itch.io

You're severely misunderstanding a lot here. Interactions with other users are by no means limited on itch just because they're public, and they're a large part of the way many people use the site. The discussion posts feature exists for a reason. Your malformed personal opinions on private messaging really have nothing to do with whether or not itch can be considered a social platform when it's very frequently used as one.

There isn't a distinction between "users" and "developers" on itch, so I'm sincerely having trouble following the second paragraph. Uploading an .exe file doesn't bar users from leaving comments or opening discussion posts. Banning someone from a game's page isn't an answer to being antagonized in different areas of the site.

There's also just the simple fact that there are reasons to block someone that wouldn't necessarily get them banned. You can be harassed or stalked off-site. Someone can poke and prod at you in a way that doesn't overtly violate any terms of use but is clearly meant to hurt you. Hell, people can just get on your nerves. That's all enough to stop or at least hide their interactions with you. Just letting the site's moderation take care of it isn't a solution to the problems this post is actually raising.

It's supposed to be treated more like a modern-day mute feature than a true "block" feature, but it doesn't even do that well.

If I mute someone anywhere else, the whole point is that I'm not shown their comments or posts without actively seeking them out. If I "mute" someone on itch, it doesn't even stop them from showing up in my main notifications feed. I haven't seen any sort of blocking or muting feature on any other site work that way, save for maybe Twitter after already starting its descent into a Nazi-run cesspool.

You know, it's on me for taking the bait and replying to someone who seems to genuinely believe in reverse racism in the first place. Thank you for indirectly strengthening my original point by acting like a complete idiot while disagreeing with me. I won't be responding to you anymore. Goodbye!

Really squeeze those neurons together and I'm sure you can figure out why European fairytales don't exist in the same cultural context as the traditional belief system of a group whose cultures, religions, and people have been massacred for centuries.

Thank you so much for taking the time to play through my game and make a video on it! Like I said in the Discord, I added a downloadable file for content warnings that I meant to include before. It's in kind of a weird format, but I wanted to offer options to people who like to minimize spoilers.

I'm really glad you recorded this one. It's super interesting to see how different people react to different scenes. Everyone initially sympathizes with completely different characters in completely different ways.

It's such a strange feeling hearing someone cry because of something I made. There's a small sense of guilt, but it's oddly warm? Just knowing that something I wrote connected with a person I've never met before enough to move them to tears. It makes me sound like some kind of creep if I'm like "It was great listening to you have to reach for a box of tissues!" though. I hope you get what I mean.

I'm also really happy you liked the gameplay of the snowy sections. It took a lot of iterating on the same thing to get players moving how they needed to. I set up the first snowy map just to teach players how the rocks and the lights worked in a safe environment, but a lot of my friends got completely lost before they even found the first rock. For the other sections to make sense, it was necessary to have those basics down, so there were a lot of changes I made before and after posting. I probably flexed my game design muscles more for that one area than I have for any of my other actually-gameplay-focused games. It means a lot that you appreciate what I was going for.

(It was heartbreaking watching you grab the Power Pod .5 seconds after the timer ran out, by the way.)

I was acutely aware of the issues with cutting off textboxes early, and I made an effort to keep important dialogue out of any text you couldn't keep onscreen. In theory, anything that you might have missed could be gleaned from context. 

I get the frustration, though. There's no way to know you didn't miss anything important if you can't see what you missed. I want to keep the interruptions for the dialogue's pacing, but it's something I would have liked to have an option for. It'd be easy to add a toggle if I used basically any other engine, but navigating around RPG Maker's base code AND all the plugins I'd already included just wasn't feasible for me, unfortunately. If I revisit it, I'll definitely look at writing my own plugin to make an adjustment.

Thank you again for playing.

When I played Águeda a few months ago, I really adored it. The art and the writing were both fantastic, and they contributed perfectly to the dark, oppressive atmosphere of the game. I loved navigating the derelict hallways and rooms, slowly solving puzzles while simultaneously learning more about the location I was in. Even when I got lost, it felt like a natural part of understanding and appreciating my surroundings. By the time I'd finally gotten to the chase scene, I'd naturally learned the layout of the house well enough to navigate it in such a high-stakes scenario. It was very, very rewarding to me as a player, in terms of both the narrative and game design. I was very eager to install the demo again today to see how far it had come and show it off to my friends.

