itch.io

Stumbled upon a bug
(running current VoidDreaming-V0.07.12PR-pc version).

On day 2, after I caught Mizz and Bromm on the Observation deck, I stayed, but refused Mizz's offer for sloppy seconds.

Then on day 6 got to MIzz's event where he goes "I'm not making a mistake, am I?" (I think it's MizzS2)

And he said: "I know you were there, that time on the observation deck. There's no use in hiding it."

Probably a wrong state assigned to d2MizzBrommCaught variable somewhere, but I didn't bother to dig further. Variables with non-binary numeric values are a headache to troubleshoot.

Also the save/load window has an issue where the second row of saves is too low, so its text covers 3/5th of the page numbers at the bottom.

My main gripe is that it's impossible to set the text speed to instant. I read faster than the text can appear with the fastest settings, plus the fastest setting makes long batches of text appear in two passes, it creates a weird jerk, a wonky feeling that I really hate.

Please fix that.

p.s. also you picked a terrible font for this page. Large and small 'L' are barely different, 'M' looks like an 'H' that owes money to the mob, and the kerning is so inexistent it gives me claustrophobia.

Just watched the trailer. Making dragons move and flip over by slapping their fat ass is so cool :D

Please add save on quit. It's not a long game, but things happen and replaying stuff involuntarily is not fun, not matter how short.

>Let's drop the passive-aggressive, shall we?

They said, before writing a character assassination essay on me.

I read the entire thing several times and I have just one question. 

Was it really easier for you to write all that, rather than rubber-ducking that scene just once to check if it actually leads the reader to the conclusions you want it to lead them to?

It wasn't related to my age, though it wasn't far off. The number was added absent-mindedly, just to avoid having to check for available names on an already popular site.

I had no idea it had any special meaning for someone. I'm going to assume it's some sort of americanism, since I have never ran into it before. I removed it just to avoid provoking anyone in the future.

I'd love to add that I'm not this and that, just to put the issue to bed, but itch will literally block me from responding to this if it detects those words. So lets just say I'm not subscribed to any hate-fueled ideas.

I'm obviously an annoying stubborn jackass, but I'm all for equality.

Sorry, we're here continuing a discussion that was started a year ago, you're out of the loop and just haven't seen that I've addressed this before. 

I'm not asking to change anything, just add a couple of lines - Mizz acknowledging that he is not offering an exclusive relationship to Rael and he's messing around with someone else would be fine(other characters give you a fair warning, there's no reason why Mizz shouldn't). 

The problem isn't that Mizz is polyamorous/polygamous/whatever, the problem is that not mentioning that little fact while coming on to Rael comes off as manipulative and insincere, which was not author's intent, as far as I can tell. 

They are just being intentionally dense about how poorly that part had turned out, readily accepting praise, but ignoring criticism. I like their writing, but I'm massively disappointed in them as a person.

Back then you didn't give me a good answer, I just grew exasperated with your unwillingness to even entertain the thought that you might be wrong. Pushing further would have been rude. I still don't want to be rude, but this feels important for me to try and get through to you anyway.

No, I get it, you can't be held accountable for every possible reading of your text. 

What I'm saying is your intended meaning for this situation is simply NOT in your text. I have genuinely tried to look at it from your angle and I do not see it. Nothing points to it. Your replies are the only thing that points to that reading at all. I am clearly missing something and I think it's your perspective. So the way I see it, you just didn't convey it properly in the game, thinking that your perspective is universal and would fill in the blanks. Me stumbling over this at all says it's not.

This needs addressing. Please.

You said:

Mizz at every point where sexual matters come up with Rael before this expresses his interest, but also his restraint. There's no notion of romantic interest discussed, and certainly after two days of knowing him that's a bit much to ask from anyone. Mizz doesn't propose any exceptional arrangements, and neither does Rael. There's interest stated, and borders posted.

because it's implied. Big part of flirting is implying things without saying them out loud.  

