Talaiporia would probably say you could have him XD

Weird! Thanks for the bug (heh) report, I’ll get that patched up in the future!

Nah, it makes them way better than the English speakers who steal and repost the game on their own sites. XD

Hey Russian translator, if you’re out there reading this, send me an email and I’ll post the translation here so more people can play the game! Glad that you liked it! 😁

Thank you! I’m a big fan of games like Depression Quest, which use un-choosable options in a similar way to showcase frustration at not being able to do certain things. Lupin III is not exactly the type of series where people spend a lot of time talking about their feelings, so I thought that exploring the things that couldn’t be said would be really good for a guy like Lupin.

Thank you so much! I had a lot of fun painting the backgrounds and studying the different seasons of Lupin III for each of the chapters! And plotting out the way that the conversations changed each time was tricky, but I’d like to tackle more conversation puzzles like that in the future.

Thank you! We’re always so glad to get to share Lupin with plenty of people, even if they’re not already fans! 

Version 0.32 Available!

Includes:

• More to read! Word count is difficult now, but I'd say roughly another 4,000 words. I've also added a new scene in that might be a little bit before your most recent saves. It'll happen right after your second game win/loss scene, and then smoothly feed back into that one of Lee jogging from last month.
• Updates to the galleries. I’ve split up the image gallery into a section for BGs/Backgrounds, and one for CGs/Illustrations. I’ve also added a ton of backgrounds and CGs that weren’t in there yet. You may have to replay scenes to make the game unlock images from earlier updates!
• Updates to the replay section; after playing Erosion and seeing the scene afterward, you may now jump to it from the replay menu at any time,
• Updates to the Achievements,
• Updates to the "About" screen, you can now jump straight to the credits from there at any time,
• Speaking of which, the credits have also been updated,
• I have also begun to add in the Route Map feature. You can find it in the Extras Menu, and it unlocks once the player's seen the credits at least once. Right now, it's just a rudimentary png. Someday, this will allow players to:
  •  view a flowchart of the game,
  • unlock new spots on it as they play further,
  • and click to jump to major scenes, so that they won't have to reload and skip through large chunks of the game.
• And of course, your general array of typo and bug fixes.

If you'd like to keep reading, NonPlatonic Forms ver 0.33 is now available for $5 and up patrons.  And hey, did you catch Let's Watch Steamboat Willie this month? It was an extra little thing that I got to work on, and it's more of Lee and Diegesis. People seemed to like it; it got shortlisted in some game competition or something? Huh. No big deal. It's not like I'm excited about it or anything. Baka. Either way, thanks for your support, and I'll see you all next month!

Thank you so much! Getting the parallax movement working with the camera dolly was a little wonky at first, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Hey, thank you! And no worries if the script is a little oblique; I'm glad that the camerawork is there to give a sense of direction. I wanted to learn to communicate more through visuals and atmosphere, so that means it was on the right track! :D

Oooh thank you so much for playing! I'll get this saved to my watch later. :3

Thank you! Making short jam games is such a joy, and I'm really happy with how cohesive the style turned out. I hope you have fun with some of the other games!

Thank you so much! I really wanted to make something short and punchy, and I couldn't be prouder of the work that every member of the team out in. They were really firing on all cylinders for the whole month, and it was amazing to get to watch it come together!

Thank you! "Cheeky" is absolutely what I'm going for when I write Liam! ^u^

Thank you so much! I hope that the concept art does help; I set up a schedule before the jam started, so we had plenty of time to try out ideas before we had to finalize things. Giving yourself space to iterate first is really important; great art never comes out right on the first try. I mean, I say that, but May's especially fantastic at initial concepts, as you can probably tell by how much of the art in there is theirs! They very much inspire me to do more sketch work in general!

And yes; I'm glad that folks that have been following Lee and Diegesis for a bit can see that extra bullet point regarding the use of copyrighted works. Often, things can be a solid jumping off point for making something that is VERY different from the original. What does it matter if you are or aren't making pizza anymore, so long as it's tasty? XD

Thank you so much! And I gotta brag on Kayla and the other musicians here; the soundtrack is dynamic, which means that for the bulk of the game, there are four separate tracks running! There’s a comedic baseline, two different semi-improv jazz tracks for varying levels of horror, and a track just for those killer horns! All of them were composed to work in time with the existing Steamboat Willie audio, and the game’s coding shifts the levels frequently in response to context and the player choices! Kayla one hundred percent vibed with the idea and listening to the music while working was such a treat each time. It’s great when you don’t even get tired of the music while bug testing!

If you’re interested in checking out the individual tracks, or want the soundtrack for easy listening, I encouraged her to put the soundtrack up on Bandcamp. Please consider supporting her over here: https://kaylaprice.bandcamp.com/album/lets-watch-steamboat-willie-ost

Wow, right on booting this up, I was instantly struck by how gorgeous and refreshing it is! I also like the atmosphere of the undersea palace, how it’s got a gently mournful feeling. The slow burn on Oto-Hime’s nature was good, too; I went in blind and she was so sweet that I forgot I was playing a horror game at all!

…then she reminded me. XD

I really really like your direction! It’s a lot harder than people think to imply movement in a non-literal way, but your camera work and transitions are fantastic; it makes the screen feel so lush and alive!

