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Wei Yuan Lee

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A member registered Dec 23, 2015 · View creator page →

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(1 edit)

Oh hey sure. I will extend it! maybe to another month. bc im like totally behind on my project too. dkf;jsa. What do you all think?

Ay, sorry that happened to your project. I myself am personally not submitting to my own jam lmao bc I decided to start late. i started this jam out of the anxiety to finish something but also bc I wanted to see more types of games in this theme.  Your concept so far was pretty cool and I hope that you will be able to finish it at some point. But game dev is not only about finishing things at the deadline, it's also just about the process of creation. (well that's all art forms)

I can extend the deadline, but I have a feeling it may not be enough time and it may ruin the purpose of game jamming. I keep a look out on your dev logs. I check itch religiously so I know I will see them.

I kind of like decided not to publish my game for the jam but i never really do anything to post online either. So.... I'm an anomaly.  Nice stuff here though. 

Tbh, I've been on itch for years and I never figured it out. but I believe the devlog feature is still fairly new.

it's perfectly fine, ppl do it all the time! Do devlogs, do dev threads, whatever. I need to do a thread for my game too hrmm.

uuuuh. I can download it just fine and zip files usually are the  packaging method for uploading it. The person must have one of these problems:

- Bad internet

- They have an anti-virus that's blocking the download bc it thinks it's a virus

- They don't know how to open up the  zip file i guess.

So it's not something that's your fault. But there is a website where you can upload your game into an HTML game, but it will be outside of your itch.io account. Renpy doesn't have an option to make a browser VN.

This is the site where several, some of them very popular, VNs were uploaded for browser play.

http://sandbox-adventure.com/

lmao im kind of a noob pixel artist and right now im more concerned about the art asset and aesthetic than the story for some reason.

Jazz bars, vampire, This is gonna get very red. 😮 I always like vampire stories but I feel like I would never write a good one.

Ah I love the cryptic message types.

Since there's like one more day till the jam and I haven't even posted in this forum, despite being the host,  I'm going to start with a greeting. Then you guys will do yours and make a little introduction about your game. 

Hi, I'm Xian Xian, I am an interactive fiction writer and occasional pixel artist. I write mostly in Twine and tried to do Renpy. Most of my stories, my recent ones at least, deal with some kind of mystery plot and usually have some  kind of nihilist, cynical narrator who longs for the past.    

The game I'm writing is a interactive novel in Twine, mostly choice based, called Red Rose. It takes place in a dystopian future and is about two caretakers who witness a kidnapping of a woman after a terrorist attack.

I don't really have any like pictures to show of the game so far, because I want to create the assets. I will make a thread showing progress of my game and suggest everyone else to do so if they can.

I have to watch Mulholland Drive one of these days, since that's another noir work by him outside Twin Peaks.  Yeah Lux-Pain has become an object of nostalgia these days to a point where ppl are calling it one of the best DS games. and i was like... it's a cool concept but localization killed it and it was executed a little awkward.... so that's a tiny bit of a stretch but it's still a decent game.  

i never watched True Detective but would love to esp with Mahershala Ali being in it. Southern Gothic is a total aesthetic to me and I've had some twine games that tried to imitate it... badly lol.

For me it's Twin Peaks, Read Only Memories,  a few scenes of Johnny Mnemonic (never finished watching it) and Hard Boiled Wonderland ofc. However,  despite Hard-Boiled being my first Murakami,  my top fave is Kafka on the Shore. What really got me into the mystery genre in a video games sense was the Zero Escape series.  I also played a sort of trash game when I was a kid called, Lux-Pain. It was a localization failure and the game mechanic wasn't amazing, I was going to replay it because I got a game over ending, but haven't had the chance to.  

Your game, The Test, is an example. It doesn't have to be a VN, it can be parser or a twine game or an adventure game.  What's considered Interactive fiction isn't really strict in this jam, just as long as text is involved. So you pick up an object and it tells a story that's an example.

Nope,  it doesn't need to be a visual novel. it can be any kind of interactive fiction game in any kind of medium. As long as it has text, like reading a novel. A game like Hotel Dusk is a perfect example of what I mean. Conversations, exploring rooms to pick up mysteries, etc. It's considered an Adventure VN. It can be choice based or linear. Just as long as there's text. 

