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Touhou Chourantan ～ Avian Panic in Asphodel's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Story / Writing | #2 | 4.051 | 4.200 |
| Use of Theme | #6 | 3.979 | 4.125 |
| Concept | #20 | 3.689 | 3.825 |
| Audio / Music | #20 | 3.231 | 3.350 |
| Overall | #22 | 3.472 | 3.600 |
| Visuals | #29 | 3.352 | 3.475 |
| Challenge | #42 | 2.001 | 2.075 |
| Gameplay | #43 | 2.387 | 2.475 |
Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
Anomalocaris, kurantoB, Vyn, miracleMira
Streaming Permission
Yes
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Comments
This is really well written!
Good job!
this is the prettiest game ever made in twine
i think more named touhous in with the bird gang would have been cool but
hey
game cool
bird puns =big bird score,
Very well written interactive story!!!
I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to writing-based games, but I was pleased. It looks great, too.
Hm, it is an enjoyable read and I was definitely hooked. There was direction, basis, and a setup for something good. The ambience is nice, I'm oddly calmed by it. Especially the music.
Also, is it me or do the character portraits feel a bit.. masculine? I don't know if I'm being ignorant or sexist with this so bear with me lmao. Regardless, the art was pretty.
The cutting out you mentioned you had to do is pretty apparent, yes. But such are jams, I think. We learn :)
Thank you for mentioning the music and art! I'm very happy with how they came out (thanks Vyn and miracleMira, respectively).
Any Disco Elysium inspiration probably went over my head, but I still thought the presentation was pretty quality and I liked the amount of descriptive, branching paths you squeezed in for just 3 days. That said, this is a heck of a topic(s) to try for a jam and it felt a bit preachy in ways that I'm hesitant to wonder what the message was really supposed to be. I agree with others that it would land better if certain character writing was given more depth/balance.
I definitely bit off more than I could chew, and severely underestimated the amount of writing I would require. I originally estimated around 5k words and ended up with almost 10k. It probably would have been better if I avoided branching outside of the endings for the jam, so that I would have had time to actually make the story work.
> Any Disco Elysium inspiration probably went over my head
In terms of explicit references, the skills are based directly on DE skills, and there are some explicit references in the text that are basically all jokes and not important to understanding the story.
For inspiration, the overall writing style and content are heavily inspired from DE. The religion system was also meant to be like the politics system in DE, where depending on the choices you make you could "be" a Communard (communist), Fascist, Moralist (centrist), or Ultraliberal (libertarian). Unfortunately I couldn't fully integrate the religion system into the game in time for the jam. I originally planned to have it heavily affect the choices you could make in the dialogue with Utsuho, as well as having effects in dialogue and interactions throughout the rest of the story.
Nice story, the detailed descriptions of places and actions got me immersed.
I didn't quite understand how the religious alignment and personal skills even came into play in the story. And then I read about them on the game page.
I say: I think I would have much liked to see how they were supposed to be influential in the story, even if we had to limit the jam entry to a first (and second?) chapter(s). They seem to be advertised as such important aspects for the game, and yet all they do for now is change three ending paragraphs that aren't directly tied to the main stuff.
Also, bouncing off Comfy Basilisk's comment below: the one part I agree with is that Kutaka's activism is a bit vaguer than I thought it'd be. I want to make clear that the focus isn't about political views, but about "balancing" the (fictional!) sides if that makes sense.
I understood that Kutaka's way of raising the status of birds is "gradual and may bear fruits down the line", but the opposite ideology, the whole "societal revolution in one swoop" thing, is literally the heart of the events.
It may be that Kutaka's way is overshadowed by the rest of the game, but I understand that it's a 72-hour project, you may not have had time to perfect and detail everything but that's okay. The main story is greatly told and nuanced regardless.
The game page mentions a possible update so I'm not against revisiting the game to see the "personal traits" concept being expanded upon. :)
Unfortunately I had to cut out most of what I had planned for the religious alignment system and skills, but it still ended up costing a lot of time just to implement. Based on feedback from team members during development, I decided that having a complete story before the jam finished was more important than having all the mechanics fully used.
The political views is a huge issue that Comfy Basilisk's comment really made me consider. I think having more detail in the ending, plus maybe mentioning the kind of activism Kutaka did before the story, would go along way, but I think maybe having a character who is part of the revolution who is meant to be taken more seriously would help too. Perhaps they would have been forced out of the revolution due to ideological disagreements, and either assists Kutaka or gets in the way but as they are no longer part of the revolution, dealing with them doesn't end it.
Well it's still a 72-hour project. I certainly didn't expect such a (relatively) rich narrative, and it does ask that its characters' views and motives have that much work and thought put into.