Unfortunately, I had to put the game down this time immediately after starting the chase scene from the original demo. I mean this with kindness, but I genuinely think the bats ruin this experience. Speaking purely in terms of gameplay, they are incredibly frustrating to play around. Their movements are so fast and unpredictable that they often seem impossible to avoid; this problem is exacerbated a lot by the fact that you mostly face them in three-tile hallways with very little wiggle room. Because of how the game handles auto-saving, it's also incredibly easy to get locked into a state where you're one hit away from dying and can't even hope to dodge the bats because you're moving at half-speed.

I think the greater tragedy, though, is how this hurts the tone of the game. The slow, subtle feeling of creeping dread felt like the lifeblood of the demo I'd played months ago. I adored the discomfort caused by the narrative blurring the lines between the supernatural and the mundane. Until the very final chase scene, the most unsettling portions of the demo still felt like they could have been based in reality; even the chase scene itself seemed like it could be purely symbolic. The bats, though, don't seem to be grounded in reality at all, nor do they seem to tie into Águeda's psyche. The way they decapitate Águeda is visibly overexaggerated, and this saps away the beautifully uncomfortable groundedness every time the animation plays. This clashes heavily with the psychological horror that the game is otherwise steeped in.

Besides the imagery, I think even the way the bats affect the gameplay itself really hurts the game's atmosphere. Unlike my first time with the demo, I felt pressured to avoid exploring the building or interacting with anything beyond what was absolutely necessary. Rather than excitedly look for clues and immerse myself in the story, I rushed through to the next cutscene and brute-forced whatever puzzles I could. It was really, really heartbreaking not to be able to experience everything as I did before because of this, but I just couldn't bear to risk getting caught in that loop of dying and restarting over and over as I explored. For this reason, I also had less of an understanding of the building's layout when the time came for the chase scene. This, mixed with the slowness with which I moved due to the fact that all my health had been sapped by bats a few seconds prior, made the chase feel borderline impossible. After the stress of the bats, I was simply too frustrated to finish it this time.

I really hope it's obvious that I'm only leaving this comment because I absolutely adore Águeda as a game. I've been studying the art and the atmosphere since I first saw it however long ago, hoping to take what I learn from it and apply it to my own work someday. I'm so excited to see where it ends up that I can't quite put it into words. I want to experience Águeda as the best version of itself it can possibly be, because I truly think it deserves it. I really hope you'll take this into consideration.

The fish designs scratched a really specific itch for me; I had an audible reaction to the ray, which is not common for me at all. I could see myself playing a much longer version of this just to see the different ways various marine life is mutated.

Once I got this game working, it quickly became one of my favorites in the jam so far. The art style is very polished, and I'm really impressed with the gameplay mechanics you managed to include using RM2K3. The characters all have a very specific "early 2000s RPG Maker" charm to them as well. 

My only feedback is that the endings confused me a bit. I respect when things are kept open-ended, but the cats are such a specific image, I was hoping for a little bit more of an explanation as to why they were there. It felt like I missed something huge even after getting all 3 endings.

Keep up the good work! I look forward to what comes next.

Hey, just so you know, this game doesn't run on some newer computers unless you manually inject RTP files into it after downloading it. I got it to work after following these directions, but I'd recommend doing this yourself for the released files.

https://moxx.net/articles/rm2k3/

Hi! I want to start by saying this is supposed to be informational rather than confrontational, and this isn't an overall review of the game. I was playing though the project with a friend and enjoying it for the most part, but we've set it down for now because a particular character's introduction made both of us a bit uncomfortable.

The short version is that I would suggest changing at least the name of the W-ndigo character. W-ndigos have unfortunately been co-opted and appropriated a lot by western media, but they are tied heavily to the traditional beliefs of several Native American cultures. This has been a huge problem for years that started way outside of you, but depictions like this tend to strip away Native Americans' ownership of their own history and culture; it's generally asked that stories about indigenous "myths" just be told by indigenous people. (There are a lot of interesting articles and opinion pieces about this written by Native Americans you can find around online. These tend to give more context as to what the W-ndigo actually is to them, as well.)

Interestingly, the westernized image of the W-ndigo is often so far separated from its original concept that I've seen people say just changing the name is enough. I wouldn't use this as a rule, but I think it's at least a good baseline.

The art in this one is really great! Using one location for a majority of the game is a really smart way to save on development time when you're hand-drawing so much. Of course,  it also works well with the main allegory of the game being the protagonist's inability to make any progress with their mother. Starting over so often was a little frustrating for me personally, but I think that's just how my brain operates when playing games like this.

