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Your presentation was the star of your game. Your tricks with the shaking car, the twinkling stars, the undoing text for the angry work emails? Chefkiss. That's not even talking about the animations, the use of palette for the background to signify the sort of moods. For someone new to renpy(I believe? may be wrong (shrug)), that didn't hinder you from picking up a ton of tricks and making it a visual treat.

Narratively I think we're by some more shaky ground, starting with the most trivial of details in the two character's names -- Ray and Ryan are visually similar. Generally as a rule you want to avoid having characters with very similar names. The prolonged coffee visit could be enough to pull people away from the work, given the duration after traffic. Like you bring in a good verisimilitude in your details to show your subject matter knowledge, but I think we spent a bit too long in the weeds. We were ready to move on a bit quicker.

However, you also did some good elements that blossom with the knowledge of the end. You set up elements that aren't quite foreshadowing, but are given context with the ending. You had some smooth lines, well crafted in their poetry. The structure of the choices are well thought out.


Prose and structure aside, you did a fantastic job and captured the spirit of the tale you wanted to tell cleanly. You showed the transformation you were intending to capture in the characters in tandem with the dates you cleanly used to set the duration of the narrative. Well done! People will surely make note of you for your next project.

I'm familiar with coding but I'm a complete stranger to Renpy. Honestly, my main goal in entering the jam is to force myself to learn how to make some cool stuff work in Renpy, like wagging tail animation or beaming lights. So, I started to get a bit serious to learn in mid-May. Turns out I had too much fun trying things and the writing suffered as a result.

That being said, I'm glad the story still came up okay-ish (?). Writing is not my strongest suit as I barely even write anything lol. I intended to make the MC as smug as possible with the coffee part. I guess it kinda worked but, as you said (and what I saw from the stream), that part was too long and bored people out. I also didn't calculate the cultural differences, things that are normal here around me are probably bizarre concepts for the other part of the world. There are also parts I wanted to explore more but couldn't because of the deadline.

It's great to hear lots of criticisms from different points of view and I'm thankful for that! I can now better understand what I should do to improve things. I consider myself lucky because all the visual tricks I've done pulled the weight this time. I'll do my best to not repeat the same mistake in my future project!