there.

 I also wasn't always sure what had happened when I did (or tried to do) something. e.g. the door code, which I assume I got wrong, but "Beeeep" and refreshing the first screen didn't really make that clear. Did I die?

I enjoyed this one, and thought it was well written overall. I did notice some typos and unfinished sentences and the like, and ended up stuck with no way to proceed when I was with Elena in the creepy playroom. Not sure if I missed something there or not, though, and I'm looking forward to another playthrough I've I've tried all the other games.

From a design perspective, the font choice was not my favorite. That said, I enjoyed the story, and how my choices affected it., and didn't run into any problems as I played.

That's an awful lot of introductory text! I wonder if you could manage to put some of it into dialogue or description later on, instead of at the front? I got a bit confused at first because I couldn't tell this was a parser game and was looking for a link to click. 

That aside, this seemed fine otherwise but not for me--I am just not into baseball at all, and (despite the disclaimer) didn't quite understand what constituted a "pair" in this context, since I didn't really have the background knowledge for it. Sorry!

I am maybe not the reader for this. I found things a little hard to follow, and couldn't quite get a grasp on the rules of the world I was in. The first ballroom scenario I picked, in particular, threw me for a loop. Once I got more used to that, I did enjoy the zany humour!

(On a more minor note, I found the font really hard to read, especially when bolded to show links, to the point where I had to turn off the selected font in Chrome's devtools in order to play.)

Lush setting and an engrossing setting here. Nicely done!

Hello!

I see there are two ratings on every game--one for each division--but there doesn't seem to be a way to rate just one of those...  

Should I be putting the same rating for both sets? Or are you only going to be looking at the rating for the relevant category when its time to score things?

This was just a whole lot of fun! Love it. (And I totally got away with it.)

This was intriguing, but was I supposed to be able to do anything after clicking on one of the recipes/spells? I couldn't see all of the text, even with the game set to fullscreen, which made this a bit frustrating.

Thanks!