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Heather's Haunted House Party's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Category: Cinematography | #4 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Visuals | #24 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Story | #77 | 4.125 | 4.125 |
| Overall | #85 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Category: Voice Acting | #103 | 2.375 | 2.375 |
| Category: Music | #118 | 3.375 | 3.375 |
Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Content Warnings
Fantasy Gore, Grieving Young Death, Adult Language, Alcohol and Tobacco use by Minors, Implied Sexual Themes
Log Line
Left alone, a teenage girl wants to throw the scariest, haunted house party, but more than just a ghost is haunting her.
Team Credits & Cast
All art, writing and code by AliceQuinnArt
Crowdfunding Pitch
I would want to crowdfund at the $5000 level as currently stands, though I did have a mini mind vacation in which I expand the gameplay at the party to include some point and click adventure elements which would expand the scope (and was not doable for a solo dev in one month) and would need the help of paid play testers and possibly some additional coding work from outside, as I am an artist who is learning Ren'Py, not a coder by nature.
My first priorities is finishing the game and getting an editor.
For hiring outside of myself would be voice actors for at least my main three characters.
Before the jam is over and I have implemented/edited all of the text I am already sitting at 7000 words of dialogue. Using the Voice Acting Club's Indie rate guide, I am looking at around $2000-$4000 in voice acting if I want to pay fair rates and if I have every planned line voiced .
If I were to use any remaining crowdfunding pay to pay myself, I would be paying myself for polish like fully animating the walks for the characters, the smoking, and some hand gestures. While these aren't strictly necessary for the game, I think they add to the finished quality of the product.
Was your submission created with Visual Novel Machinery?
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Comments
Wow! A really touching entry - I love the color (/grayscale) choices, and the sprites have a great 90s/00s cartoon feel that I really really love. The emotions feel really real and human, both the grieving and spirits, and the teenage social navigating, which is a tricky thing to pull off. Also I'm super impressed throughout by your cinematography - the camera angles, speech bubbles, and animated/moving shots are all super ambitious, and pay off well. I had a few loading issues in the browser version, but I think that's probably in part from the resolution/quality of all your assets needed to do that camera work (I ran into similar issues last year with my entry - ended up having to do a bunch of compression!). This is a wildly impressive first entry, and doubly so for being solo! Absolutely makes me intrigued to see more of the Unthreaded Memory world.... huge congrats!!! 🎃
Thank you again! I was definitely too ambitious in some ways, but I had time to really work on it since I am self-employed right now and wanted to see if this was a good medium for my storytelling. I feel so bad that it's slow! I am trying to figure out how to fix it, and in general I need to go back and look into more best practices with Ren'Py, as a lot of this was searching for an answer when I hit a problem more than knowing what I was doing so I am sure there's plenty of places for me to optimize in the future.
Be still my Xennial heart, this was the Daria-flavored world of my dreams! I absolutely adore the self-constructed high school clique inflicted "forbidden love", the messy friendships, the hints at a more supernaturally-influenced world than our own, and our Queen Bee popular main character being named Heather, of all things. ❤️ And all of that is just a sidebar to the absolutely mind-blowing artwork: the choice to use speech bubbles instead of a textbox, the animations for blinking, speaking, different zoom levels, shifting expressions and outfits--on top of the variety of textures and continuously animated backgrounds!--nothing about this feels like a jam game, and it is mind-boggling that this is the work of a solo dev. ✨ Thank you for the introduction to your incredible world--I definitely hope you continue to build on it!!
(also: I sent you a Discord message under my username of Widdershins--no pressure at all intended, but I wanted to be sure you knew who was randomly DMing you!)
Holy crap! I was so shocked when I got to the end and it said this was a solo project. What an amazing amount of work to get done in a month. It looks gorgeous and the animations were pretty slick. I was a little bummed that you made this amazing world where the dead walk among the living and it's possible to transfer/sell memories but the dialogue focused more on dating and teen drama. We were so curious about the supernatural elements! Please tell us more!
No biggie, but there were a few tiny errors of missing images in the browser version. I caught "sona_eye_%s" and "Gray_nose". Heather had one when she was in bed but the text was so tiny, I couldn't make it out and her doofy boy toy had one when they were arguing in the hallway but I couldn't make out that one either.