Mizz saying "There's something special about you", ESPECIALLY as it follows "I want to fuck you, but I don't want to rush to fuck you"  is an admission of romantic interest over plain carnal interest, and without him mentioning anything else about his other arrangements, it is an unvoiced promise of an exclusive arrangement. Both in our world and the one you describe in the lore so far. The world of Void Dreaming is not so overwhelmingly polyamorous that it would be completely alien to the reader. People get into exclusive arrangements, people have expectations of exclusive arrangements. And they flirt normally, without taking a break to explain their hints and body language in plain words.

So no, this it not some wild reading of mine that Mizz leads Rael on, it's on the surface, right there in the text.

With all due respect, if you intended something else - you have failed. I beg you to see it.

Still fuming about Mizz cucking you.

The rest of the game is great, but that one part is so dumb and annoying.

"Oh, we won't have sex yet because you're something special" he says before running off to blow Bromm. And if you try to confront him - you get repeatedly told off for not being a good little cuck, and even receive a death threat to your face from the sociopathic captain.

And you don't even get to push back on any of this, you just sit and watch Rael suddenly act like a doormat with no agency, sending a message that it's you, the player, who is wrong for not wanting to be cucked.

Cool, thanks, writer.

This is a great game that's really trying to be more than just a FVN. Great production values really elevate it among the peers.

I guess my only negative note is that it's... Not scary? It does a better job being a thriller than being a horror - the build-up to the actual spooky stuff is much stronger than the payoff.

Okay, so, to rephrase my feedback into something more actionable...

Your writing lacks purpose. Any kind of writing - be it for a book, a show, or a visual novel, - must be purposeful in what it's trying to achieve. Because you don't have an infinite budget.

And you probably just thought "Oh I have spent nothing so the budget is two sandwiches and a coffee", but... No. Your time is a part of your budget as well, you don't want to spend the rest of your life trying to bring one single story to a satisfying conclusion. And to make things worse, the reader's attention is a finite resource too.

So when you're writing a scene - you need to make sure you are not wasting your own time, and the time of the reader. To do that, you must designate the goals for the scene. And everything you write for that scene must pursue that goal. Even the banter.

There's absolutely no need to write characters just shooting the shit with each other, this is not real life, art must be more interesting than real life, especially when pretending to show it honestly. 

If two characters are talking - there has to be a purpose. If two characters are talking - one of them must have a goal and be the "attacker", making the other one "defend".

An easy example would be A asking B: "Hey, so how was your date?" - it instantly puts B on defense, trying to present himself well, trying to protect the image he had built up within this social circle. 

And that creates opportunities - C could ask B the same question in a more private setting and receive a more honest answer, achieving the goals of showing that B and C are good friends, showing B's motivation on several levels, etc, etc.

I hope this helps.

"Go! To snowtown" starts in chinese and there's no obvious language switch, so if you can't read it - you have to blindly poke through hieroglyphics until you manage to switch the game to english. 

Many of the UI elements are not translated.

The entire game has a slightly awkward english translation that has obviously never been proof-read by a native speaker, or even anyone at B2 level. It's not horrible, just awkward, which makes the experience slightly worse. 

The UI animations are distracting and unnecessary.

There's no text speed option, so you have to double-tap forward button/spacebar/LMB if you read faster than a first-grader, which makes the whole experience so much worse. 

The anti-piracy statement makes no sense, claiming that this right here is not a legitimate upload of the game. Is the game asking me to report you to itch for impersonating the developer/publisher?

p.s. unpacked the game files and WHY THE HELL IS THE GAME ICON AN 8K RESOLUTION TEXTURE?! WTF?!!!

Sorry, I should have worded my comment more nicely, but I was sleepy and grumpy.

I still stand by my words, of course, my impressions were genuine, but I didn't need to bite your head off.

Stream of consciousness writing.

The story is monstrously bloated with completely pointless inconsequential things that just happened to spring up in the writer's mind at the moment.

The protagonist is a complete dumbass on every possible level and I don't believe he is earning any awards for the school, so there's disconnect of the backstory with the story.

All characters sound the same, with no hints of personality.

