itch.io

Thanks for reaching out! I just sent you an email.

Hello! Yes, I do. All of my games are small enough to fit in regular mailing envelopes, so international shipping isn’t too tough to manage. If you can receive letters in the mail, I can ship a game to you!

(And thanks, I had fun making it)

Just played this with some internet friends who all share a love of folk music, and we had a really good time! We started out with a sibling pair of Gold Rush-era highway robbers who had a dispute while steering a fleeing stagecoach, resulting in the sister sending her brother to his (likely) death in a river below.

We tracked the ballad into the vaudeville era, seeing how different performers reshaped it into everything from a cautionary tale about sibling rivalry to a gruesome ghost story to a commentary on gender. In one of the face card ending scenes, we even pulled all the way into the present day and explored how a YouTuber tracked the source of a modern cryptid back to the ballad and the ghost stories it inspired.

This is a fun and creative game premise that's fairly easy to set up and play with minimal time and tools - thank you for writing and sharing it!

That's very cool, thanks so much for sharing how your game went! It's interesting and helpful to hear how different sessions approach/engage with the LARP in different ways. Being an all-shapeshifter friend group definitely makes sense to me as one way to approach the game even if it's not strictly as written. I'm also glad the time format in particular worked well, that's one of the elements that's in there specifically because of the suggested theme list from the Golden Cobra Challenge.

https://beatingthebinary.itch.io/this-party-sucks

https://beatingthebinary.itch.io/shapeshifter-problems

When I’ve facilitated we’ve often ended up with a laugh/cry split! Moments of both across different scenes. I tried to make the safety tools and game tone very clear up front and format an epilogue structure that’s hopeful and grounding because you’re right, it’s possible for it to feel pretty brutal at times.

Thanks so much! If you get a chance to play it, I’d love to hear how it goes/anything that stands out to you from the gameplay process. The distractions in particular were largely pulled from things I’ve personally done at the same time as messaging with friends.

Gameplay is designed to have three main scenes followed by an epilogue, so I’d say it works best as a one shot! All of my playtests were single session games.

My apologies for the formatting limits! I just went in and added a PDF version of the game as well. If there is another file format that would work better for you, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

This gave me an instant nostalgia boost, what a truly delightful generator!

I've been using the Rewards feature to sell physical copies of some of my small roleplaying games. My impression is that the space to fill in an address doesn't appear until buyers go to the game download page after purchase - most of them go there swiftly and enter an address, but occasionally they don't, meaning they purchase the game but then give me no way to mail it to them. Is there any way to require that buyers input a mailing address during, rather than after, the purchasing process so that I get mailing information from everyone buying a physical reward?

I've added a notice to all of my physical rewards descriptions reminding people to please provide an address, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes I'm able to successfully contact buyers via email and request a mailing address that way, but I don't always get a response when I do that, either. One person who I was able to reach via email said that they had paid with PayPal and had assumed that the PayPal address information was given to me during that process until I reached out to them (as far as I can tell, it was not).

Your journal entry is wonderful! I don’t often get descriptions of gameplay from folks I haven’t directly facilitated a game for, thank you so much for sharing how you approached Off Recipe.

I want to send this to my undergrad, who had us all do the Meyers Briggs as part of residence hall staff training.

Thank you for the thoughtful reflections and feedback! It's really lovely to hear how the tone/structure of the game feels for others, especially since being both intense and hopeful is a lot of where I hoped it would land.

Party Prep: Yes, all the party prep moves happen before each party! The players give each new party a type, a complication, and at least one guest, and the protagonist has a brief coping interlude before starting the party scene.

The Palette: It's definitely allowed/encouraged to talk through what an element on the Palette means, especially if it feels unclear or anyone in the group is concerned about how it might manifest in play, and a yes could still be vetoed by other players. I realize that the way I have it written could lead to the feeling that if someone already added a theme as a "yes," another player can't change it or modify it with a "no" - that's something I'll work to clarify the next time I revise this for print, thank you for pointing out how it read to you.

Part of the point of adding yeses and nos in varied sequence is that sometimes ideas for what might land in either column can arise from what lands in the other - if someone wants cafés to be a game location and suggests that in the "yes" column, that might prompt someone else to put "angry/confrontational customers" in the "no" column, for example, to refine the emerging possible theme in a way that'll still be comfortable for them. That's also why a "no" means something won't be in the game, but a "yes" only suggests it might be because at least one player would like it - yeses are still subject to the needs and comfort of the group.

Thank you so much! I will need shipping details in order to get those out to you, is it all right to email you at the email connected to your purchase and ask for your address?

https://beatingthebinary.itch.io/this-party-sucks

Lovely, creative, both soothing and energizing, a truly excellent collection of tiny LARPs! I like them all, but the laundry folding game that includes union organizing themes might be my favorite.

This gave me chills as I played it - lovely, beautifully paced, intense in a way I didn't know I needed.

What a deeply charming game! It reads like poetry, and feels as though gameplay would have a fun, player-determined balance of the cozy and the exciting.

Art is in progress now! You can check it out here. Trying to decide if I want to focus more in refining these pictures, or on expanding the number of pictures overall.

Love your concept sketches, especially all the little artifacts and the flower eyes! Looks like the design of this game will be really visually fun.

Thanks! I'm not directly discussing the story details too much because I think it's more interesting to play if you don't know everything that's coming, but most of the text is readable through the storytest for interested folks. I'll post art in this thread soon too, I've started sketching everything out and mainly need to add color now.

Also, nice Undertale icon!

Script is complete! I figured out the very tiny bits of CSS I needed to add some delayed display effects to key pieces of text, thanks to support from folks in the Text forum for this jam. Now my only priority is doing the illustrations - that's going to be my main work up until the deadline. I'll try to do a WIP art post tomorrow.

Thanks! Your link helped me figure out how to put together the effect I wanted. Starting with zero CSS/Twine knowledge meant I didn't know where to try to paste CSS or Javascript code to make macros work in my game without a guide.

Making progress on plugging my now 95% completed script into Twine! It looks like this so far.

I still have almost zero knowledge of CSS, so that's the main thing that's hanging me up right now. Trying to figure out how to install other people's macros into Twine to do some very basic edits to the visual formatting of my game, but I'm finding the basics of that process awkwardly tough to figure out, even with Googling/using resource links from the game jam.

Does anyone have advice for how to make text display in Twine in such a way that new pieces of text display after a short time delay, but on the same page?

It seems like the <<replace>> macro sets here might do it, but I don't 100% understand how to use macros/is there stuff I need to download and install in Twine somehow to make them work?

Hi folks!

I am 100% new to itch.io and to gamemaking in general. I initially thought I'd just vaguely follow this game jam and enjoy playing some of the results, but then I had an idea partway through the week and figured I'd give it a go.

I'm going to make a Twine game called Gopher Heart that's pretty much a playable version of one of my earliest childhood memories. It will be a little bit sweet and a little bit gruesome, which I think encapsulates a lot of childhood. I've never worked with Twine before, but I really love playing Twine games and I've wanted to learn how to design in Twine for a while now. I'm happy that the beginners game jam is giving me an excuse to finally work on that!

So far I have the game about 80% scripted and have very rough concept sketches for most of the artwork, but haven't started any of the coding. I also need to figure out what kind of art style will let me finish the illustrations in a comfortable, timely manner. Once I have some digital art tests done, I'll post them here so folks can get a clearer sense of the style I'm going for.

Looking forward to following other people's game design processes and seeing what everybody makes!