Weeell, this is some kinda spooky coincidence cos I just finished playing your Spooktober game and was typing up a comment on your page when my browser crashed (thankfully, I'd already copied most of it to a text doc before it happened, so I only lost like a sentence, haha) and when I reopened it, I saw an itch notification saying you'd commented here! Which means you officially beat me to it x3
Anyways, my brain is trying to refuse to compute that I could possibly be anyone's favourite Spooktober writer x3 I feel so vastly inferior to everyone, haha. But I feel incredibly honoured that you think that and wish I could give you a giant hug of appreciation!! Thank you so much for playing this one and for leaving such lovely feedback <3
I certainly couldn't have made the game that we did without everyone's help and amazing talent :3 It was a bit of a bumpy road in places, and there were times we thought we might have to resort to cutting out big chunks of the game, but we made it in the end. I think this might actually be my first-ever project where 100% of the art is original (none of it by me, of course, since I can't draw to save my life T_T) Cos usually, even when I've had the opportunity to work with awesome artists during other jams, I have still ended up using a few paid or free assets here and there. This time, aside from the fonts and a handful of edited asset pack sound effects, everything else was original stuff made for the jam by various folks on the team ^-^
That's so cool that you tried both pairs of voices too! There was a point where it was looking like it might only be possible to get the BxB pairing fully finished in time for the jam deadline, but thankfully, with a lot of work and not much sleep, we got the full lot of voice combos in there, haha.
!!!There be spoilers below!!!
Hehe, weeeell, you were supposed to be able to play hangman as well as Simon Says, but that was one of the things that very swiftly got slashed with the scope knife cos I realised there was no way we'd have time to add 2 minigames, and also didn't wanna add to the list of needed UI assets >.< So yeah, instead Rhime just has a convenient headache if you try to play hangman xD
Speaking of managing to get stuff done, that point you mentioned about the "credits" well, we had a backup plan to end the game just before there if things went drastically wrong and it wasn't possible to actually finish the remaining sections of the game in time for the end of the jam, haha. I even had an extremely rough alternate draft of the hospital scene where Rhime's reasoning for what happened prior to that is similar but different x3
I would've been gutted if we had no choice but to go with that alternate version because it would've meant ditching the whole idea of Rhime being a deity and all the meta stuff, but it was better than not having an emergency backup plan at all I guess!
I totally agree about going meta being hard to pull off, and I'm still not entirely convinced we managed it here without being somewhat cringy in the process, haha, but it was a fun experiment to try out :3 I haven't done any forced quits in my projects since Impostor I think, and that was years ago back when I was still using Tyranobuilder!
Aaaand, I can also see people being annoyed by the shutdowns as well, yeah x3 In fact, I annoyed myself when I tried to playtest on my potato laptop because on my PC, the game launches pretty fast, but on my potato, it takes like 30+ seconds to launch sooo, it's kinda painful trying to get some of those endings when you have to keep re-launching the game on a terrible system T_T I really don't think using Naninovel/Unity helps the situation either cos I'm sure it would launch and load waaaay faster if it were a Ren'Py game!
I'm glad that you at least found it amusing more than annoying though :3 Tbh, it wouldn't surprise me if something similar had already been done in some form by someone else! Especially with how meta stuff seems to be getting more popular these days. With any luck though, there's nothing tooooo similar out there >.<
xD I love that you did a full psycho playthrough, haha. That's like what I do when I play stuff like Mass Effect, haha. Always pick the choices that come naturally to me on a first play (usually the 'good' choices), then 2nd play, full renegade :P
Yeeeeah, the cat was a bit of a contentious thing x3 I even said that while a CG would be cool for the shock factor, it might be too upsetting for a lot of people, so maybe it would be better to just have Li close their eyes, and handle that scene in darkness with just SFX in the hope it would somehow make it a bit less grim... but then NeonSaphir drew the CG anyways, and there was no way I was gonna waste it, so we just thought, screw it, it's not like the player is forced to take that action, so let's go for it x3 I have a bad feeling that the animal death content warning might put a lot of people off of even playing the game though >.<
And thank YOU for playing it and for being so sweet and supportive! It means a lot and I really appreciate it :3 Gonna go splurge my ramble about your game in your comments now! Mmmwwaahahahahahahaha :D