itch.io

Yep! That, and the way each artist does face proportions is very different between the three characters. Not sure how else to describe it, tbh... it's good, though, easy way to make a cast distinct/avoid running into samefacing issues.

(comment contains spoilers)

It's an extremely good sign when I'm already laughing 30 seconds into the game lmaoooooo; in the tutorial, even?? No better way to make things accessible than removing high pitched sounds and replacing it with. That.

The pixel artstyle is really lovely! It gives a consistency to the different artstyles (I can recognize Nox's art a mile away at this point, haha) but the overall hues and shading leaning toward purple or otherwise cool colours gives it a very harmonious look. The warmer greens stand out, but it's a nice touch! It gives Amber and the Queen's Butterfly a sort of distinction from everyone else. Also, I really like how Amber's mask has expressions. Cute...

I like how the story subverts some tropes and plays some straight. I briefly expected Liam to be the other thief given his sudden schedule change, but nope! In any case, it took a bit of wheel scrolling to look for what made changes to the narrative and what was, effectively, just extra flavour text, but it was a fun romp.

I only caught one of the references, but like. Darkest Dungeon my beloved

ALSO QTE MATH IS EVIL. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH (cry-laughed at it, so, good job, it genuinely threw me off).

omg thank you for the kind words!! 

but also aaaahhh i'm so sorry! I didn't have anyone willing to playtest/proofread my script so I had to go in hoping that the acronyms would be somewhat decipherable... tbh though those translations you have do make a lot of sense given the context. next time hopefully I'll drag someone to sling sangria at to see if it meets the sinclair quality assurance (if there is a next time).

(is that "my bad, you're right, i'm a bad girl"? I don't think I'd make a good Sinclair either tbh, that's just my guess!)

Oh! Right off the bat I love the start button placing a cage over the canary, poor thing :( can't start the story without that, but still...  

I wasn't expecting that to end the way it did, but everything comes around. Everyone's a canary in some way here. Beautifully written!

i'm so sorry. she's just Like That. we can't stop her

But omg thank you so much! I had a lot of fun doing the art for this and doing little details like the window fog, hehe. I was initially unsure if the menu would look weird but I'm glad you like it!!

Oh my god i was so sure that no one was going to look at this the moment they read the fact it was a fangame, tysm for proving me wrong!

I'm... so sorry for Ryoshu oh my gosh. It's hard being Sinclair...

everyone involved here is terrible, i love it. jessica especially but live your life girl!! get that bag!!

the old lady's expressions are gold!! love her. 11/10 would scam again <3

Again, thank you so much for playing! Doubly so for helping with bug fixes/balancing/etc!

I've always wanted to make game maps that look pretty while serving their purpose... next step for these in particular would be to make characters that just walk by the roads to make them seem populated. One thing at a time and all that

The battle music only recently got delivered so that explains why I didn't have it out for .1, but it was well worth the wait! And yeah, having to consider things like pacing and refreshing the party (as well as realizing that locking the player out of a shop is a bad idea, even if thematically fitting) are stuff I'm slowly learning.

((redacted) jumpscare real. i needed some npcs to use as shopkeepers and he and Morgan got picked on impulse... i'm unfortunately quite fond of him. (redacted)-centric game one distant day, surely

Aaaaah thank you very much! (I got some mixed responses from the puzzle but ultimately everyone seemed to figure it out eventually, so I'm pretty happy with it, haha.)

I appreciate the faith in the aesthetic of the game. Roughs were all I could manage, but I hope at the very least what I have conveys what I want in the final version. And yeah, people did tell me the final battle was a struggle, so it's been adjusted quite a lot since! Balancing combat is hard, I have learnt...

Thank you for the comment and for playing my game! I'll work hard to finish this!

Yeah! In addition if you want to keep the glittering and fire animations, just enable stepping on top of directional lock - it'll make it so that it constantly uses the stepping animations for its direction, even if it's being interacted with.

Thanks for making it!! It was a blast <3

HELP IT ACTUALLY WAS?? our friend group is so chronically online oml

I streamed this to some friends and it was really fun! The general consensus was that the writing was very 'comedy skit' like. I'm inclined to agree; it's very well paced and had us laughing the entire time.

