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Witching Metal Productions

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A member registered Jan 15, 2019 · View creator page →

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Thank you for the kind comment!  And I'd say your take on the story is accurate.  It's been a while but I do plan on following this up with a proper sequel.

I agree re: the sprites having color that matches their names, I like that idea a lot!  I will let you know when I update this game and follow it up with a sequel.  🫡

Sorry about that! Should be viewable now.

Please note that I was unable to get proper character sprites done in time.  I plan to update the game with character sprites in the near future.

And now the game has a proper logo!

If anyone wants to do some last minute contributions like artwork, sound effects, or even just proofreading - go ahead and let me know!  Slim chance, I know, but I figured I'd go ahead and ask before I slap some filters onto some public domain images.




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If anyone's interested, I have a build with the finished text plus music and sound FX, but no graphics yet.

https://witching-metal.itch.io/a-long-walk

Hey, this is a really good little narrative experience!  It ran a little choppy on my system, but that's almost certainly due to my outdated drivers.  The graphics, writing, and sound design came together really nicely despite being a rather short experience.  The effect with the world falling away when you approach the door was cool too.

I have just a couple minor bits of feedback regarding QOL:

- The sound balancing seemed a little iffy in places, the sirens at the start seemed a good bit louder than everything else for example.

- Escape key seems to quite the game immediately - would be nice to be able to access option settings in game if possible!

- I'm a slow reader, and the text boxes sometimes disappear before I'm finished reading them, requiring me to back up and walk up again.  It would be nice if they stay open until you dismiss them or walk away

- The mouse sensitivity is a little high for my liking even on lowest setting - I would prefer even lower settings.

- The phrasing on the college letter threw me off at first, it's either missing a word (inform/tell) or it's an intentional fragment of the letter, in which case it might help to include part of the word "inform" at the edge of the paper or something like that.

- This is a super minor one, but the model used for the airplane doesn't seem consistent with a commercial airline, which the note mentions the MC flew.  The model chosen looks more a single-seater hobbyist type of plane.  Totally understandable with the small team and limited timeframe, but as a player it's the kind of thing that throws me off a bit while experiencing the narrative.


Great work Vera, Matt, Corentin, Yuliya, and Jaryn!

Cool stuff!  Is this going to end up being a VN?

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Hey, space jammers!

I'm a writer/programmer working on a Visual Novel for this jam entitled A Long Walk.  I was wondering if anyone's potentially interested in joining an ongoing project.

My submission is a short neo-noir VN that follows Gregory Ward: A ranch hand employed by organized crime to hide "packages" on the private property of a remote farm in Arizona.  When the cops finally show up and shut down his operation, Ward takes a deal to put his associates behind bars in exchange for just a year in prison.  But only a week into his sentence, the power goes out and the prisoners overwhelm the guards.  Ward and the other so-called "snitches" must make their last stand in an empty basketball court if they want to leave the prison in once piece.

If anyone is interested in contributing, I could use the help of artists, testers/editors, voice actors, musicians, and anyone else who would like to share their talents on the project.

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Hey!  This is a great one-pager and I dig the looseness and freedom you give to the players and GM alike.  Keeping that ethos in mind, I have a few suggestions for polish:

  • I would try to reduce extraneous explanations to the bare minimum so you can save as much space as possible for rule explanations. For example, I think the first two sentences of the Roles description can be simplified as "Each role comes with special knowledge and some gear."
  • I think the specific rule explanations are great (e.g. rolling and health) but it's a little vague in places, such as "negates electric damage" or "negates all chemical damage" - as a GM I'd be likely to ignore these if it's not referenced at all elsewhere, such as in the Consequence Ideas
  • Generally speaking, I think these rules would benefit from an additional one-pager that gives Scenario ideas.  Better yet if they provide character some character archetypes that players can base their own characters on!

I look forward to seeing more of this, especially some scenarios!

Is there a download for this game?  I don't see a link available.  Sounds cool!

Love the art style for this!  Will have to print it out and give it a shot.  Sounds interesting.

If anyone needs a Mac build, I can send the files required and instructions to create the build yourself.

Unfortunately I don't have access to a machine and cannot create a working Mac build!

Hi, if you're familiar with Ren'Py engine I can send you the files you need to create a Mac build.  Unfortunately I don't have access to a Mac machine, so I can't do it myself!


Let me know and I'll gladly send over the files and some instructions if needed.

Great art style with slick and fun point-and-click mechanics!

I made a few notes for critique and bugs I noticed:

- During dialogue, it would be nice if each major character had a unique color to their name.  It gets a little disorienting when they all have bright-red names when they're speaking, but when they say someone else's name it's blue.

- On that note, I'm not really sure what the pattern is behind certain words being colored green in dialogue.

- Movement is a little slow - it would be nice to be able to run!

- When you mouse over the perfume, the tooltip says "Parfum" - seems like this got missed in translation.