God the writing in this one was so good, esp with the art accompanied by it. I just imagined Silent Hill music the whole time. This is totally a fave from you. Also when I clicked the link to  ChapelR's LinkKey macro , it led to a broken page. Idk if that's Twine or the page itself. Awesome. 5 stars.

You have a bug in the game,. it's not something game breaking but she just letting you know! 

dang, nice and eerie game.

Thank you, I've missed two days of writing trying to learn Renpy coding so now my writing routine isn't going too smoothly now idhshadfajflaskf.

Yeah I love Wispna's sprites, especially Simon. 

Thank you, I'm going to try my best! Omg I looked at your friend's game and the it looks amazing. I need to make a tigsource account to follow it.

3rd Entry

Yesterday I did some writing but I was feeling really iffy about what I have so far. So I decided to give this game two endings and bring in some choice menus. This will teach me some renpy coding for sure. But also, I feel like writing linear stuff is kind of boring to me as a writer? Ever since I got into writing interactive fiction, I found that writing stories without interaction or choices has become the most difficult thing to me even though it is also the most stressful thing ever. God, I'm weird, I wish I can make up my mind. But the thing is, having more than one ending, having branching in your stories allows more freedom in my opinion. It allows you to explore your story and it gives you more space for that vague idea you had. 

Also I felt like I was getting into a writer's block, but then I remember that this is an adaptation of a older, unfinished story and I forgot parts like exploring caves, shopping at weird stores or eating rice and bean flavored ice cream.  So I'm glad I remembered that because then I would've hit a block. 

Wispna finished the emotions for Luna's sprites

      


2nd Day Entry

Yesterday's Current Word Count: 5,574

Which means I wrote 1,735 words. Funny enough on the first day of the jam, I wrote 1,700 words. Perhaps that should be a daily goal I aim for?

The plot for now is just introducing the house, the inheritance gift, and the cursed rain forest. Pretty soon the climax will come, I usually "feel" when there's something important coming up. Even though I shouldn't, I want to go back and add some stuff.

Here's Wispna with Símon Álvarez's facial expressions

I also tried sketching out an GUI idea. Basically. I'm going to use a free open font called Alice. And I tried attempting to make the logo with like a rosary bead thing. And well I'm not that good at paint.net.


So the menu buttons are on that one side on the left. Just like the New Renpy Default menu. And then on the other side is going to be a vintage TV with a river in the screen. There's a part in the story where  Símon  sits down to watch TV and is introduced to a program about a beautiful green river, but he's incapable of changing the channel. Also what the hell is with itch.io's forum, I can't scroll down, the scroll bar disappeared?

wow, always wanted to see what it's like to work in Unity.

3 days late into the jam, I decided to make the devlog.

Team: 

Xian Xian

I'm the writer and  noob coder in Renpy for this visual novel project. But I've been writing since my late teen years. I've been in this jam multiple times so I feel weird talking about myself. I'm a sociology major, literally just graduated with a B.S.  Uh I like magical realist novels, mystery and a little bit of horror.  I'm from a multiracial background and most of my recent writing projects actually have Afro-Chinese or Afro-Latino main characters. My recent project that I put on pause takes place in a sort of cybernoir Chinatown. I like JRPGs and only recently got into visual novels like 2 years ago. I love the medium but I wish there was more in the mystery and horror genres since those are the ones that got me hooked, aka the Zero Escape Series and Banshee's Last Cry. However, I don't really read that much horror and mystery, my only exposure is through movies and video games so I hope I pull off this story well enough, especially since I feel like that's all I ever write these days. My experience in game dev is Twine, I've coded baby html/css and did all that variables and boolean fun stuff. I've tried to learn other engines but college and executive dysfunction got in the way. 

Wispna

I’m the artist for this ren’py project. I’ve always drawn, but began doing art more seriously when I started high school. Now I do digital 2D art on a regular basis, and though my main program is Clip Studio Paint I am also proficient in Sai, GIMP, photoshop. I also have experience with coding, and while most of my expertise is in html and CSS, I know some C# and Python as well. Having made Ren’py games before, though never completing them due to writing hangups, helps me better able to understand what the assets I create need.
I am mixed chinese and caucasian, and enjoy seeing projects that have both eastern and western elements in them. 
I’m mostly a fan of the fantasy genre, but I also enjoy scifi, suspense, mystery, and horror. The games I play most are rpgs, visual novels, and survival games. I really love the art in games, and am hoping both this game jam, and working on a team will help me see a visual novel to its full completion. 

