Blood is fine, though if you feel the amount of blood, gore, and/or violence may be a concern for players, you should put a content warning somewhere near the top of your game's description.
Unfortunately no, this is not a ranked jam and there won't be any ranking this time around. We're discussing the possibility of having a ranked jam in the future, though!
I wanted to chime back in and let you know a fix for the blurriness is now in our release branch, and should make it into the next version.
I also wanted to thank you for not only taking the time to check out Beacon, but taking the time to leave feedback. I hope you find the time to check back in every once in a while to see how the game has progressed :)
Actually in typing this, I realize that the zoom effect does probably count as pixel interpolation. I can probably experiment with adjusting it to see if it helps the blur, or even just remove it and instead upsize the source spritesheets (since everything's drawn at exactly x2, that wouldn't be difficult). Thanks again for the feedback!
Thank you for the feedback! The game actually does not do any sort of pixel interpolation -- all the art is done in exact units in multiples of powers of two, and movement is done in pixel units as well (as opposed to something like Unity does where the units are abstract). There is some visual "softening" which is the result of everything being rendered at 2x size, and maybe that's what you're seeing. I plan on experimenting with some subtle shaders in the future to mask this side effect somewhat.
I don't have a win7 machine at the moment to test on, but I will procure one ASAP to see if I can get this resolved. Windows 7 is nearing end-of-life (Jan 2020) so it's possible that part of the underlying framework is no longer supported (in which case I'll update to be more clear that win7 isn't supported) -- but if there's anything at all I can do to make it work I'll find it :)
I also have a way to create a more Windows-specific build which may yield better results (current build is basically the same for all platforms, save for some platform-specific files)
I always love to see interactive narrative experiences like this; somewhere between a game and short story. I'll be honest, my knowledge of Japanese culture is lacking so I'm sure there was a lot that I missed, and some stuff I struggled to follow, but not so much that I couldn't enjoy the story. The protagonist made me laugh a number of times and I enjoyed the story overall.
If I had any feedback, it would be to perhaps shorten the intro a bit and get to the detective stuff faster so long as that doesn't mess up the pacing too much. The gray text was also a little on the hard side to read, but I managed!
Thanks for the pointers! I've already added your suggestions to my task list for the "v1.0" edition coming soon after the 15th. I appreciate the accessibility advice; that's something I definitely need to consider earlier in future projects.
