I'm leaning more towards time-travel on this one.
For historical event, you would have to base it (albeit loosely) on a real historical food event, such as an ancient greek banquet.

If you've played any 3rd person shooter game, I think these kinds of controls would map out nicely:

Like assuming I'm using an xbox controller, left stick would move forward,  right stick would control turning, and you can use the A button to interact/Jump/Advance dialogue. Something simple like this would be perfect for most scenarios in your game.

Best thing to do is actually get a gamepad (like an xbox or ps5 controller or something) if you have one and test it out and see what feels most natural, or of that's not possible, there are game tester discords where folks probably would be willing to try out your game with a controller, just DM me on discord and I can send you the link to one if you're interested.

It's great that you're trying to support all platforms, but all of that can kind of bog down the user experience IMO as it might be too much information/UI at once. There's probably some kind of smart detection you can use to detect if the platform is mobile or not (something like Application.isMobilePlatform in Unity?) You can probably use something else to detect if someone is using a game pad. Then you can handle the logic for each control scheme depending on what the user is currently using. Testing your whole game with each control scheme on its own can let you take advantage of the strengths of each control type.

Hope this helps!

Hey, it seems like a lot of people really dig your game, congrats on 1st place!

I just played the post jam version and found a bug, it seems if you tap on the jump button, you can jump infinitely, sending you to height higher than the moon. Maybe this can be one of these cases where a bug can be turned into a feature though, would love to explore the moon as well(the Apollo moon landing comes to mind), or possibly other planets or worlds...

Be sure to join the Tokyo Frequency Discord where you can post in the looking-for-a-team channel to find teammates as well as links to game dev assets.

• https://discord.com/invite/tAcyDBpXZK

Team Formation Advice

• Introduce yourself: Post a short description of your skills and what kind of project you’re interested in.
• Complementary skills: Try to team up with people who have skills different from yours (e.g., coders with artists or musicians).
• Communication: Decide early how you’ll coordinate (Discord, Shared Docs, Notion, Trello, etc.)
• Keep it simple: Small, focused teams often produce better results than very large groups.

Here's the link to the stream, will start streaming in 10 mins:

Sounds good, I'll just stream on YouTube only then to make things easy for you and your viewers, I don't want to risk doing a dual stream as I'm not sure I have enough bandwidth at the moment to pull that off without issues, will just focus on one high quality stream for now.

Sounds good let's stream on Jan 18th then!

You can stream at your usual time (around 7PM Eastern time) that's fine with me.

7:00 PM Florida time (Eastern Time) = 4:00 PM California time  (Pacific Time, my timezone), So then I can start my stream at (your time 8PM, my time 5PM), (assuming that you stream for ~1hour).

Do you use twitch to stream?
Not sure how the raid will work if I'm using twitch and you're using youtube >_> but let's figure something out, maybe i can dual stream to both youtube and twitch or something.

Anyway, feel free to message me here or DM me on discord if you have any changes or suggestions. I'll announce everything on my discord once i get the thumbs up from you.

That would be awesome, would definitely down to collaborate now and/or in the future!
I haven't announced a time yet, lets try to find  something more convenient for your timezone/schedule as well.

I think usually 5PM PST on Fri, Sat Or Sun would generally work best for all timezones. Would any of these days work for you?
Jan 16 17 18 23 24 25. I'll start my stream at 5PM PT, so you can stream beforehand at an earlier time.

Feel free to DM me on discord too if that's easier for coordinating.

Hey unrested thanks for your comment! Don't worry about all the rules - as long as you had fun making it that's what counts. I'll be pretty lenient on what games qualify as it's my first time running a jam too, and I may have included too many restrictions, as long as your jam generally fits the theme of travelling I think you'll be fine.

There really isn't a prize for winning other than the livestream of the top games, and since so far there are only a few submissions, I'll probably end up streaming all of them. I permitted AI usage for coding only because I wanted the main focus of your time to be on your creativity, not being frustrated spending hours or days fixing some mysterious bug.

I'm not sure how i found out about this game, but wow, what an experience - so much passion was put into this project, I don't know where to even begin.

The story was gripping, and the lore, the world-building, the characters were done just right. This is exactly the type of indie game you hope to find on itch.io

The story had me gripped, it ended too soon just when it was getting good lol.

I think I finally managed to find the game!

It's called Koumon No Hana by Studio Bakanal
https://vndb.org/v25090

It's no longer on itch io,
but the devs have an email and twitter, so maybe you can ask them for a copy of the game? 
https://studio-bakanal.itch.io/

Nice, the art really reminds me of mysterious murasame castle.

Nice, the Contrast between Tu'er Shen and the rowdy Roger is hilarious.... the music was choice.

