Thanks so much! I will take your input into consideration when designing my future projects. Nonlinearity quickly gets out of hand so I find myself walking a tightrope between the art having to be very simple and the story being nonlinear. It's hard to have a huge branching plot alongside really developed art. The simplicity of the art was a huge advantage in The Machine.
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The reward of the non linear path is that you end up with a game with a lot of replayability. I think thats a huge part of why The Machine is so popular. The most common complaint I see from other gamers who play a lot of homebrew games is that theyre too short. Art style and the mood that can afford a game is great, and your work is particularly great in that regard, but especially for those investing a pretty big whack sometimes in physical games find it hard to justify the price for games that are so short. I cant even begin to imagine how much work must go into creating a branching game like The Machine but it was 100% worth it. I was speaking to someone today who shared a picture of all his physical release homebrew games for GB, GBC and GBA. I asked him his top 5, he listed them but said “if you have to play one game play The Machine, its insane”. Out of about 50 games he physically owned that was his recommendation, I cant think of better praise to give than that. Its really something special.