Post by Propel S in Awaken Ye Elder God jam comments

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Always interesting to see a renpy game pop-up. Concept is fun, at worst its a "what animal are you?"quiz which is cute and at best its an engaging cosmic horror romp against humanity.

The gameplay is a little strange just with how everything is calculated but its playable and is somewhat retraversible even without comprehension. There is no 'load' option, which I personally would hope for in a renpy game to really programatically explore all the branches. (and it seems like you wanted too because you have saves)

It also appppeears that you are hiding some easter egg secrets relating to some other media (your previous games?) in this game ;)

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mrchapel0203327 days ago

Oh, I may have failed to remove all of the save features included in the default renpy set up. That was my intent since each play through is only intended to take a few minutes at most. The "what animal are you?" is absolutely something I found while implementing the system. I ended up with 42 animals just to make that part of it interesting (an expansion of that game would absolutely have more animals but also have some sort of counter for which animals you've managed to end up as).

You are absolutely right on the calculation part. That's probably the thing I was least happy with since you don't know how much power a choice will cost before you make it. I went back and forth about adding that and eventually decided against it since I didn't want to explicitly hint at the "right" choice.

Well... since you figured out they exist either by reading my dev blog or looking at the source: "Sharktillary" and "Evil Clown" give you secret options. :)

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Propel S327 days ago(+1)

ah okay, that makes sense - on the first point.

I went back and read the dev blog and was explicitly called out for cheating. I was wondering why a dev was hashing their source code, I just assumed it was dedication; but it makes sense that it was an open-source protection. Fun. I couldn't find these games on your itch page so I wasnt sure where they were being devved

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mrchapel0203326 days ago (1 edit)

Sharktillary was made a while back (really far back, it was made in Adobe Flash) before life took me in a radically different direction and, with that same group, I never managed to actually ship the game with the evil, killer clowns. Sharktillary was released on Android. It might have compatibility issues now, but it is technically still available. A random YouTube suggestion of someone doing a Let's Play of it is partially the reason I came over to itch.io and started looking up game jams to enter.

Being open sourced, I didn't want to make the solution of the game's main puzzle (the name of the Great Old One) too easy to just look up. That said, you can absolutely recreate it with a little knowledge of Python by finding the script that generates the clues.

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