Platform: Renpy

Game Concept

I wrote a summary for this in  a doc and I'm just going to copy and paste it.

"Mellizos (Twins)  is a kinetic visual novel. It tells the tale of Símon Álvarez, a hermetic, unambitious college student who returns to his birthplace, Santa Paulo, after the death of his grandparents. The island is shrouded in dark clouds of pollution and the population is small, which leaves Símon dumbfounded, as it contradicts his blissful memories of childhood innocence and diasporic nostalgia. When Símon meets Luna Garcia, a distant cousin, repressed memories begin emerging and he falls into an obsessive spiral of uncovering more about his home country and his deceased twin brother."

 Mellizos, is a rip of an unfinished twine game I have in a folder that is loosely inspired by the chupacabra which is a mythical creature  that has apparently been seen in Puerto Rico first. You will read a lot of about typical Puerto Rican things like virgin mary statues, brightly colored houses, folktales, and poverty caused by colonialism and imperialism and floods that have caused destruction is mentioned in this story. An eerie thing I just realized while writing this devlog I wrote this story way before Hurricane Maria. My Puerto Rican family is safe, but thinking about the condition of the island is pretty grim. This game's setting and story is heavily inspired by Puerto Rico, it's basically a Caribbean modern folktale about a creature that has been stalking the family after the great flood. After writing the unfinished Twine game, I actually wrote a script for a detective story that takes place on this island in Renpy and then I wrote another side story for that in Twine and god, I wish I can finish one of these stories.

So far for the game making progress:

I have written 3, 839 words and I'm barely even done with the first day of the game. I already feel like going back and adding and fixing stuff because I feel like it's rushed.

These are the sprites of the two main characters,  Símon Álvarez and Luna Garcia by Wispna.

 

I was going to work on music by myself but I've been having tinnitus which means I'm trying to chill with the amount of music flowing in my right ear.  So who knows if I will post something other than word counts and Wispna's art. Uh, this text thing started doing some weird bug that's similar to when you hit the insert key and text you just typed starts getting replaced by the new text you made, so editing and rewriting stuff was a horror. So sorry for the roughness of this post.

Yeah I encountered this after clicking silence when they were going into the portal thing I believe? 

I clicked on Silence link and nothing happened. Is that supposed to happen? it's just a blank text box.

@onetucker, I'm new to Itchi.io so I don't know how to reply to comments, I don't see a reply button. But yes, it is halfway a poem and a dream. I wanted the game to contain a dream-like sequence. There was supposed to be three endings, but with the time constraint and aimlessness, there ended up being two. I guess I can say it's up to the reader decide for their own interpretation and names were purposefully left out. I hope I don't sound pretentious lol. Thanks so much for the comment.

I am a Writer and sort of Programmer looking for a team with an artist, composer, and other programmers if possible

1. Introduction: Include any basic information you wish for people to know. I.e., Name, timezone, pronouns, etc. Or go all out and give your entire life philosophy; it's up to you!

You can call me Xian Xian or Li-Fei. My pronouns are she/her. I live in the U.S., so if you also live in the U.S. you don't need to worry about too much time zone issues, if you don't, I wake up at like 10:40AM and the latest I go to sleep is 3AM, but I'm trying to sleep before that. I am Multi-racial, Black-Puerto Rican and Chinese American, so I always have references to Chinese culture, use Spanish words here and there, have brown or dark skinned characters and Black hairstyles. (Although it isn't an utmost requirement if artists have a hard time with it, straightened hair doesn't erase African identity.)

2. Skills: Stuff you know how to do, or kind of know how to do. You can also add things you're willing to try.

Twine 2 and a little bit of CSS. Writing story and plot line. Finding pictures to use as reference I guess?

3. Programs/Languages: Engines/Programs (for any use, be it art, music, game dev, animation, etc) and markup/programming languages you are familiar with.