And the writing is trying so hard to be funny, but never manages it.

The cute and consistent art style is the only redeeming quality of this VN.

Someone is still mentally living in the year 2025 I see xD

It's for the best. The writing was horrible - no one acted like a person, the pacing was all over the place.

Sure, it looked pretty, but high production values can't replace good writing.

I'd like to be able to at least turn in down a bit. The balance is so awful you can barely hear anything else.

It's impossible to save yourself by eating your own limbs.

Cutting off your leg and eating it will not compensate for the calories you will lose for your body to deal with the consequences of losing a limb. You will just die faster.

If I have to replace any more fuses in a coordinate radar less than a day after I did it the last time - I am going to get really angry. This is not a fun gameplay loop.

I played it a bit, completed Cedar's route and here are my notes, in no particular order.

The writing comes off as extremely heavy-handed. There's no subtlety. Every detail isn't just shoved in your face, you get beaten over the head with it over and over again. Cedar is shy and troubled, so everyone tells you he's shy and troubled, and so does he. Several times. "Show, don't tell" is not a suggestion, it's the basic rule of good storytelling.

The pacing is way too fast, even for a short VN. You get introduced to Cedar and after two more interactions with him you're in love, and also he bawls his eyes out and tells you everything on his mind, AND it's suddenly the storm. What? But I just got here.

At one point I got a bad ending that felt completely arbitrary and out of nowhere. Zee tried to drag me away while I was chasing Cedar - why would I go with her? Why would I assume that not going with her could possibly trigger a fail state? Nothing happening prior to this ever hinted at that. It felt unsatisfying and annoying.

There's no good way to say this, so I'll just rip the band aid off. The plot is dumb at times. Montegenisha stops you from finding Cedar to tell you to go find Cedar. His appearance was completely unnecessary and it broke the tension of the event for nothing, as did the long boring monologue the storm gives you(forgot the name).

The entire Scene with Cedar trying to sacrifice himself for you is stupid - he has enough time to shove you, but not enough time for you both to run off instead? What a precise amount of time!

And then Theo runs past you and saves him anyway! Theo saves him, not you - MC doesn't do ANYTHING in that entire scene. Someone else called this a book and I can see why. MC has no agency, he just stands there, watching, like a lemon.

Then he tells Cedar that what happened wasn't his fault, but it 100% was his stupid fault and no one else's.

The weird sound of a small metal hatch slamming shut down the hall used for punctuation is annoying and doesn't fit ANYTHING at all. Why is it here?

It's a small issue, but backgrounds sometimes don't fit the story. Like when MC and Cedar are left alone in MC's room the bed is described as narrow, while the king-sized bed is displayed in the background.

Oh, and the GIANT FULL-SCREEN DISCLAIMER warning you that kissing the characters is going to influence your route is completely unnecessary, and just plain silly. Duh, I sure hope it influences the story!

p.s. I'm not trying to insult your work, obviously a lot of effort went into the creation of this VN, and it's very commendable that you actually managed to finish it, but the oversights I just mentioned really kept me from enjoying it, so I thought I'd share. Hope you'll be able to learn something from this.

I'm mostly talking about the meaningful routes - Mikko's and Torulf's, since they are the big branching ones with a lot of deep character exploration, while other routes are more straightforward.

In Torulf's route she inserts herself at the point where I simply don't believe Arvo would let in another pushy stranger and it ruins my suspense of disbelief.

In Mikko's route she comes in at the exact point where Arvo can salvage things and talk to Mikko straight, with the fire of Mikko's decisiveness lit under the tiger's ass, but now it's suddenly a group outing and he doesn't get a moment of intimacy because of her. It's frustrating to the highest degree.

Fuck her, she ruins everything, both times coming in at the worst time with the worst opinions, without anyone asking her. She is a really obnoxious person, in my opinion.

p.s. also she's being a possessive friend in Jorgen's route early on, but I haven't played Jorgen's route for several updates, so idk what she does there yet.