Anyway, amazing work especially for a beginner. I would have never guessed you just started learning Ren'py if you didn't tell us. If you decide to expand it and need a hand, we'd love to help you out!
Thank you so much for playing!
This is a short story spinoff of my comic/worldbuilding (which granted is also a romance story if you don't like those) that focuses more on the ghosts, possessions and memories as Grey has a business based on bringing the dead back to life temporarily. At some point I'd love to make that story a full visual novel as well, but the "season 1" script alone is like 40k words, so that's a much longer project than a month.
I know there are a bunch of bugs that I am trying to work thru, some of which were carelessness/running out of time, some of which are just straight up baffling and I need to do research on, but I am hoping to get a new build up in the next week or so that takes care of the most obvious ones, improves performance and adds some more music!
I will keep you in mind, I really enjoyed making this, even if bug hunting is not my forte ahaha.
Great use of speech bubbles and animations! Getting this much done by yourself is truly amazing!
I'm afraid that the game is too much for my potato laptop. I managed to finish the game somehow., but it was super slow. Also, on a minor note, there are some missing expressions.
I really appreciate you playing thru it even though it was so slow. I think I made all the images too big for a web build and some computers. I will have to learn how to optimize as my next step while I work on finishing the story. Will get the art and expressions fixed as soon as I can.
Thank you so much!
"Not a single one of them can handle that grief doesn't get put neatly into that little stone box."
Wow! This is what you are able to do in one single month alone without any previous Renpy knowledge? Absolutely insane. There is objects in front of the sprites? Holy, smokes. Eyes and lips are moving? Speech bubbles that must have taken ages to implement? Crazy!
Seriously you absolutely pushed Renpy to its limits and beyond. This might be one if not the best cinematography I have ever seen in a Visual Novel and I mean that seriously. I am probably going to use this game as reference for ideas.
No wonder the game struggles with minor bugs, that is completely forgiven considering considering the insane complexity. There is a good reason my current game only has very basic animations, I know from painful experience how much work and pain these things can cause.
Also I really love your characters, they really ooze personality. The dialogue is a pleasure to read and has the right amount of snark. I am intrigued by the hints regarding the world building and eager to learn more.
Thank you for making this game and I hope to see more!
Hi, Alice! I played and voted for your game on stream and I'm posting here for your own feedback and promotion. Would be happy if could rate and comment your thoughts on my game submitted to this jam! Enjoy and thanks for your consideration. - Kyle
Hey, this is absolutely fantastic! I loved everything about it — the characters, the way you drew them (and all the variations!), and the backgrounds too. The dialogue boxes look great, and the subtle camera movements add so much life to the scenes. The story seems really promising as well — I’d love to play more! 💖 Just followed you to keep up with the game :D
Oh, and one small note! The menu music and ambient sounds are wonderful, but I think adding some subtle background music during gameplay could make the atmosphere even more immersive :3
Also, I totally get you — I was super ambitious with my own project this month and didn’t manage to finish everything either, so I completely understand hahaha 😅
Thank you so much! Your comments are so nice. I have another art show that I need to get ready for next week, but after that I'm gonna try to get back to working on this, with some more scenes I have written already and just need to program the cameras for. And now that it's post game jam I can add some background music I have previously written into the game, so I will probably do that as part of my first content update. Next time I am gonna have to pick out some fallback music before the jam starts as a fall back for my overambition.
Hey-O! :D
I attempted to play the game, but strangely enough, it gave an error! :0
It said something like an exception has occurred, it could be me, I'm not very sure, have you play-tested the build?
I have, but only on my computer. Was it the win build or the Linux windows build, both seemed to work for me.
It was the windows build, other renpy games seemed to have worked so far, it might be an issue with my hard-drive then, I'm sorry m8 :c
It's very possible it's my fault, I'm gonna see if I can borrow someone else's computer , it might be broken in some way that I can't see on mine.
Thanks for pointing this out to me earlier. Turns out there was a shader issue that my computer could handle but breaks on other builds. I haven't fully play tested everything, but the .exe should be working on more devices and there is also now a web build that I am actively working on optimizing. I am brand new to this so I had no idea what I did wrong at the time I uploaded it, or that that was even going to be an issue I needed to look out for, but I will try to keep making it better, so thank you for trying it either way.