itch.io

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, I played Crystal City while it was still active on Steam and later played Totem City. I still think about these games from time to time, especially since I recently got into Steam badge crafting and have been opening Crystal City booster packs for fun. 

As you can see from my Itch profile, I used to release visual novels with a few friends until I became distracted by other pursuits. I still want to be involved with VNs though, and one thing that I thought of was that if your team is interested, I'd be willing to volunteer my time and rework the English localization of both Crystal City and Totem City to make them more enjoyable for a native English speaker. I admittedly can't speak any Russian (beyond a few lyrics from Rachmaninoff art songs), so I'd essentially be adapting the English translation already inside the game to create a more polished copy. 

Please let me know what you think of this proposal. I hope to hear back soon!

(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!

(Tim) We love you, Lynn :D We hope to collaborate with you further in the future!

(Tim) Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment! I loved your O2A2 entry.

(Tim) Thank you for reading! And that makes the two of us, regarding fan club membership ;)

(Tim) Lala is featured in our studio's newest visual novel!

https://itch.io/embed/1129253

(Credits on both the project page and in the game's About section.)

(Tim) Thank you for the kind words! We'd love feedback when you get to the end of the demo ^_^ I'll be reading your Otome Jam game today :)

We're excited too!!! :D

Thanks for running the jam! We're super happy for the great experience.

(Tim) I just started reading and am tipping my toes into the Hiroko route, but it immediately made me think about a famous story among classical musicians.

Legend has it, after Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No.1 flopped, the up-and-coming young composer lost his confidence and could no longer compose. It was only after visiting the hypnotherapist Nikolai Dahl that he could recover his artistic spark. Rachmaninoff's eternal Piano Concerto No.2 was the result of his rehabilitation.

"You will become a great composer. You will write a masterpiece."

This formulation of the hypnotic suggestion is almost certainly apocryphal, but I remember being quite moved when I came across it. How wonderful it would be, so become so assured of oneself.

Anyway, I'll continue reading! I really like it so far.

(Tim) Hi ShibeyFace! Thanks for your comment.

Yes, as we developed the game we moved away from the original idea of having a magical girl style transformation sequence at the end. We felt that it was more impactful for the last interaction to be somewhat underwhelming. It would have been more within the magical girl aesthetic with the transformation, but it still would have been somewhat subversive so we decided to go all the way with simplicity.

Totally get the critique about the lack of interaction! Our studio plans on having works with more interactivity in the future, but for now we want to keep the scope of our visual novel projects small. Kinetic VNs are at their core fancy picture books or illustrated novels, while a VN with a branching narrative requires (in my own view) quite a lot of planning for each of the routes to properly extend the story and also interact with each other. To be blunt, I do not think we (specifically, I) am skilled enough to pull it off yet.

But when that time comes, I hope that you will enjoy it ^_^ Thank you so much for your feedback!