Play book
The Hollow's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Monsterous! | #112 | 3.130 | 4.200 |
| Scariness... | #120 | 2.683 | 3.600 |
| Halloweeny? | #131 | 2.832 | 3.800 |
| Candy!! | #135 | 2.236 | 3.000 |
| Overall | #135 | 2.713 | 3.640 |
| Fun | #139 | 2.683 | 3.600 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Log Line
Short story about being visited by a spirit.
Content Warnings
Descriptions of Mild violence, Horror, Blood, Ghosts, Spirits, Demons, Macabre themes, Psychological horror
Team Members
Karen Chen/Liveshark, Mama Lulu/VoidstriderLucatiel
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Comments
The concept seems promising and the writing is very good. But yes, in this state, the ending is unsatisfactory because it happens too quickly so the conclusion has no impact . I'll definitely read the final product because the basic idea is good, and the writing very neat.
Thank you for saying as much.
Definitely would like to see what the finished game would look like with player choices and branching paths; maybe a way to click away from the eyes and have them keep popping up?
I somewhat agree with the other comment about the longer paragraphs, I didn't really mind the length, but the speed of the scroll effect was a little intense.
Great writing, overall really enjoyed it!
Glad to hear it. We'll either work on it after the jam is up, or shelf it while we work on something focused more at our core series of projects.
Hey this was pretty cool. I wasn't sold on the second person until the second portion of the story, where it was weirdly hard to follow the text's instructions -- no other perspective would've been as effective. That was definitely the high point of the game (neat art in this part too).
They story's well-written too, but it sort of seems like a good standalone short story than a VN (aside from the finale, really). This might be a side effect of the large chunks of text in each box (difficult to read when it's running full length at the absolute bottom of the screen).
We'll likely try to revisit this after the jam is finished. Especially if we can secure some funding.
We wanted to have a couple endings, branching dialogue for some of the grandma stuff, and the possibility to die to The Hollow. We just needed more time than we had thanks to PC issues.
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!
Visual Novel Maker has save, load, and skip as defaults. VNMaker is kind of iffy, but they recently updated their engine, and we decided it was time to give them a second shot.
Protagonist is meant to be kind of vague. It's hard to write something sentimental while also being vague, honestly. Tried our best to do more 'universal experience' sentiments. Most people have broken a window or made little mistakes with family. They can really be any age, as old or young as the reader. To reach out to anyone who's struggling with unnecessary guilt. But it does call back to the reader's childhood, and have a dreamlike quality. I think it was actually a watercolor brush we were using, with a pencil brush, but you're right. It's got a crayon quality to it, and that's very cool.
Breaking paragraphs into separate pages is definitely an option. We tried to use each text box to its fullest this time around, to see how it would look, because I think having too many text boxes breaks VNMaker. If you look at our previous project, we did that, but longer scenes, with more individual text boxes actually lags the engine when editing, so it was also half out of writing convenience. We're considering writing paragraph/novel-style in a future endeavor.
Glad you enjoyed the whole of it, though. That means a lot, and says that, despite the extra time limitations we faced, we still managed to make the concept creepy. Big win on that front.