(somewhat spoilery below please don't read if you're just skimming the comment section and haven't played. go play it i very much recommend it)

Starting the game and immediately somewhat struggling with a slime that I picked a fight with for no reason was really funny; at first I was thinking, what, is dying going to give the MC a huge buff or something?
No. No, this dungeon's local skeleton is just really strong and unwittingly hijacks his place as main character. Honestly, Greg is so strong, who put him here, how did he even die. He says he was born in the dungeon but I'm inclined to think that was for comedy's sake. The way the entire cast talks bounces really well off of each other - doesn't feel like a holier-than-thou hero party but like a bunch of mismatched adventurers meeting for the first time slowly becoming friends (which, to be fair, is what it is). 

It was also fun picking out the various media references, from dialogue, right down to little things like the party's incapacitated sprites. One of my friends was asking if Greg's was based off of a mummified alien meme? Can't believe he'd recognize something like that smh

The custom pixel art/design is really charming and it must have been a lot of effort to do all of that in the span of a month or so. The music really catches attention though, it's really good! Especially the final battle theme.

wrt gameplay; relaxing to play, but well balanced - Sereda's healing is plenty strong, and having Recover means she won't run out of juice, so if it had to be it could be a battle of attrition between player and enemy. It didn't have to be because Greg and Rob hit very hard and have various means to increase damage output. No wonder why heroes die here

By the way, I think the directional lock was forgotten on some things, like the bonfire and the crystals. Very minor, you literally only see it if interacting from directions other than from below, just thought I'd point it out.

also i can't believe there's no fishing minigame. inexcusable. 0/10 (i'm joking, i'd rate this 5/5 if i could)

I tried to go for wacky but I just wasn't that good at it, haha. But an attempt at a romcom style of writing is probably practice I'll need, so it is what it is. 

Thank you!! I'll try to finish it soon!!

Never! (Half of the comedy hinges on it, unfortunately...)

asdfgkskf omg thank you!!! 😭 

ETRIAN OD- (i am immediately shot and left for dead)

Okay, in all seriousness; I adore this entry! I'm really impressed that you made an entire dungeon crawler with just the RTP plus the 3D plugin. I'm also more than a little biased because I loosely re-created my Etrian party in here, haha. (Also, regarding the images used when showing the character portraits on creation - are those upscaled with waifu2x or something? The artifacting is a bit odd to me, but it's nothing major.)

The classes feel like what they're supposed to, as far as I see - I used a Spellsword (big damage, and good trash mob clearing, very key to whittling down the final boss down fast), Knight (I feel like his very existence just soaking up damage warrants a spot, but learning smite and fortify all gives him things to do which is always neat - and unlike in aforementioned dungeon crawler game smite here actually does something instead of just chip damage), Ranger (deals good damage but nowhere near Spellsword - excellent buffs and debuffs that sync well with it though, and good trash clearing, too), and Cleric (Uh... heals, heals, and more heals, and nothing else until you learn judgement, which doesn't hit that hard and costs too much precious TP that I could be using on healing- it's basically what anyone who chose this class signed up for, really.)

I do have to say that the phantom boss in the first area didn't disappear after defeating it, which was a bit disappointing, but ah, well. Also, I initially tried playing this with controller, but there doesn't seem to be a button bound to confirm? (Which is fine, I have a working keyboard, so no big deal.)

I have to admit that the first mimic I encountered oneshotting 3/4 of my entire party with arrow rain before I could do anything was kind of unexpected but slapstick comedy levels of hilarious, so even if you didn't intend it you get a comedy rating for that. I sort of panicked before realizing that it just... didn't do anything but spam heal after that? So I had the knight beat it to death with smite. Haha... that's not going to stop me from opening everything, though.

I could have made the tile puzzle easier for myself by marking all of the tried tiles in an image editing program or something... I did not and suffered through it as god intended 10/10

Thank you!! I won't be able to finish it in time for the judging period, but it is what it is, I suppose.