There’s something, and I still haven’t been able to figure out what the right term for it is, but it’s kind of a design language that can be found in the pacing of transitions, and knowing when to use a CG, or vary up the visual composition. You’re quite good at that, and I think it speaks to a particular insight into VNs as a medium!

Hung out and played this with the team! We had a lot of fun; we didn’t do enough runs to get to see all the dialogue options, but it looks like the stat-building is so robust that it wouldn’t be possible! We hopped straight over to a date with Silver and fell flat on our faces, and had a really good time doing it! Afterwards we had a run at a date with Anya, and things went a lot more smoothly.

The one-bit look is nice here; I like the composition of the main room! Limiting the use of color to the names and chat is a great call, it makes communicating when Krypto’s the one talking much easier!

Thanks for playing! ^u^

Yeah I wish I’d been able to figure out how to pause or advance the video; hopefully in the future that’ll be a feature present in the engine. I’m not sure how much call everyone else would have for more bespoke video playback controls, but then I wouldn’t have wasted a week trying and failing to wrangle them myself 😆

And pizza is very serious business, at least the toppings!

Thank you so much! The voice acting is definitely vital to this game; my partner nearly refused to playtest it until the lines had been added, they said that trying to read along in a timed manner was exceptionally unpleasant! 😆 It also made the last days of debugging a lot more fun for me; since when I was down to my final passes and was fine-tuning the timing, I couldn’t skip either! I’m very happy to hear that the dialogue is still snappy; I really didn’t want to ruin the director and actors’ hard work with bad editing!

Thank you! I had a lot of trouble with the first draft of the script, and I had to refer to some troubleshooting on how to write a short film, which had some different storytelling rules from what I used to with games and prose.

And yeah, Ren’Py is amazing. There were so many places where I wasn’t sure before starting that the coding would be possible. And then when the jam started and I was actually able to get going, it was so much simpler than expected. 😆 I love this engine.

Thank you! I broke a lot of my own personal rules for VNs while making this, including taking away so much interactivity from the player. I lost a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement a pause menu too, and it’s easily my one big regret. I’m fairly certain that none of this would work if the game were longer than eight minutes; even this is pushing it. But it was fun to get to experiment and see if the idea would fly at all.

And heck yeah, I’m getting yours downloaded now; I’m looking forward to seeing your adaptation work! 😁

Thank you! I think that having strong silhouettes is really important for a visual novel. Our sprite artist, May, is really incredible with body language, and so we focused on having lots of poses, rather than lots of facial expressions. Though they did really impress me by adding mouths and eyes anyway! 😁

Thank you! One-location games are great for jams, and I liked the idea of doing something Mystery Science Theater-Style with these characters.

Thank you so much! The voice actors were both a joy to work with, and I felt so lucky that they understood the characters so well!

Thanks for playing! I wanted to get a little experimental and see what Ren'Py could do! There's a lot here that I think wouldn't work in a longer game, and for a little while I was scared that the format would end up too different to be fun, if someone was expecting something more traditional.

The bickering is more of the same from me though, I'm afraid. Man, I love writing bickering couples! XD

Liam needs to get to work freeing those games, they won't free themselves!

YOOOOO I was hoping that this would be up your alley! Adding this to my Watch Later list for after work. ^u^

Thank you! Niles is such a little terror to write, and I was astonished that Josh Wells was able to wrangle the bulk of Niles' puffed-up blatherings in a single take! That dialogue tends to end up being a mouthful.

It’s complicateeddddddd XD

👀 Oooh, I’ll check it out! Thanks for playing!

Heeheehee, perhaps rather expectedly, Hawaiian pizza is one of Liam’s favorites, and depending on your choices in NonPlatonic Forms, you can force Niles to buy one for him. 😆 Niles might grumble, but I think he secretly likes it.

And thank you! I think charming and horror go together really well, but it can be hard to pull off, so I’m really glad to hear we got it right in your eyes!

Oooh, the fixed-camera-angle vibes are strong,especially in the opening, the composition of each shot is amazingly strong. They give me a wonderful 90's FMV feeling, which is very nostalgic and dear to me. Your character designs are so appealing, and I'd love to play the rest of this if you expanded on the demo!

Oooh, the fixed-camera-angle vibes are strong,especially in the opening, the composition of each shot is amazingly strong. They give me a wonderful 90's FMV feeling, which is very nostalgic and dear to me. Your character designs are so appealing, and I'd love to play the rest of this if you expanded on the demo!

I'm a sucker for a good menu; going straight into channel surfing from the main menu was such a playful way to begin.  

Watching the hints and bits of different world-building accumulate as the story progressed had a satisfying feel to it, and the art direction was a cohesive combination of Saturday-morning cartoon(with very nostalgic weekday morning kids' show vibes) and gore-splattered horror!

I'm a sucker for a good menu; going straight into channel surfing from the main menu was such a playful way to begin. 
Watching the hints and bits of different world-building accumulate as the story progressed had a satisfying feel to it, and the art direction was a cohesive combination of Saturday-morning cartoon(with very nostalgic weekday morning kids' show vibes) and gore-splattered horror!

Happy to make a Monday memorable. 😁