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Good Morning, Bea's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Please provide some feedback! Be Kind. | #4 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I don't normally play visual novels. But I have a few thoughts.
The art is lovely, probably my favorite part. I like the phone sounds. I only found the true ending. The writing had a few odd unrealistic feeling turns. Do people really speak via text like that? Aside from the oddness with some of the dialog it was an enjoyable experience.
:)
Fun game, nice art, overall good game within such a limited timeframe.
The art is gorgeous and I like how you incorporated thoughts, speech and text messages. Sadly, I found the story off-putting so I didn’t finish the game.
The art is really pretty in this game!! I really like how you put in the effort to do branching paths. I did two runs so I could see what the bird costume guy looked like (I guessed wrong on the first one) and I sadly got the same ending both times. I did notice a few typos that probably would have been caught by most online proofreading programs, but that isn't important. The idea was really cute, and you did a great job at changing the tone in your writing between the different characters. I was voicing them on stream and it was obvious when I started to read a line in the wrong voice.
aww, thanks for playing and streaming it! The voice was perfect for a VN! It's so cool to see all the different reactions to the game.
If you're interested to know how to unlock the other endings, you can message me through the Halcyon discord. You can also check Jess' stream who did an additional one.
Elftwitch, your art is gorgeous as always! I really enjoyed Bea, your OC, and I thought the storytelling through texts was done well! I only got 2 endings, and one was *much* darker than the other! I would maybe suggest different fonts/text box backgrounds to differentiate between characters. My biggest concern with the game was around the personality of one of the characters, but I think that's more of a personal thing and not necessarily something that detracts from the game. I hope you keep working on this! I would love to see anything additional you bring to Bea's story. Thank you for your submission!
Jess I'm so thrilled you played this on stream and I would love to make more content and continue the story! I hope you will like the sequel too. Naturally there are more endings there, but again also a canon one.
Coloring the text was something I would have loved to do, but it was not possible without too much fuss and with that much dialogue. I agree about the personalities (of more than one character in fact). It's like this with a lot of visual novels, they make you react with: I would not deal with this. On the other hand if the characters were "normal" options or were instantly turned down, there would be no story to tell. Plus, even if VNs are not life advice in any way, they show a lot of things people burden themselves and others with, even if its in a dramatic manner. It's rather meant to make you think and look closer.
Thanks again for the games jam and the presentation! This has been so much fun.
Thank you for the explanation! That's helpful indeed ^-^
Very solid art and writing on short notice, well done!
thank you so much, that's very kind! <3
This is probably going to be a bit of a long and rambling comment, so sorry about that. I have a lot of (hopefully constructive) feedback, so I want to make sure I make this clear up front: I really enjoyed this game. I certainly enjoyed it enough to make sure I saw all of the endings. I don't often seek out Visual Novels, but it seems like every time I try one I end up liking it, so maybe I should start seeking them out more...
I ended up looking through the files in the game download because I was curious what engine(s) everybody used for the jam. I hadn't heard of TyranoBuilder before, but it seems like a really interesting tool. This game has going on with it, so I assume using the engine made development faster, which is cool. I noticed that the game download is using Electron, so I guess TyranoBuilder makes the game as a Javascript/HTML game behind the scenes. With that in mind, I'm curious why you didn't upload an HTML5 build to Itch. From my experience with the GMTK Jam, it does seem that people are much more willing to play games when they have a web build avalable, so uploading one can be useful. (You don't need to upload just an HTML build either, as my game this jam has both).
There were some things that seemed missing, but I suspect are just limitations of Tyrano. The game lacked any sort text history or rewind (that I could find) like RenPy has, which was something I missed. There also weren't buttons for text skip / auto skip in the dialog box like RenPy has, though text skip is in the game by holding Ctrl. I also noticed some technical issues like some of the buttons in the context menu not doing anything or the context menu not appearing when it should, but that's not something I'd hold against the game.
I did notice what I assume was a game script issue where the phone at the start of the game faded out twice, but that is also a really minor issue. I also noticed the lack of background music, which I felt like it affected the feeling of the game. I did notice some music in the game files, but I don't know if that was a default asset from the game engine or not (I noticed a few images in the game files that were certainly engine defaults).
I also had trouble at time keeping track of who was talking with any given dialog. I know it has their names right on the message box, but I found myself not paying enough attention to it, and I confused myself at one part at least. It might have been nice if the game did something like change the text box color and/or added/changed a text box outline, but I can also understand if that's not something that's easy to do in the engine.
The way that the dialog options were utilized felt kind of unfair. As I understand it, these sorts of choices in VNs are more about opinions, so it works when they appear without much context on how they influence the game. This game using them with "correct" options that (mostly) have no real way for players to predict them on the first playthrough feels rather punishing (especially since it makes the most likely first-time ending (I think) be the bad ending, which is quite a jarring ending). I think maybe having some sort of foreshadowing for the correct answers might have worked better. For example, the first choice is made really blind, so maybe having the main character say something about each photo she has would give at least the sense of having a hint for the right answer. Also, having each person correlate to a "True," "Good," and "Bad" ending feels kind of weird, but I get that this isn't meant to be a dating sim, and can respect the choice of qualifying each route.
Ok, enough criticism. I did really enjoy the game. The artwork was outstanding, and I did enjoy the writing in the game. The use of sound effects was a good touch, and I did like how the conversation bounced around in a natural way that didn't happen so much as to be annoying. I can tell a lot of effort went into this game, and I'm glad I got to play it. Great job :)
Absolutely gorgeous! I really dug a lot of the writing too, fantastic overall!
aww, thank you so much! It was a race really, since I had to start on Friday and not before. Normally writing comes easy to me, but at some point I was exhausted keeping up with three conversations at once xD It means a lot that you like it!
Not my usual genre but a nice game nonetheless. Some VtM vibes...
A volume slider might be a nice addition as an update ;)
Awesome art :)
haha, dating sims are an acquired taste :D but I'm all the more happy you like it. and the VtM reference blows my mind!
The artwork in this is absolutely phenomenal! It just needs some music the fill the silence, and I could play it for hours.
Well done!
that is awesome to hear, thank you! I had picked some music, but I wanted the game to be as stream friendly as possible.
This is the track I was looking to add if you're interested: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Makaih_Beats/time/time-4/
but you can choose whatever you like to play with it