While you had to make do with seemingly-lightly-motivated characters contrasting against such a heavy topic, it's not something to beat yourself up for really. The way I see it, it's a miscalculation of the scope, and there's so much even a team can do within a small time. It happens.
From what I've seen overall (the game, its release state), and from your reply, I get that there are a lot of "could have been's" and "maybe's", but again I think that's okay. I got the point of the story and understood the intent of the planned mechanics through the gameplay, and if that's not already good, I don't know what is.
So truly, good job to you and your team. Even though I said I would have preferred to see the mechanics used to the fullest, that was still a damn good hour I spent playing the game!
... so, no word of what kinds of activism kutaka got up to. just, "we did some stuff, and it got better." how? it's unsaid. why is it unsaid? did you lack confidence in your ability to describe what kinds of actions you believe would produce meaningful change? it all reads as very weak. it's dismissive of revolution, but offers no kind of alternative. just a "no, that route won't work and will get a lot of people hurt, so instead i'm going to do *mystery activities* that will *help bring people together* through *interpersonal mechanisms i won't explain*. and this just works, because it would be convenient if it worked? it reads as so deeply naive. even a more charitable reading still feels like you were just afraid to say what you really wanted to say.
the comments section of this itch novel are probably not the place to get into a dissertation on my actual politics, which are strongly in favor of social anarchy, (anarchy being a philosophy that i feel most people have the wrong idea about due to being actively lied to about it by the state, who wishes everyone to believe that it's a synonym for chaos and lawlessness, when it is actually serious nonviolent political position advocating for real means for people to support their communities, offering ways to make grassroots support happen and specifically not accept the idea that any human can be above another (anarchy literally meaning "without hierarchy")), but regardless of the position you were arguing for, i would have been happier if you actually argued for it. (well thats not true. i would have been much angrier if you were pro-fascism. but if you want to go for a leftist angle then etc etc)
I had more I wanted to write on that conflict but the deadline hit me hard. Also I realized pretty late into it that trying to be nuanced about politics in a game I make in 3 days is going to be hard. If I redo it I will probably add other endings where Kutaka changes her approach or beliefs based on your choices.
I actually agree with your politics mostly, but I'm really bad at expressing it and found it hard to write into the story in the time limit. I wanted Kukata to not just be a self-insert of my political beliefs but the good ending works out too well so if I were to change it, I would probably have a mix of good and bad outcomes. Like if Kutaka ends up stopping the revolution but supports some aspects of it, maybe she does something that starts a new conflict. Or if she doesn't change the way she does her activism, then once she stops the revolution things don't change or get worse for birds.
I think having the religion system also made it harder for me to write Kutaka's political beliefs, since I made her unchanging in her beliefs even when it didn't make sense, in order to make it easier to write the religious parts. I think if I wanted to make the political parts work better, I shouldn't have overscoped with the religion and skill system that ended up wasting a lot of time during development I could have spent on making the writing better.
> so, no word of what kinds of activism kutaka got up to. just, "we did some stuff, and it got better." how?
I feel like I did mention a little here. Kutaka stages a sit-in that helps sway some humans to her side. Though rereading it again I could have went into more detail. I think it would work better if I broke the ending up into multiple passages and went into details about what happened in each one instead of having like two sentences.
You brought up a lot of good points and I'm going to take a lot of this into account if I make a significant update.
I like the proofreading, just my distaste but politics is ASS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! but i played because okuu is peak. but i dont see a point in skills....btw i got both bad n good endings lol. for some reason the whole game reminds me of this jerma985 clip (ITEM ASYLUM MENTIONED GRAAHHH)
Bird communism!
The writing is fantastic - how did you even pull this level of writing off in 3 days!?!? I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was indeed a good ending for everyone involved, and that you could genuinely befriend Utsuho - I was worried that you wouldn't be able to, or that it would be an up-to-chance sort of thing.
The chance decisions (talking to the chickens, scaring Aya, etc.) don't really seem to affect anything, and I haven't found any ways to raise my skill levels. Maybe there wasn't any time to implement the non-linear/skill aspects further, which is understandable. Still, it didn't affect my experience much, if at all. I really enjoyed reading and playing this!
Good work on the game!
Thank you for the review! I don't know how I managed to write so much in 3 days either.
The side stuff didn't have a major impact beyond some extra text, and skill levels are fixed in the jam version. There was a lot I had to cut due to time constraints, unfortunately. If I make a post-jam update I plan on adding more skills, letting the player allocate points to them at the start, and add more side content to make it more like an RPG.
I'm glad you enjoyed the game.
This was an incredible fun read. Bird communism is very creative and Utsuho is a great friend!