Thanks for taking the time to play and especially to write out such an extensive account of your experiences and thoughts!
A lot of your criticism is super valid. You're totally right that the game is janky, poorly optimised, and visually discordant, among other things.
For some perspective on how we made the game and what resources were available to us, this was my first video game I made out of school. We had a very tight time constraint of two months (the album was already scheduled to be released and Jade Statues insisted that the game launch with the album) At the time I hadn't yet wrangled the ins and outs of Unity's rendering, animation,
and lighting systems. Some of the jank I decided to lean hard into, such as the collage like visual inconsistency of freely accessible 3D models found online, and deliberately turning down or off the LOD quality tools to make the trees and water look "good" at a distance. In the end I think we curated a kind of "vibe" that fits the aesthetic of the broader Vaporwave scene and aesthetics (which this game and especially this album was a part of at the time of release, releasing on Dream Catalogue, at the time a pretty critical locum of the scene)
The text boxes are a bit busted for sure. they SHOULD display all the text at the very least but I did my best in the time we had available to us to make sure they functioned. The priority was of course the music, however, and matching the scenes to the music as pers Jade Statues' vision for the spaces. The game was sort of planned out by JS and the other collaborators at the time, and I came in enthusiastic about doing my best while knowing full well I had loads of knowledge gaps.
Anyways, since EXECTUVIE TOWERS I've had a LOT more experience honing my skills and attuning my vision for projects I wished to follow through on. My other game VIRTUA BLINDS served as a sort of follow up, also embedded in vaporwave aesthetics and music, while serving as an excuse to learn the skills I hadnt gotten the chance to learn yet at the time. There are other projects on my page as you can see, some of which are more protypical than they are what i'd consider "complete" but you may find them interesting in any case.
As for sending lucy's regards, thanks for that! You can run FASTer by pressing all the letters in the word "FAST" on your keyboard at once. There's also a code for JUMPing higher, by pressing all the letters to the word JUMP at once. There is also LEAP and RUN which offer different heights and speeds. Theres a handful of other cheats too, most of which do silly useless stuff like play a sound effect or change the material of what you're looking at. If you want more of them let me know lol
In terms of my more recent work, I strongly recommend checking out STREET UNI X, I spent 6 years working on it and it's a MUCH MUCH more polished experience and what I would consider a "complete game". It is like a Tony Hawks Pro Skater type game on unicycles (a sport that I am very much interested in and take part in myself). If you don't have the means to purchase a copy you can email me and I'll send you a code for a copy here on itch if you like.
Anyway thanks a lot for your care and attention! I really appreciate when stories like this come up for something I made nearly ten years ago now. It's cool that even this janky and rushed project is still resonating with folks at all.
Also since the project is so old, I've basically given up on updating it, so while I appreciate the feedback in terms of like, things that could be fixed or updated, it's not possible for me to make changes, as much as I'd like to!
<3 daffodil