itch.io

Thank you for the feedback on what is most evocative! And thank you for the very practical feedback on density.

Density is definitely a problem. This ideally wants to be a social network, but gaining meaningful adoption for a social network is difficult. Of course every user is *also* their own fellow user within the same locality and so could at least talk with their own past self (if they so desire, haha...), and also all global users also constitute another locality, though not as immediate of one. I think even seven users on the global scale could make for an interesting experience since it would basically be a message room except you see from where messages are being sent. Users could set the radius for the messages that they want to see. As soon as there are enough users within a certain radius, one could start looking at the conversation happening more immediately around themselves. For the fully realized idea of sitting down at a park bench and being able to read the messages that someone left there exactly there last week... this would be quite far off even with a relatively successful implementation, and maybe only possible in places like New York City where there are many famous everyday landmarks. A more realistic middle ground is seeing what people within a few tens of kilometers of you have been thinking about, since even though this is not a trivial distance to travel it still is traveled often enough that different places in one's everyday life (like work vs. home) would expose one to a different pool of voices.

Maybe a small syllabus or sequence of linked posts with a short explanation of what possible requisite "hole" it might fill in would make it easier to follow along! A lot of it is about communicating your own frameworks and models and distinguishing them from what others might use. This could then culminate in your thesis that the leading AI labs are barking up the wrong tree.

This pitch is so good. It has a clear vision of who needs this and who does not. It has a distinct aesthetic in both graphic design and writing tone, and speaks clearly about issues familiar even to lay people who follow recent news surrounding AI. After reading this, I started immediately thinking about whether I would want to use this in the future, and also who in my life might benefit from knowing about this. I consider the messaging in this pitch to be very powerful. Great marketing and public relations.

I would like to sign up to be an alpha test vibecoder. I am not a professional programmer, and my first vibecoded projects are available for viewing on Itch. 

I enjoyed reading about this! I do not work in AI and only use the most consumer-friendly tools on the market right now (I do not host my own LLM instances), so my technical knowledge is limited. But I like the examination of the field's current direction and the proposal to essentially look toward learning from biological efficiency instead of maximizing a model of how brains work as the sum of many reduced mechanical parts. (As a music teacher, I have been recently very interested in how tactility and generative power were important parts of historical improvisation models whereas modern music theory is often abstract and too slow to be immediately practical.)

A part of me desired a smoother ramp between the pitch itself and the technical details of *how* you are pursuing new approaches to examining human neural architecture. I am not well-versed enough on this subject (either on the biology or on the computer science) to understand many of the links you provided, so if you are pitching to those who are not industry experts, it might help to have a primer article somewhere?

Itch gave me a warning before downloading this file, and I think that this presents a barrier to me giving this a review even if it is for benign reasons.

I will be honest, I had other thoughts I wanted to share, but my desire to address you nonchalantly talking about stealing groceries outweighs pretty much anything else. So I really have to say, I think this is a bad way of going about things. I am sure you have your own reasons for your actions, but it is an ugly look to either feign indifference to antisociality or to demonstrate genuine antisociality. I strongly suggest both removing this (and so disavowing public signs of bad behavior) and reconsidering the rationale and disposition that leads to this pattern, though I expect that you will not heed this advice. Morality is about winning, and immoral actions are on the face of them losing as acting immorally trains you to be immoral, and being immoral is being a loser. 

Aside from that, I like the structure of this document! It reminds me of an "open source" document that I made before, a Google Doc that anyone could edit. I think you made some tasteful aesthetic choices. 

But again, very sour on you talking about stealing groceries.

When I first saw the name of this, I thought that you were talking about a new America-specific jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox Church! I really like that you are attempting to speak on practical ecclesiology and wondering about how to reorganize society around an accountable and streamlined church institution.

I wonder, how would you compare your ideas to that of existing historical ecclesiological models? Christians have obviously been thinking about these questions for a long time. I think the main thing that catches my eye here and admittedly sours me on your ideas is the idea of little or no confessional standards for participation. How does this not become Universal Life Church or the Freemasons? Around what is this organizing? What even makes this a church? 

I also am skeptical of your aim to put ritual, "mutual aid", "moral formation", and "character underwriting" above metaphysics. This seems to undermine itself immediately, since to proclaim what is aid or morality or virtue is to proclaim metaphysics, and so this seems to unknowingly or deliberately smuggle in presumed metaphysics that sees itself as self-evident. At least to me, metaphysics is so much more important than pretty much any other civilizational issue that to treat it as something to brush aside to search for common ground elsewhere points to your project having an ultimate reference that either unfortunately downplays the centrality of the one true triune God or dilutes the language of church tradition through using the language of church (appealing to Christian sensibilities) toward short-term temporal aims.

Paul said that if Christ did not rise from the grave on the third day, our faith is in vain. I say that we take this seriously. For me, your full project as presented would not make a good investment compared to something like a detailed ecclesiological study of existing church institutions. I would be interested in seeing you address some of the concerns mentioned above and also tune up the mission of this project, tying it explicitly to its metaphysical and traditional dependencies.

I have a good example off the top of my mind of a study of the practical implications of theology on ecclesiological models and subsequently the political climate of a nation:

Compass Rose: Calvinism as a Theory of Recovered High-Trust Agency

Yes.

I found this a year and a half ago, and I still often think back to it! I absolutely love this resource. Thank you. I hope you release an official printed version someday! Maybe on The Game Crafter?

Thank you so much! I hope you got something beautiful about it. To this day, I use this to write new poems, using my own older ones (and ones I find around online or in magazines) to make the magic happen.