That whole sub-route is so forced. "Hey, a stranger forced their way into your life and you got burned after trusting him - time to throw yourself at yet another stranger forcing themselves into your life!". And Gudrun really forces her way into that route, like omg.

Worst sub-route ever. I already hated Gudrun for being ham-fisted into every route at 11th hour with their opinion nobody asked for, but this is just too much.

The entire THEM conspiracy sideplots branch is unnecessarily edgy.

This is a fun porn world with fun porn logic, serious themes already barely work here, clashing with the tone of the rest of the story and the setting itself. Edgy stuff doesn't work at all and just annoys the reader with zero benefit for the story. 

Like, okay, cool, I already hated Therium and the cat, what did that ending achieve?

Literally nothing would change if the route ended with Therium saying "nah-ah-ah, not how this story goes" and snapping the player back to the choice. The ending we got is literally a bad prank from the author. Just like that shotgun flashback - the scene was done in the most lolrandumb cringe-inducing edgy way possible just to annoy you.

Also the 'teacher?' reveal was super obvious. The plague doctor cosplayer having furless skin was a dead giveaway - I still don't understand what was the point of him even being two characters.

I still don't understand what bug you are talking about, Liquid containers taking on outside liquids when submerged is clearly intended behavior. I'm not talking about that, I'm being baffled why it's a mechanic in the first place, because it works off an insane assumption that you are putting uncapped bottles into your bags.

I was hoping the developer would read this and either disable the mechanic for now, or add a way to close bottles.

People keep finding new ways to say they hate the new sprites.

I haven't tested it, so speaking from my impressions. Liquids containers are not leaking. But all liquids containers that both have something in them and have free space can passively take in liquids from outside if you are submerged deeply enough. I don't know what counts as "deep enough" but it feels overtuned against you, just like many other things in this game.

I don't think it matters where a liquids container is on you - hands, bag, or a worn backpack. Or maybe it does and the bag must physically get submerged, I don't know.

Empty containers you have will never get anything in them from outside, unless you actually drop said container into the liquid, or pour a bit of some liquid into it first. Which suggests that there IS a bottle cap mechanic, but you don't have access to controlling it, it just auto-activates with an empty bottle.

The only container that doesn't seem to take in outside liquids is the one you can wear in the same slot as a fanny pack.

>You can now scavenge dumpsters for trash!

The developer must have played Pathologic 2

Liquids collisions make no sense. 1mm puddle shouldn't freely move the player and giant boxes around and easily throw them off a cliff.

It makes no sense what items can freely roll like they're perfectly spherical balls. Dropped a toolbox that was making me overweight and it just ROLLED AWAY.

Also, did I somehow miss the way to close water bottles or does this game actually take place in a universe where they never invented bottle caps? It makes no sense that I have to hunt down 250ml cups because this way I can make sure all my liquid containers stay full and I can use them one at a time.

Oh, that's right, it could be a slider! Sorry, that's definitely a better option than changing things for everyone, you're right!

Floor tiles blending in with the background even under light is annoying and not fun at all.

Items cluttering on the ground are impossible to sort through with pixel hunting, there should be a proximity inventory.

Rates of all conditions progression, including hunger and thirst, are definitely cranked up way too high.

So are the spaghetti until they get wet.

Also he's really into getting Mikko and Arvo back together. I think the tanuki boy is a fudanshi.

Travis would say no because he wants you to stay with Mikko, duh.

Keo keeps rewriting the axe murder ending, and it just keeps getting weirder because of it.

I don't know what the scene originally was, I only came around patch 0.28, I think. But I caught the tail end of someone giving Keo shit over changing it. I think it might have used to end with the axe sound, or maybe the axe sound was meaty, or maybe there was blood - something gruesome like that.

In 0.35.1, which I have kept, the cuffs were real(screenshots attached)

Now it's 0.51.1 and there's no blood, no axe, no cuffs... And since there's no Mikko - the scene now suggests that it was all purely imaginary, Arvo simply freaked out from being around Mikko and ran.