I am familiar with Twine which uses variables, if statements and macros. I also learned some basic CSS. But I would like to use Game Maker Studio which has somewhat similar coding.

4. Portfolio: Not terribly necessary, but it'd be a good idea to provide examples of things you've done. Don't sweat it if you're a complete beginner!

Uh. I have an itch.io and you can PM me for my current WIPs. My WIPs are going to be sent to Interactive Fiction competitions such as Spring Thing and IF Comp and the rules say I can't post actual working parts (html files) of my games in public places. Only on PM to beta testers, so I can also send it to you in PM if you would like a peek at more writing I do.

5. Contact: Ways to keep in touch. Instant messengers, slack, emails, etc.

You can PM me at Discord through the mfgj channel or I can invite you to some other Discord channel where we can talk privately as a team or email me at xianxianif@gmail.com.

6. Other: Anything else you think is important. Have an idea for a game? Stick it here. Have any specific expectations from your team? Stick them here. Anything goes.

I prefer a small team because I do get confused and overwhelmed easily. I'm big into story so I don't mind plot discussion especially since like most people I tend to have a hard time wrapping things up. Although the idea I have currently is quite simple. Girl wakes up with her brother missing, the island she lives on is in shambles, she soon finds there's a curse while searching for her brother, she must find safety.

1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?

Ay What's up? You can call me by my discord name, Xian Xian or Li-Fei. I'm a college girl, 21 years old, who's practically a hermit thanks to online school. I spend way too much time on the computer.

2. Did you participate in the last jam we held? If so, what do you plan on doing better this time? If not, what's your reason for joining?

I participated in the last two jams, Winter and Summer. This time I actually plan on using a new engine, which is Game Maker Studio. I want to learn a new engine that isn't Twine. It's always good to broaden your horizons despite the many many hardships you will endure. I'm really slow at understanding coding, so I know I'm in for a challenge as Twine code isn't really all that complex. So I guess this is my answer on planning to do better.

3. What games are your favorites? Did any of them inspire you, or made you want to make your own?

Like last year, the Zero Escape series has been my favorite. If you guys see me on Discord, I've been talking about Phantasy Star a lot and I'm even playing the ones I haven't started, which is Phantasy Star 4, and I plan to actually beat Phantasy Star 1-3. I got halfway through 3 and then stop playing years ago and now I have no memory of what I'm supposed to do next. I also really love Banshee's Last Cry and The House of Fata Morgana. I really love games with a lot of story that hits me in the heart with pretty writing.

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?

The only game dev experience I have is Twine 1.4 and recently Twine 2. Twine 2 is sort of easy compared to Twine 1.4 I'm noticing lately. I've also done a little bit of Renpy and I know basic CSS thanks to Twine.

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!

I'm super passionate about story telling, I've been writing fiction and poetry since junior year of high school and even had some poetry published in zines, but I don't like my poetry anymore so I don't really talk about it anymore. I will say that school work has fried my writing skills recently. Most likely this post is riddled with mistakes and I will go through writer's block in period of time when I have to get some writing down.

6. Any advice to new jammers (if you're a veteran)?

Don't beat yourself over not finishing a project and just marvel over your progress. I know this is hypocritical of me to say, because I complain about not finishing stuff all the time, but this is something that you have to remember when you're submitting a broken ass game into the box.

Ah okay. I had a feeling it was in the good but wasn't exactly sure. Thanks!

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Well I got errors at both endings. So Im confused there. But I guess I can say I "beat it"? And I haven't figured out the password yet.

Oh hye not sure if you're going to see this comment but I managed to get to the end of the game. Do you want to know or did you reach it already?

Thanks so much!

Yeah there's not as many Visual novels or any other genre games but there are quite a few CYOA text games out there!

By the way, another one of my huge inspirations for this twine game was Banshee's Last Cry, which is an Interactive Novel you can get on iOS. It's actually my main inspiration. I don't know why I love it so much, but I do.


A New Update After a Decade.

There's two days left. I'm not good at this journal entry thing as you can see. This jam was rather unsuccessful for me lol. So when i signed up for the jam, I didn't expect to be going to summer school. So I signed up for summer school thinking that I can handle it. Yeah. School is more important than jams. But see, I had the time, I just didn't have the energy to do anything as usual. That summer time laziness.

