Thanks for the feedback!

This definitely feels like it’s still a work in progress

Yeah, there’s quite a few things I didn’t have time to do during September.

Most obviously, the road to Meadowport was a path in a forest near my grandma’s home, photographed during the jam, in September, so there wasn’t any snow, so I tried to draw in some snow without even bothering to remove the leaves from the trees… yeah, I definitely should make a better background for that part of the story.

The lack of music outside Meadowport is another result of the lack of time. And I wonder how many players get to hear the lyrics.

And I should add sprites. I was running out of time and thought backgrounds without sprites would look better than sprites without backgrounds.

after you go to bed at the inn, it replays the scene with the dragon tamer

that’s supposed to be a nightmare… but yeah, I should have made that more obvious. Perhaps I could have added some vignetting effect or something. And if I add sprites for the characters I’d be able to replace them with silhouettes on the “replay” to make it more obvious that it’s in the past, or make the colours messy in some way that’s hopefully obviously on purpose.

And speaking of the dragon tamer dialogue, maybe I should add the voice acting to the first dragon tamer scene so that it doesn’t seem like there isn’t going to be VA (there is some later on, mostly in the middle of the story.

But I hope you’ll keep working on it, because it has the potential to become a fun little story.

Thanks! I will keep working on it, probably mostly on the music and art, since I had to go with quite a few compromises on those fronts. I can also tweak the text, but since I already have some VA recorded and added into the VN, there are parts (I’m thinking of those that aren’t my own voice) of the text that I might want to keep mostly the way they are other than to fix obvious mistakes such as typos.

Thanks for the feedback!

In my playthrough, if I don’t trust Clara, then go to the park and see her, then we go to the inn together, I get an error message I hope you don’t mind these suggestions, and if you’ve already fixed anything in your new update, apologies for being slow with the comment.

In case you’re curious, it was me spelling the variable name in two different ways. And I did fix this in version 1.1:

Also, at the inn with Clara, it might be worth to put a visual effect or line of text saying “I slip into a dream” before the dream sequence, as when I first reached that scene, it appears quite suddenly and I thought the game had accidentally jumped back to an earlier point.

I initially intended to set everything to black-and-white or add a vignetting effect to show that it was a dream. Or make it blurry or something.

a new player wouldn’t know about these issues, so I think it might serve the game better not to mention them at all

I think I’ll do that when I make a 1.2 release. And if I actually get the card game working I’ll probably put that in a 2.0 release.

“I hear he blows the candle, it goes dark” which should be “ I hear him blow out the candle”

Another thing I can fix in 1.2. Thanks!

For the art, I really liked your pencil drawing - and I wonder if it might have been fun to make all the art ‘traditional style’, to fit in with the storybookish feel?

Thanks! I think drawing by hand takes longer, especially for things like forests where I want to be able to draw a few trees and then add more copies of the same trees to create the illusion of there being more trees than I actually drew. And in case it’s not obvious, the buildings were actually 3D edited to look 2D.

the photo editing route

I did take a photograph of a sheep and use that as a reference when drawing the sheep by hand.

Thanks! I did make this to make something with Ren’Py, to get better at writing, and to figure out how to use voice acting.

1: Thanks! I’ll show the voice actress that played Clara your comment (I’ve also shown her the other feedback we’ve got).

2: Yeah, I intended to have two more songs (with and without lyrics) but didn’t have time to write them. I think I will try to write them when I have the time.

3: Thanks for pointing that out. There were some inconsistencies that happened because I changed things in some places and forgot to change them in others (next time I’ll write a proper outline first). And I guess I should try to get better at writing, in English and in general.

4: That was an edited photograph because I was running out of time. The photograph was taken in September where there wasn’t snow, so I tried to add it into the photograph, but yeah, it didn’t quite turn out well.

I hope this was helpful and that I see some of your work in the future.

Thanks! I’m planning on participating in more jams, so I’ll take this feedback into account then. And I’ll also try to make a 1.2 version with more music and maybe some tweaks to the script, especially if I decide to make more characters sing songs.

Sheeps, dragons and fairies? Alright, count me in!

There’s also the horse. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to add an image of the horse (I wonder what a flying-capable harness would look like, I have prepared real horses for cart rides, but I’ve never put a harness on a pegasus).

It even had voice acting! Both yours and the voice that played Clara were top-notch!

Thanks! I’ll show her your comment.

Only pity was that the music was a bit louder than the voices.

I was kinda aware of that when I submitted, but I didn’t know how to change the default volume of each channel.

You probably already know this but Renpy has a volume attribute that you can use in case specific music tracks happen to be too loud

Now that I’ve looked into it, it seems there’s a couple of ways I can make the speech hearable over the music, and apparently one of them is putting define config.default_music_volume = 0.5 in options.rpy. I might try that, and add a Mac build while I’m at it.

* And a not-completely-silent laptop, but the road is louder.

Also would have been nice to have music throughout the whole game, as I first thought the game would have no sound and nearly missed the voice acting, but I guess that was due to time constraints.

It was. I intended to have different music in the different villages/cities, and I also hoped I could have had more songs with lyrics. Maybe I’ll add songs to the other levels in a later update.

* Al’s gender isn’t mentioned anywhere in the text, as I wanted it to stay ambiguous to make them an “anyone”.

Thank you for making this game! You’re welcome!