I mostly liked the approach you took with the writing as well. It shows a very specific type of abuse (and a very specific reaction to it) that's hard to capture in art. It's a lot easier to just show overt violence as shorthand for child abuse, so I respect the depiction of the much more common slow wearing down of a child's confidence and wellbeing. Like I said, the symbolism of the frozen setting and the gameplay mechanics are great for this subject. My only criticism is that the exposition towards the end feels a little direct in comparison. The mother's antagonism in particular seems to condense down years' worth of verbal abuse into a very short speech, so we don't really get to see the sense of love or familiarity that makes their relationship so complicated.

This is really only noticeable because the rest of the storytelling is handled so well just through basic character interactions and imagery, though. You've already got great visuals and interactions throughout the game for most of what you're telling the player, so I think they could do a bit more heavy lifting than you think. (I also get that planning out a story that touches on such a complex issue, especially one that has to condense such a large span of time into such a short timeframe, is just super difficult for a jam entry.) I'm very into what you've made here regardless, and I hope you continue to develop games and tell stories like this one.

thank you for leaving such an in-depth comment! I'm glad the story resonated with you so much. There are a lot of throughlines i tried to include throughout the entire timeline of events so it was still enoyable on a second playthrough, so it's cool to see you picking up on some of those already. 

I did have an idea for a reconnection years down the line, maybe when the characters are in their 30s or 40s, but I don't know if I'll ever actually do anything with it. I think Addie is a little too prideful and obsessive to just let the whole thing go, though. She definitely tries to find out more for herself once she realizes Clara can't be the one to tell her. I don't know for sure how much she would actually discover (or be willing to accept), but it would at least come up if the two ever talked again.

I feel that if I say more, I won't be able to stop from just dumping out my entire writing process and everything about the characters rattling around in my head, so I'll leave it at that :'). I'm really glad you liked it.

Thank you!

Hi! If I'm overstepping or this isn't how you want the message board to be used, please feel  free to tell me or just delete the post.

I just wanted to let anyone who might have tried to play it earlier that my game, Frozen Forward, is functional now. There was a version that constantly threw up errors and failed to load a lot of audio + visuals, and there was a chunk of time when the entry showed up on the jam page but the page itself was restricted and inaccessible.

If you had any interest in it but couldn't play it for either of these reasons, you can try again now. From what I can tell, both the browser and Windows builds work as they're supposed to.

Thank you!

This was a very cool game for a lot of different reasons. Obviously, I'm impressed with the art direction. I think I would rather die than create so many animated assets in a hand-drawn style like this, and your dedication made a really stylistically-distinct game. The intro cinematic specifically stuck out to me a lot. It seems like a nightmare to get that functional in RPG Maker, and it adds a lot to the game tonally. Sometimes collisions are a bit awkward because the character is so large compared to what RPG Maker wants, but nothing felt impossible to navigate.
(On that note, I got stuck on the first map because I couldn't tell where I was meant to walk out. The tree I had to walk behind seemed like it was meant to be a collider, and I thought I somehow hardlocked myself.)

The writing is pretty well-done too. It compliments the tone of the game and its graphics really nicely. You managed to mix the somber introspection perfectly with the projection and theorizing on the bones, and somehow it felt like there was a deep connection between the protagonist and a dead girl that she'd never met. The line about wondering what her skull looked like was one that stuck out to me a lot.

My only real criticism is that the chase scenes kind of clash with the well-constructed tone of the rest of the narrative. This game's slow, contemplative pacing is its best quality, and the sudden bouts of fast-paced, high-tension gameplay and audio detracted from that quite a bit.

Other than that, I really did like this entry. It has a very clear goal running through its art, its audio design, and its writing, and it accomplishes this goal incredibly well.

This was a cool one! I always enjoy seeing your art, and the character design did a lot for this one. I like the way Bora's design plays off of the sexual dimorphism in wild fowl.

There were a few bugs, or what I assume were bugs, when I played. The section when I was picking up twigs suddenly went completely black except for the light sources, so I had to use my mouse for navigation. You can also walk through the wall at both edges of the couch. There are a few spelling mistakes and misused words as well (the only one I wrote down was "triad" being used instead of "tirade"), but nothing was illegible or game-breaking.