So this game was meant to be quite long. Maybe not Porpentine's Howling Dogs long. But long. And I only ended up writing enough to at least reach the point of a puzzle and this puzzle is supposed to lead up to the main conflict of the story. So yeah, quite a few interactive stories have mazes, the idea popped up in my head because quite a few Inform 7 games have the mazes, puzzle rooms, or interactive rooms. What I love about Interactive Fiction is not only how your choices will change the story but also how you can interact with your setting. And I hope to actually achieve that or something close to achieving that.

I added new transition CSS from glorious trainwrecks. I added some shaking CSS for earthquakes and anxiety. I also added some music from Free Music Archive. I also changed the text shadows to make it more readable for certain colors but I feel like it might've been pointless.

Small talk in a car:

[img][/img]

I might've messed up on some spacing or no breaks lines because there's like this huge gap of space on one of the pages. I'm a person that constantly likes to go back and edit things to a point where it hinders my process because I waste time back tracking, editing, and then after all that editing I stop working. People usually do editing when the work is done no?

The Earthquake scene, um okay maybe not the actual earthquake scenario. Maybe just what happens before that. For some reason imgur isn't allowing me the message board/forum option to copy and paste. (Mouse decides to be a jerk while making the gif. Computer lags because it hates me. But I managed to fix the break problem in this gif. If I get to post it..... JFC I forgot to finish a sentence. This is why I always back track and edit grammar and mistakes.)

[img][/img]


So here's the cornfield maze, this gradient may change, it doesn't look very cornfield mazeish, but the previous one was too bright. The maze is incomplete by the way:

[img][/img]

Okay, see you later, you will find a Twine demo soon.

Thanks so much! I'm going to try my best!

Ah, didn't think of that. I think I could have fixed that though. Oh well I will try again for the next time lol. Thanks!

Hey guys! I've been in the Winter My First Game Jam with a twine game called Pink, it was my first and it was totally a noob game. Twine is very eclectic, you can do a lot of things with it, the most basic looking CSS and variables can be a lot more complicated than it looks. Such as the CSS stylesheet I copied and pasted in Pink.

I decided to bend the rules a bit and use the same engine again by making another Twine game but with a better understanding of it than I did before. I'm going to use If statements, my own CSS, which is mostly copying and pasting CSS animations, and the gradients are mine. I'm also going to make dialogue choices by using the cycling link like in the Twine game, Breakfast on a Wagon with Your Partner.

Madrugada is a mystery/thriller text game about a person named Jai who is invited to a family reunion by a cousin they haven't seen in years. They leave their island home to find themself venturing into an unfamiliar, sleepy Southern town, to find their cousin dead and buried in the woods. The idea of Madrugada came after the Zero Escape series, I kind of hate to say. I loved the mystery and the dramatic, yet so human scenes and characters. Although, I will admit for me that some endings were really outlandish? I almost laughed when Sigma was like "OMG IRON ARMS AAAAGGGGGHHH." Because I didn't expect it to be honest.

Day One - Day Two?

[img][/img]

I kind of slacked off because I was also doing schoolwork and I kept getting sleepy. Then I spent the nights playing Undertale, but also managed to make an Intro screen and the first few pages. So I guess at some point I did work I guess

Day Three - Four

I found the CSS animations and got to writing down the story. The sentences aren't very well written at the moment. I will have to fix some plot ideas and sentences. I'm trying not to write too much but I also want to write enough where I don't break the "Show not Tell" rule. I also decided to make the character gender neutral at the last minute. A lot of people tend to prefer that in Twine games. And I notice the shifting from past to present is annoying the shit out of me at the moment I might not being doing it right, but there is a flashback in the beginning where I tell the reader why he ended up where he was at. I finally got to the dialogue part at 1AM, but I don't like how the dialogue is going. Everything is scattered and nonsensical. I also used a timedcontinue macro to read the long pages of text. But now I'm wondering if it is better to switch to Jonah.

The bounce animation (Wtf happened to the gradient? Why is it look all rough like that? It doesn't look like that in the browser???)

[img][/img]

The cycling link dialogue (This may change in the future.)

[img][/img]