That feels more anti-climactic than the jumpscare of the worst ending, IMO. That one at least follows the motif of Mikko's repeating monologue about how nothing we do matters, and we're less than dust on the cosmic scale. You're dying, never having made up for your betrayal to your best friend/love, but at least you both happened, no matter how inexplicably unlikely, and managed to enjoy each other's company for a bit. And if it ended poorly - well... None of it mattered in the first place.

p.s. Imagine Travis' face in the morning when he found out that Arvo fucking DIED! 😳How would he try to make amends for his sticky paws? Would he tell Mikko? How would Mikko feel about it? I love exploring the doomed timelines like this, they are so rich for good meaty developments.

p.p.s. The Bad Ending, if read as "it was all a dream", shouldn't really be the end, as it invites a continuation of the story - Mikko going ballistic from Arvo not just leaving the lodge, but straight up dropping out of the university. Running way from him. FUCKING. AGAIN. It could actually lead to a satisfying ending where Mikko actually corners him with cuffs to make sure this time he stays around long enough for them to talk. How it would go from there - imagine for yourself, fanon is bae. ;)

Alright, without spoilers, but you must promise to come back and discuss them with me after you play them.

The Bad Ending - stay with Mikko but ignore him. (I think you only need to ignore his invitation to go outside, but if you're going for a bad ending - might as well ignore him completely, this way the final scene seems more natural).

THE WORST ENDING - Agree to stay with Mikko, but bail on him when you find the key.

Make sure you get all of Mikko's bad endings, otherwise the experience is not complete. Come back and let me know how you like his kinky side >:3

Excuse me, which route is this?

I realized what I like about the old sprites. 

I like how artistically artificial they look. Their expressions, their poses - they are aimed directly at YOU, the viewer, the only real person here, whose act of witnessing the show makes it real.

When it's a one on one dialogue, your companion stands in the middle of the frame, staring right at you, unblinking, like they are a character in a Wes Anderson movie. His works exude the same artistic artificiality as the old Dawn Chorus sprites - everything is not just artificial, but draws attention to its artificial nature.

I always loved works of fiction that are not afraid to make a nod, or better yet, a full bow to their artificial nature. "Pathologic" is a great example - it has main characters, background characters, and then the extras that don't even get a costume, they are just wearing a black bodysuit and a mask to create the sense of scale and numbers.

But back to Dawn Chorus. It's not just the old sprites that have this artistically artificial nature, other aspects of the FVN share that quality.

The background extras are not even black-clad shadows, they straight up don't exist. There's several dozen people in the lodge, you only ever see less than a dozen.

A lot of the writing here is unnatural in an artistic fashion as well. 

Every single OOC dialogue about ships at the sea the characters have is non-diegetic, it doesn't actually happen in the world of the VN. 

Every single perspective change is just the omnipotent storyteller lifting the curtain only to you, the viewer.

Every single monologue is saturated with theatrical pathos, like there's a literal spotlight shining on the speaker. Especially the self-analyzational sermons you shouldn't hear, because they are happening inside another character's head, or even in another time. It's completely fake but also extremely awesome.

And the old sprites really add to that feel - they grasp your attention demanding you witness them.

And the best part is that it's all entirely accidental. The creators of this FVN did not intend this at all, it happened by completely improbable sheer cosmic occurrence. The universe just shuffled the deck of reality 14 billion years ago and a never-ending sequence of happenstances made it just so happen that the people behind Dawn Chorus had created this deeply artistic artificial feel to their work while just trying to tell a story.

I think it's fantastic.

0.50.7, patched from Patreon.

Legacy is missing Dan's sprites, happens in day2_12_fireplace2 sequence of events. It was in Rune's route, though I'm sure this must be an issue in other routes as well.

The exact ones that gave me grief were

images/sprites/misc/dan dark-legacy.webp

images/sprites/misc/dan-legacy.webp

I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your honesty and openness.

Came here after dealing with a FVN creator who is a way, way lesser community manager than you, and it's so horribly tiring to deal with them. You're just a breath of fresh air.

Please stay as you are, you're amazing and I hope your project succeeds and becomes popular. I recommend it to people whenever I can.