itch.io

Since the game is in the Gameboy rom format, it requires an emulator unless you play it on Game Boy hardware or an fgpa device that replicates the game boy hardware. Even an fgpa could be considered hardware emulation. It's possible for me to convert it to an exe but it would be inside of an emulator wrapper. I figure it's better to give the player more flexibility instead.

Ah the demo is ancient and hasn't been updated since the first version but maybe this is a good time to update it.

Which form of charity did you give all of your money to?

Do you know which version of the game you have? Is it digital or physical? Do you use discord? Would love to discuss this bug a little bit more with you.

I'm sorry, I sell my digital editions through my publisher too. I'd love to just toss my games up on itch but I'm bad at promo so if I sell stuff on my own on itch it doesn't sell well enough to justify the time I spend making it.

Thanks so much! There should be 3 endings like you discovered. There may be some variants of endings or um secrets for harder difficulties.

You can play it on MacOS using a program called an emulator. It pretends to be a Gameboy and runs the rom file. Here is one example of a free Gameboy emulator for MacOS: https://sameboy.github.io/downloads/

I've been pretty hooked on this game it's really nice. Are you going to add art to the jokers? They seem a little blank.

Oh damn, guess I have to keep exporting pocket files then...

Happy to help! I don't even have a pocket but I remembered seeing this online so now needing a pocket file is kind of a solved issue. I never liked having to export a separate proprietary format for a gameboy game because roms are such a nice clean universal format. It was like needing a different power cord in every country you go to.

https://retropatcher.jonabrams.com/

That's awesome to hear! I think you're right and it's hard to imagine how much work it is to make. It's unique because of that but another one too soon might put me in the hospital before it's done anyway.

Thanks so much! I will take your input into consideration when designing my future projects. Nonlinearity quickly gets out of hand so I find myself walking a tightrope between the art having to be very simple and the story being nonlinear. It's hard to have a huge branching plot alongside really developed art. The simplicity of the art was a huge advantage in The Machine.

I find it really hard to estimate playtime because since I made the game when I play through it, I am kind of like a speed runner since I always know exactly what to do next. I don't want to spoil too much but Specimen is not as nonlinear as The Machine. It does have multiple endings though. If you want more games like that, buying my games would help sustain their development!

There are a lot of extra characters in the ascii sheet and all you need to do is identify 9 tiles you can use. If you want to do more than one portrait, you can switch the font sheet so that the other portraits use the same 9 tiles.

I used an old trick which is to just add the avatar tiles to your ascii sheet and then type in the characters that represent the avatar when inputting text. This is very helpful with that: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/RichardULZ/2920dca52989902dbb7225318256c545/r...

Thanks so much! There's a lot of great Gameboy devs I respect so that really means a lot.

Thanks for the support! Some endings are better than others but it also depends on your perspective

For some reason that username didn't work for me but I have now added the rom to the downloads of the heliosphere comic so you should be able to download it there.

Later tonight I can add it to this project and you can download it here too.

Hey I can send it to you. Want to give me an email or discord username?

Great work!

Sometimes it takes longer, haha

I love how you conveyed that glow that rises up from the streets in a city.

Really cool!

Really cool concept and nice execution too

Really nice!

Ironically I suggested one of the palettes and then used a different one. The 'blood tide' one was designed to use in a painterly way but I felt like doing line art.

No, I'm sorry I know I listed it as game assets but I just didn't know what category best describes a picture.

The one thing that confused me about your comment is the fact that there aren't boxes in that level. If you mean you got stuck because of where an egg got pushed, you should try some other movement patterns for the eggs because the level does have a solution.

This is still to be determined. We have to weigh the risk of introducing new bugs that are more significant than the ones we fixed since the ones we fixed are pretty minor. I can let you know when I know.

It might be but I haven't taken any steps towards doing it yet.

Thanks so much! I am glad you liked it.

On some emulators it is impossible to force dmg mode but some people might want to play dmg mode either for nostalgic reasons or to do something like apply a custom palette. That's why we included it but you are right that the regular rom is dmg compatible too. The cartridge has the gbc rom loaded onto it.

Thanks for the report! We will have this fixed in 1.1

Really cool plug-in! I can't wait to try it.

I'll take your feedback into consideration. Thanks for your honesty.

Thanks so much for playing!

Thanks for the video buddy!

We have already done an extremely thorough round of testing and bug fixing so I'd be really surprised if there were any serious bugs. We've played through this build many times without issue and have had the help of some incredible testers.