But omg thank you for pointing out those collision issues?! I realize now that it's because I added that tileset but didn't mess with the collisions manually (sob) lesson learned...

Admittedly, the big scale of the kingdom was me using RTP for the first time and going 'ooh, how do I use this asset/layering/etc? and then getting incredibly carried away. But I'm glad it worked out!

Aww this was really fun! Echoing the creative use of the RTP, using the title images as map assets (and the usage of the castle) was really neat. The drawn CGs are really nice (your artstyle is very cute!) and the story was very funny.

Mmm... kinda want to make mango graham now.

Thank you very much for the long comment and the concrit, I really appreciate it! I'm really glad you found the presentation in particular to be great.

A lot of the things here, were things I wanted to address had I finished the game in time, but alas (I had been intending to play with the battle system, but just didn't have it in me, haha!)

formally apologizing for the masterpiece of all time smh. 10/10 crying from laughter. couch best alien

Out of curiosity, where does one go to find the minigame?

aaa thank you!! I feel like the writing isn't as funny as the other entries in this jam :< hopefully I can salvage it for when I finish the rest...

I'm glad the maze wasn't too bad (i threw it at a playtester and they told me to colour code it haha...)

This had me giggling the entire time, but also damn... the Reids are making me want to go buy milk.

Very lovely overall! The tutorial felt natural, esp with how it was framed and with the 'i just work here buddy' vibe Boss gives. All of the customers were endearing in their own way, and the last client... love them, absolute peak

also: quasooooooooooooo

There's a neutral ending you get for failing to get into a route, and there's a bad and good ending for each route, totalling to 5 endings :)

Okay, I got around to playing all of it today and afterward cracked open the files out of curiosity (hope you don't mind) and LMAOOO. In response to the commented out lines, I would argue that you guys added a tsun in the form of Nenette, does she count. Either way, peak

I think it's really funny you guys picked up that unintentional otome isekai trope in (redacted for spoilers) and in turn meant editing the name tag used to match the internal one (their name was meant to be mispelled because she was initially one of the 'vague references to other media' that I had dropped in, but this is better)

You guys also sticking to using 'clod' consistently is funny because whilst you could argue that 'clau' is one letter away from being a clar typo but actually? The reason her internal name is like that? i was thinking of clodsires at the time. yeah. don't think about it

(redacted)'s 'bad' end has always been my favourite ngl but that doesn't mean the fix made it worse, I think it's perfect. Sweet and in character. still insane. My belorbed... never change (I adore that you made him so obviously smarter than everyone else. Chev, you dumbass)

And speaking of Chev I didn't pay him much mind originally because he was supposed to be a rushed, mis-paced route, picking fun of how some OI just... does that. But you guys fixed him and made the pacing much better!

And whilst I say I played all of it today I didn't realize there was an ending that involved all three of them! Gotta get that, stat, haha. Also really like how you guys cleaned up my messy code (first renpy project pls understand) and you made checks for study and status as appropriate, good stuff.

Again, thank you for picking this up! Really giddy seeing it real and live, lol.

Oh my god I- I'm laughing and crying rn this is so good what the heck. Thank you guys for turning my jam-induced fever dream into an actual readable VN oh my GOD

I love that you guys added a lot to my old text! And that you adjusted a lot of the options so that they flow a lot better! The art slaps, the new expressions are a lot more lively (big fan of Claudia's annoyed face, and I'm doubling over that the bleed sprite is called out) and you actually added music and sound design! I'm laughing the entire time playing this game what the hell

Shoutout to the addition of a OG MC route (and the added parts in general are so good) but I'm laughing. Remade version Nenette my beloved

Omg thank you!! I'm really glad you enjoyed the demo. Thank you for taking the time to check for the two leads' silly conversations throughout the place :D

Thank you very much for the detailed comment, I'm glad that you enjoyed the game so far! These two were really fun to write and I hope to keep that sass between them fairly consistent throughout their dynamic :D

The current puzzles are meant to serve as a tutorial for basic mechanics, I hope the full game won't disappoint with the puzzles that are planned - the intention was to have the chat function serve as a possible hints section but it wasn't quite conveyed since there was only one area after getting the second party member, hahah.