- When I talk to Marc, his name changes to Doug.

- Some of the dialogue is hard to follow, possibly due to translation.  For example, when you interact with the barman: You can ask "Are you hugry?" (misspelled "hungry" or "angry"?) and the bartender replies "Of course, what questions!"  I'm not really sure what's being communicated here to be honest.

- This is mainly personal preference, but I find a bit of the side dialogue to be rather banal and doesn't add much to the characters or story. Instead of something simple like "Are you hungry?" "Of course I am!" it would be cool to be able to find out something more pertinent to the character or story.  For example, even just asking the bartender something like "How long have you worked here/owned this establishment?"

- The transition between scenes is jarring and abrupt.  I think it would help to include some kind of visual indicator that you're moving from one physical location to another, plus maybe some text or dialogue that indicates the shift in perspective from Nyck to Owen.

Overall this is a great little prologue and I think the full game has tons of potential to be an awesome point-and-click experience!

Hi Sigh - I saw your message about including a content warning regarding suicide.  When you have time, can you take a look at the latest comment on my submission page regarding my content warning?  Let me know if it's acceptable or if there's anything else you'd like me to do.  Thanks!

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Content warning: This game features descriptions of war, death, gun violence, and drug/alcohol abuse.  There are no graphic images in this game. 

There are a few casual mentions of suicide in conversation between political adversaries (e.g. a character saying "If you want to commit suicide, there are better ways to do it" to reject a plan you proposed to them).

Additionally, there's a hard-to-reach path where the player becomes the new dictator of the country, and if specific conditions are met, the player is given the option to commit suicide in a manner similar to Adolf Hitler.  I hope this is considered within acceptability for the game's dark themes, and if it helps, this specific path is unlikely to be seen by the majority of players except people who specifically try to get this outcome.

That said, I'll gladly withdraw my submission if the mods feel this crosses a line.  Thanks!

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I don't know what's going on here but I love the idiosyncrasies.  5 stars!

also *happy slide whistle*

Hello,

In the submission form screen, there seems to be a bug where you cannot submit an entry unless you check both "Solo submission" and "Group submission."  It seems like this is a bug, because I assume the purpose of these fields is to pick one or the other - not both.

Thanks!

Note: This is a solo submission, but for some reason I had to check both "Solo" and "Group" in order to submit it.

Thank you so much for this kind review!  It means a lot to me that you enjoyed the game so much.


Progress has been slow, but I'm working on an update which will expand and add new endings, so I can definitely look into adding an extra ending that includes Artur more heavily!  Especially if the player picked Helthien, since I agree that's a great opportunity for an alternate or "hidden" ending if you play your cards right.


Thanks again for your feedback and stay tuned for more updates!

Thanks for checking it out and glad you enjoyed it!

Hello!  I've uploaded a new Mac version of the latest build.  Please let me know if you have any issues running it!

Thank you very much for the kind words!  And yeah, I plan on expanding the ending a bit after the Jam 😉

Thanks for the heads up!  I'll look into this and let you know once I've resolved the issue.

Of course, will do!  It's at the top of my list of Jam submissions to check out 😉

Thank you for the feedback!  And yeah, I agree the final showdown could definitely be more engaging beyond choosing where to search.  I'll definitely revisit this in the future after the Jam and consider adding more choices to the showdown ;)

Thanks again!

Thank you!  I appreciate the kind words :)

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Minor nitpick: "2 a.m. in the morning" is redundant!  Just say a.m. or "in the morning" :P

I also noticed a typo: "Every parts of your body" should say "Every part of your body"

Anyway, this is a great little VN with a simple but well executed premise!  I don't know if the music is original or stock, but I quite enjoyed it.  The story and situation seemed a bit surreal and purposefully incomprehensible, but I thought it was effective for that virtue!

SPOILER: I quite liked the loop gimmick when you "lose."  Run, indeed!

I enjoyed this a lot!  Well written and well structured with a nice sense of pacing and mystery.  The art style is great and I love the mood established by the background images.

My only nitpick is that the sound effects when you hover over the quick-bar options are a bit annoying.  I was confused at first and thought it was part of the soundtrack, but if you wave the mouse past all the buttons it makes a fairly unpleasant sound.  I would recommend changing it so the sound only plays when you click a quick-bar button!

First off, bonus points for including save, load, and skip functions in a non-Renpy game!  (No idea if the engine you used has them built in, but still.)

I quite enjoyed the writing style - well written without being too flowery or sentimental.  The art style is simplistic but has a strong sense of style and aesthetic consistency that I think works really well with the story being told.  (I imagine the protag being young, so the almost crayon-like backgrounds adds to that vibe.)

If there's one minor nitpick I have: I think some of the paragraphs could be broken up a bit into separate pages.  For example, on the page "It catches you off guard..." - I would consider stopping this paragraph before "Dreams are always strange." and move that sentence and everything after to a new page.  It might make the game a bit slower to skim, but I feel it helps the "mental workload" of the reader, so to speak.