The exposition did feel a little heavy in this one, with a lot of information being repeated just a few too many times, but I think you really thrive when you're leaning into visual storytelling. The lack of clarity as to who or what exactly the protagonist killed was incredibly interesting to me, and a lot of this was handled with the in-game graphics. Visually, it was clearly a pheasant, but the text descriptions very much felt like a human being was being killed and eaten. As mentioned, Bora's character designed also suggested the image of a pheasant without being 100% clear on why this was the case. I was glad that the game didn't really end with a blatant text explanation as to what happened; Bora's importance rested mostly in what he represented rather than who he was as a character. He could have been a person that literally transformed into a pheasant, he could have been a person that was mistakenly killed like a pheasant, he could have not been real at all, he could have been half real and half metaphor, or he could have been something else. I love this type of symbolic vagueness in emotional stories.

I do kind of wish there was either a more hopeful ending or less finality to Var's confrontation with his "father." It was hard for me to understand why a character arc about aggressive self-acceptance would be bookended with such a depressing turn. It almost felt like finales to two separate games.

Both of these finales have a lot of potential, though. If the confrontation with the father had less finality to it, I could see Bora's death as a metaphor for Var ultimately closing his heart to his true self because of his trauma. He would feel the need to kill and consume the pheasant just to sustain himself, even though it ultimately causes him grief.

On the opposite end, if Bora wasn't killed, even if he still "became" a pheasant and didn't see Var again, his presence would feel more impactful. He would have been a passing love or a surge of emotion that changed how Var felt about himself. Even if the game didn't end with a happily ever after, it would show that sometimes the most important people in your life don't always stay in it.

That could also just be a matter of personal taste, though! Regardless, there's a lot of potential in this little project. I would really like to see the characters and world expanded upon in the future.

I haven't finished this demo, but here are a few thoughts. 

Negative first:

• Look into texture groups. If you only take one thing away from this comment, please make it this. The long bouts of freezing that mostly stop after you've been playing for long enough are almost certainly because the game is constantly loading new texture groups. You can tell because they tend to happen whenever a new sprite appears for the first time. They're fairly easy to wrap your head around and will do a lot to make the experience feel 100x smoother.
• Hitboxes and hurtboxes could have a lot more player leniency. There were many, many times when I felt as though my attacks should have connected when they didn't, and many, many times when I felt as though an enemy's attacks shouldn't have connected when they did
• The bullet hell sections are really awkward to control. I've played 2 or 3 of these and haven't found a reason that I would ever need to fire in a direction other than right yet, so having to constantly hold down a trigger button just to face the enemy was cumbersome. Holding down a face button to fire while pressing the opposite face button to dash (while also still holding down the trigger to lock my direction) also felt really unnatural. Besides the fact that I was just awkwardly moving my thumb over so many buttons, I have problems with my wrist that were exacerbated a lot by constantly holding down a trigger and a face button while also managing dashing. If turning needs to be a feature for a later boss, it should be a toggle. If it doesn't, just force Bronto Burt to face right. I'd also say shooting should just be mapped to a trigger button so it's less awkward to move around while doing it.
• It is hard to tell sometimes when I can heal. Changing the color of the meter so it's visible at a glance when you can heal once would be really helpful.
• The second phase of the Moley fight is frustrating. Having a character that attacks low and a character that attacks high and/or in arches means you'll inevitably find yourself in a position where you have to take damage.
• Resetting a boss and dying take an annoying amount of time. This is really noticeable if you're going for the bonuses and will have to leave and return if you get hit more than a few times.

Positives:

• I like that you didn't just go with a lot of traditional boss fights. Even though the gimmicks didn't always land for me, I appreciated the effort to make each fight different.
• It's always fun to get new upgrades and increase your move pool in a game like this.
• It's impressive how many different moves you managed to telegraph in a unique way with very limited sprite sheets.
• It's just generally fun. Pogoing off of a boss feels nice, even if the hitboxes don't always match what you would expect.

Thank you so much!! This is all so sweet and in-depth that I'm sure whatever response I give will feel small.

I really appreciate everything you said, basically. I'm very glad to see you got what I was going for with everyone's relationships and the setup overall.

I really hate most stories that try to inject their abusive characters with depth and end up excusing their actions or redeeming them in some way. I think characterizing abusers as inhuman monsters is also reductive and shallow, though. Abusers often convince themselves they're in the right because they know they love the person they're abusing. It was very important to me to show that abuse can come from a place of love while still being harmful to everyone involved.