I'll be sure to work on improving and polishing the game for the final release!

You don't like my 10 minute backgrounds drawn with a 17px default brush, and my epic plot threads that come so out of nowhere that they basically don't make sense are super surprising? :<

Jokes aside, lmao thanks! Don't know if I'll ever revisit this but we'll see.

If I got a nickel every time I read an otome isekai manga/manhwa that pulls 'actually I was a good guy all along but just wasn't allowed basic communication of the situation to my fiancee' out of nowhere I would have way too many nickels

Thank you!!!

Haha, thank you! Yeah MC is a mood fr fr

I've got a lot of other things on my plate at the moment (other otome projects) but I dunno. maybe, you never know!

Thank you so much for playing my silly game!! And doubly so for telling me your thoughts!!!

Yep, you're 100% on the mark for thinking he was the yandere. I'm unsure if it was clear, but at the decision where he prompted the player to return to the dorms, he was testing her - and taking the bait results in missing his route. He's a very dedicated yan :^)

I'm really glad you say the game is good! This game was a little rushed, admittedly, and mostly hinges on playing tropes from villainess media, so to hear that regardless of it makes me happy. If I had more time or was making this seriously rather than for a joke game jam, I think developing the characters further would have been fun. Alas (currently pre-occupied with other actual otome projects so I most likely won't expand this one)

Clarence's ball ending is my favourite, personally :D but yeah, for a guy that the MC literally refers to as 'fuckface', yeah... that checks out!

I haven't played all of them yet because time but the ones that stood out to me so far!!

https://dollcorp.itch.io/a-story-about-love: Best writing! Shitpost-tier visuals (still very lovely. i hope mark brown laughs at his 'sprite' if he ever sees it) but an overall great read that practices what it preaches. But is it really a bad game...

https://knickknackpj.itch.io/notlikeothervns: Definitely 'worst' game ever, and it knows it (it takes more effort to take built-in QoL out than to leave it in...) Truly simulates the feeling of pure agony. I dread re-opening it to continue playing because I just know Violet will give me 2048 again, leaving me with no choice but to force close and lose my loop progress :(

https://glueblade.itch.io/worstvn: Based writing I hope all of these angels and demons live their best life. I don't want to live in a world where angels aren't yaoi enthusiasts

https://omegabutton.itch.io/hilltop-academy: The greatest soundtrack of all time and the best gameplay loop ever, clearly

https://flufffables.itch.io/thirsty-for-you: Hot-leaf juice route, my beloved... (i accidentally rated this good because I liked it but forgor that the creator appreciated low ratings. oops)

https://cloudrac3r.itch.io/snail-society: The realization that this was a powerpoint file alone killed me. And that it looks like a vn...peak

goty (i cannot play 2048 to save my life though) (also i'm unsure if it's a bug but sometimes even without me force closing the game violet gets mad at me the next time i open it) (this only adds to the experience)

just like a lot of other people in the comments the first impression i got was that it was gonna just be silly little goobers having silly little romcom :3 but lmao... mark brown jumpscare

i don't know, this doesn't feel like worst visual novel ever when it has such a strong message. to create art for the sake of making something palatable and for everyone just leaves it barren of sincerity and you nipped that in the bud. love how chloe and adam have such different reactions to the game which is great!! the narrative doesn't strike a chord with the former but it does with the latter and like that the MC has found the audience of the thing she wanted to make instead of trying to mold her thing for an audience that maybe just wasn't meant to be.

i guess tldr a game like this that made me really think and reflect what tf i've been doing just hits too close. 10/10 i'm so sorry

AAAAAAHHHHH THIS GAME IS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I was laughing so hard the entire time, omg Maya's so relatable (i love her sm) and Robin is SO SWEET?? gdhgdfkhjdg i would gush more but i don't want to spoil anything in the comments-- please just know that I enjoyed this immensely!!

; o ; I eagerly await the other routes!! (super excited for Nico, he's so cute!!)

ALSO i just want to say that i ADORE Coco's design!! i too want to become as ice cream T_T 10/10 would dedicate my free time and disposable income to him