I'm not so good with surreal/dreamlike plots so I don't have a lot of specific feedback about the story, but I enjoyed it thoroughly and really enjoyed the creepy animations!

Oh yeah I got that, I'm just saying I feel the narrative would benefit from those details being alluded to a bit more within the narrative itself instead of in a bonus "extras" thing that not everyone might read. 

Definitely maintain the mystery and let players fill in the blanks, like you said, but I think it would help to leave a bit more of a bread crumb trail - maybe even just an extra throwaway line that alludes to the "incident" where Sarah expresses her fear that another "incident" is going to happen just like the last one.  Again, leave the details open to interpretation, but give the readers a bit more to work with 😉

Keep in mind this is just my opinion and in no way objective or factual!

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Great little game with excellent voice acting, artwork, and snappy dialogue!  Well written with a good sense of characterization for the two main characters, and a great sense of comedic timing.  Excellent adaptation of Inside No. 9.  I appreciate the hard work that went into providing full VA for both genders of not only the protagonist, but also the partner!

Thank you very much for the kind words!  Yes, some casualties are inevitable, but a couple characters can be saved depending on your choices ;)

Excellent little VN with a great sense of style and a nice mysterious, suspenseful story, and fittingly moody music that's not distracting.  I also quite enjoyed navigating the patient interactions at the beginning.

In terms of gameplay, the "fast" button was kind of annoying because I clicked it by accident and blew through a good chunk of the story before I managed to stop it without any way of going back.  Ren'Py gets around this by not skipping through dialogue you haven't seen yet.

Narrative notes (avoiding spoilers as much as possible):

The revelation after you leave the hospital works as a motivation for the main character, but the reveal came out of left field for me and it didn't seem to really go anywhere afterward.  It's possible I glossed over the early hints, but if not, I think it would help if you plant the seeds in the player's mind that this reveal is coming, even if the exact details/nature of the reveal aren't made known to the player until the reveal event itself.  (That was really hard to write without spoiling anything!)

A few grammatical notes:

Just a quick nitpick, a choice at one point says "Condolence her" - this should read "Console her" because condolence is a noun, console is the verb you're looking for :)

I also noticed a typo where I think "amidst" is spelled "midst" (when you choose between rushing to the door and trying to lose him)

"What if this time Jackie won't make?" - I think "it" is missing from the end of this sentence?

"The doctor wanted to keep me in monitors over night" - This should probably say "monitor me over night" or "keep me under monitoring over night" - the way it's written sounds like the doctor is going to jam you into a gigantic monitor ;)

"inappropriate" is misspelled when you see the website warning page

I put my name as "Jesus H Christ" and laughed my ass off when the game called me "Jesus H Christ Carmichael"

To give some serious feedback, the game has a strong sense of visual style and I quite liked the artwork for the different characters.  The background in the house was also quite cool and the music was nice.  I was disappointed that it turned out to only be a demo, but I understand that's likely due to Jam-related constraints.

In terms of narrative, the game would benefit from having a stronger introduction.  I was disoriented by the opening scene, since we see a grassy road but we get dropped straight into the middle of a conversation between a pharmacist (the protagonist) and an unspecified male voice who seems to be the pharmacy manager (why not just call him that? "Male voice" sounds like I don't know who he is).  I assume the background mismatch was due to time/resource constraints, but it would help to have at least a basic opening line of text to let us know the context of who these characters are and where they are.

The opening line is just, "Where's that?" and I'm still not entirely sure what it's referring to or what it means.

Great work on this demo so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing this get finished!

Yeah when I read "episode" I think of something that happens chronically/regularly like a panic attack (or other spoilery condition 😉), whereas "incident" makes me think of a specific moment in the past which was the catalyst for the protag's family moving away.  I think it would be interesting to flesh out the "incident" a bit, maybe hinting that the protag had an issue with a past stalker and suggesting that this is the reason she moved away?

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Well, I didn't see that one coming!

A well-written little horror short with a simple but well-executed concept.  Great use of atmospheric sound and animated visuals which add a sense of style while also nicely capturing the feeling of rising anxiety.  Strong use of similes and metaphors!

If I have one minor nitpick, it's that you have to dig into the extras after the end of the game to get the full picture of what exactly happened.  Early in the story an "incident" is mentioned, but it's never really brought up again.  I think it would be a stronger narrative if the protag's "incident" is alluded to a little more throughout the story - obviously not in a direct spoilerish way, but in a way that leaves breadcrumbs leading you to believe one thing, when in retrospect after finishing the game, you realize the breadcrumbs were leading to a whole other, more horrifying conclusion. 

(Sorry if that's too vague to be helpful, I'm happy to explain more in detail in a PM if you'd like!)