I had the same error - if you just keep hitting ignore like 20+ times the game will continue.

Also, it's shader error, which means it's probably being caused by some special effect being turned on. It happens after this scene for me:



the actual fix would be to modify the shader code itself - remove any lines like

precision highp float
precision mediump float
precision lowp float

The "precision" keywords are for OpenGL ES (web builds), however, they will cause errors on desktop applications, hence the exception.

What an incredibly rare treat to see SEA/Indonesian mythology in a game - loved the atmosphere in this game, it's unlike anything I've ever played! I only wish that the world could be expanded upon more.

One more thing I thought of - have you tried asking this question in the DevTalk discord?
There are a bunch of Visual Novel devs and players there, someone there might know!
https://discord.gg/devtalk

Assuming that it was properly tagged as a visual novel, If you are sure it was created in 2022, here are all of the games in 2022 visual novels.

If you know if it was part of a game jam, that narrows the scope significantly:

https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/in-jam/year-2022 (1,825 results)

If it wasn't part of a jam:
https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/year-2022 (5,278 results)

It's still a lot of stuff to go through either either way, but you might be able to recognize something by going through the list of thumbnails/ hovering over each thumbnail that looks like it could be the game.

I don't know the name of the game, but maybe try looking at yaoi game jam entries? i.e.

https://itch.io/jam/yaoi-game-jam-2023/entries

The art looks similar to this, maybe not exactly but maybe it will help point you in the right direction.
https://chimeriquement.itch.io/

It seems to be working now!
But I'm seeing that other people's RPG maker saves are showing up now on the save file, maybe that was causing the issue?

Like I was playing this other game ( https://lichtel.itch.io/japan-to-go-please ) saved a few times, and the saves from the other game are now showing up in your game? I can't load them... but my guess is the bug might have had something to do with your save files being saved in a shared RPG Maker directory, leading to issues.

This is a unique and captivating premise - would love to see the full fleshed out version!

Love the enka music and yokai/traditional Japanese folklore themes in this one! but there are a few typos like broschure -> brochure. Be sure to spellcheck!

Thank you, I added some more UI/UX enhancements in the post-jam version. There are now expressions, faces, and names in the cutscenes.

Wow nice, a point cloud puzzle is such a clever concept.
And the ending was great! it had me gripped the whole time.

Now that the jam is over, I just added a difficulty select to the last minigame to make things possible without adding extra lives, as well as a whole bunch of other features. You also no longer "need to be a professor" to run the game, it just works in the web browser right away. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave your valued feedback on this game, it made me a better developer overall and I'm going to keep making games and keep on getting better.

You can play the game in English or ภาษาไทย!
Just change the language in the settings menu.

The game seems to list an english localization option, however even when turned on the game is still in russian.

I really liked this game due to the branching paths, but save/load doesn't work properly!

I really like this dungeon crawler RPG maker game, really reminds me of the Dark Spire game.

This is super cool and unique! Unfortunately I can't finish it due to the game breaking bug that makes the main character disappear.

How to get past the electrically locked doors? can't seem to find a way to tell which door is which.

This game really reminds me of the game second sight, love these kinds of "going out of body" games.

Love the title screen/great tree music in this one!

It's got an old man with explosions - what's not to love?

Love the vibes and music of this game!

Be sure to join the Tokyo Frequency Discord where you
can post in the looking-for-a-team channel to find teammates as well as links to game dev assets.

• https://discord.com/invite/tAcyDBpXZK

Team Formation Advice

• Introduce yourself: Post a short description of your skills and what kind of project you’re interested in.
• Complementary skills: Try to team up with people who have skills different from yours (e.g., coders with artists or musicians).
• Communication: Decide early how you’ll coordinate (Discord, Shared Docs, Notion, Trello, etc.)
• Keep it simple: Small, focused teams often produce better results than very large groups.

Theme: Travel

🌍 ✈️ The holiday season is here — and while real-world travel is expensive, game travel is free!

Create games in the Traveller’s Jam about journeys, destinations, and adventures.

Base your game on a real location — no fictional worlds.
You can stylize it, miniaturize it, or reinterpret it, but it must have a recognizable real-world anchor.

Choose 2+ limitations (ranging from time-travel 🕰️ to unique transportation methods 🛶) and go all out, the only limit is your imagination!

🌍 Join here ✈️

It's out here if you want to check it out, I ended up making a Bâan fangame:
https://tokyofrequency.itch.io/baan-rinradas-mystical-departure

I had to take out the random card loot and just give fixed loot at certain points
as it felt like it was hard to balance it properly with the weakness system I implemented.

But I still think this genre has a lot of potential and will be playing with some more of these mechanics in my next game.