So good! I run a very rules-lite campaign, and printing this pocketmod on a double-sided sheet of paper lets me convert from rules to tables whenever I need something. Thank you so much.

This is beautiful. Using it made me lose sleep, and after I dreamed of a white city.

I used a VR space for method of loci and spaced repetition practice, and would love something similar for this where the user creates notes that randomly spawn in locations in the future. I don't expect that this would be a popular feature at all, but maybe this comment might give you ideas for where to take this next!

I even have separate boxes so I can take only the ongoing leg of my adventure with me!

Also, I love writing notes on dry erase index cards and shuffling them in :) Drawing them on future runs is always a pleasure, like I'm reading old journal entries a past hero left behind.

That is much too clever! Thanks for the read :)

(Tim) Oh no, could you take a screenshot of the error? We haven't been working on anything recently, but if something's broken I'll try to get a fix uploaded.

(Tim) Hi, not really. It does use a screen shake effect near the climax, but it's pretty well telegraphed.

(Tim) A great supernatural story. I'd love to see Hugo Laurent crack some more supernatural cases!

(Tim) Thank you for your comment! I loved your entry for this jam. I hope to see your universe expand even more in the future :)

(Tim) Thank you for this comment! I'm glad you appreciate the finer details. Our team wanted to make all the different parts fit together as well as possible, and feedback like this gives me confidence that we're on the right track.

(Tim) Thanks for reading! I also enjoyed your entry.

(Madeleine) 

The idea of presenting where the player has no real agency is interesting! There's another game in this jam titled Melanie which explores a similar concept.

I'd love to see where you take this! Some music and sound effects would really help to bring your writing to life.

(Tim) So far, I've not been able to replicate this issue or get anyone else on the team to. We're all Windows and Mac users, with either 8GB or 16GB ram.

Could you refer me to the community you're in where multiple people have reported this problem? I fear that this might be out of my technical expertise, but I still want to see if I can fix this outside just removing the noise/artifacts effect.

(Tim) This one really creeped me out. There was a recent period in my life where I'd have nightmares about body decomposition because of a death in the family, and this weirdly enough has helped me come to terms with death a bit better. Memento mori is weird.

I also really like how the pumpkin head is quite on brand for Thugzilla, of object head VN fame. Moreover, the music is excellent and added a lot to the atmosphere.

Definitely one of my favorite Spooktober VNs, and I predict that this one will have quite a lot of staying value in the OELVN literature.

(Tim) I'll look into this. This does sound like the static/artifacts effect is the culprit.

(Tim) I'll look into this and get more opinions. My computer has had no issues, so I will seek feedback from colleagues on other machines.

(Tim) Hi FlareBlitzed, did you encounter this issue with the newest version of the game? There was indeed a lag issue with the initial release, as we did not properly downsize our assets for distribution.

(Tim) The Penitent was one of my favorite O2A2 titles, so I was happy to see a sequel of sorts. The art is as good as in the first time around, and the feel of the entire experience was clean. The line-by-line writing felt quite different, though that is to be expected when given more than a thousand words as a limit.

The resolution of the mystery was unsatisfying to me in its current form, but I await some sort of expansion on this jam game to tighten everything up. The world that Tamafry created is ripe for further exploration, so I hope she revisits it again and again in the future.

(Tim) This one was pretty fun, haha! Definitely gave me a bit of emotional whiplash, which is exactly what was intended I think.

The music for this is excellent! I hope we can get in contact about collaborating.

(Tim) I really enjoyed this one. It feels like there is still a lot of room for this story to be developed further, which is something I would definitely look forward to.

Between this and EDDA Cafe, I have come to expect high quality visual novels from Mushroomallow :)

(Tim) I was kinda amused by the formatting of this title since I'm a fan of the Tales series. I was so happy to see this lampshaded in the story itself LOL.

That was a pretty fun adventure. I was a bit annoyed with the quicktime events and having to click through many menus guessing culprits, but overall I really like how everything fits together. The dialogue has lighthearted personality, and the art style works pretty well for me.

(Tim) This makes for quite an effective fairy tale! It kind of reminds me of looking up different versions of traditional stories and imagine what-ifs.

There are essentially two main endings, and each of them works fairly well as a standalone story. I think I prefer the "pacifist" ending more than the other one, but both have a lot of merit.

I hope to see more work in this style! The music and art direction really came together in this one.

(Tim) I lost my grandfather two years ago at around this time of year, and reading this definitely made me feel something. This short VN manages to capture a very universal experience within the span of two conversations: one between the protagonist and her father's headstone, and the other between her and a stranger who approaches her.

Almost everyone who has lost someone dear to them has some unpacked baggage lying somewhere. I can tell that this project was very personal to the team. I hope that creating this was at least as therapeutic an experience as me reading it.

(Tim) I really enjoyed this one! The art design reminds me a lot of what I liked about The Heart of Tales from the same developer. Among non-anime-style English visual novels, Katy133/Jasmine is a pioneer among pioneers.

I'd love to see more VNs use a similar approach to dialogue!

(Tim) I really liked this one :) The art direction is fantastic.
I'm excited to see how the story develops!

(Madeleine) I'm blown away by the polish of this game!!!

Did you use Akakryoryu's 3D camera for the parallax / depth effects?

(Tim) Hi! Glad you could stop by.

I'd say a jam is what you make out of it. As far as I know, most of the creators are active members of the Devtalk Discord, which is the biggest English visual novel development community on the Internet. However, the work itself is definitely quite solitary, unless your team does a lot of back and forth.

People in the jam can see other submissions as they roll in, and also play them if they so wish. I personally did go through the entries in the jams our studio participated in :) It's fun seeing what other people came up with!