There is in fact symbolism with basically everything formed from the Break other than the mouth. I like hearing people's interpretations though, so I don't know how much I should give out publicly... I will say that if you find a journal entry near something weird, that section is usually related to what's written. All of the characters formed from the Break are also references to biblical stories. It's easiest to see with Hannah and Samuel, but even the monster that chases you has an internal name that references a popular Bible story. The dead lambs around him should be a hint as to which one. 

(Also, I love talking about my own writing, so if you want to get in touch offsite I can actually tell you more about why I wrote each section lol)

Thank you again for your kind words. :] Hopefully my next game can meet expectations too

This one was really cool. Definitely one of my favorite entries so far. Audio and visual design were genuinely unnerving compared to what I've come to expect from a lot of RPG Maker horror games.

The fakeout intro scene really stood out to me. You absolutely paid more attention to detail than most people would for something like that. Not just the default assets, but also the corny, self-referential writing worked wonders to sell me on the fact that this was just someone's awkward first project. It was just the right amount of cheese to lull me into a false sense of security before the actual game started. (Also a very good choice of audience; it would go over a lot of people's heads if not specifically submitted to a jam full of RPG Maker devs.)

It's very hard to make RPG Maker games feel unique, so it's super impressive that so many different play styles were pushed into this one experience. None of them feel too similar, even in their simplicity, yet they all still sell the idea of being made for a very old console/computer. The small details like the restricted color palette even across different rooms were also appreciated.

Most of my criticisms are nitpicks, honestly:

If I accidentally passed over tutorial text before reading it, which I did for the first two games, I had no way of getting it back. The second game was pretty self-explanatory, but it took me a while to figure out what I was doing for St. Peter's Cross. The square-pixel font used for some of these tutorials was also very hard on the eyes, so I'm not sure how much I would have processed regardless.

I like the slow pacing, but some of the cutscenes felt just a biiiiiiit too drawn out. With the game "breaking" in the intro, for example, things took so long to visually fall apart that, even after realizing what was happening, I'd assumed the game just actually froze in the middle of the creepy transition. If just a few seconds were shaved off, the anxiety wouldn't have that time to fade away. The same thing happened towards the last scene of the game, though I forget exactly what transition it was.

I get that the Devil's exposition at the end was kind of a necessity for a jam project—I know planning out a non-linear story is a process that can take months in and of itself—but I would have liked the details to be spread out over the course of the game a little more. It was just a bit obvious that the Devil wasn't talking to me as much as the writing itself was, so it felt a little unnatural to get the information that way. The censored Wikipedia screenshot was a really neat hint at what a subtle build-up could have accomplished, and I really liked starting to piece together what RSR was doing and what the screenshot might have had cut out of it. (On that note, it also frustrated me a little to get the full version of the screenshot later. I'd already gathered the general idea, and the last screen sapped the fun out of putting two and two together.)

My criticisms are always long-winded, but seriously, don't take it as a sign that I disliked this at all. Like I said, this is easily one of my favorite entries. I just tend to give verbose feedback to games I really enjoy because of how much potential I see in them; I like to be detailed since I think micro-adjustments are the only improvements to be made at this point. I'm very excited to see what you come up with in the future.

Thank you for leaving such a nice comment! It's really nice to hear when my writing gets any sort of emotional reaction.

I'm also really glad to hear you liked the combo lock puzzle.. There was a lot of back and forth on that one when I originally pitched it, and we weren't sure if people would get it.

I appreciate the feedback on the chase sequence a lot too honestly. It was very hit-or-miss when we had friends playtest (one person spent thirty minutes on it), so I was thinking about asking Jabberwocky to adjust it if we release a post-jam version. I originally wanted thicker hallways so it's harder to get stuck, but we just never looped around to getting it done.

(The Hedrik dialogue bug also came up in playtesting and was supposed to be fixed in the most recent update lol. thank you for pointing out it's still broken.)

I really respect how much original art went into this one. Making the sprites and all of the portraits was a huge timesink on our project, and a majority of our tilesets are adapted from pre-made assets.

The narrative was also interesting, and the interpretation of the theme is clever. I like the submissions that go for a more symbolic "devil" than an actual monster.

My only major critique is that the framing and setting confused me a bit. It seems to take place in a hyper-conservative Christian church in the early-to-mid 1900s, but there's modern-day slang, a casual reference to lean, a well-respected female priest, and a lobotomy(?) all in the same time frame. Some of it might have been intentionally fictionalized, but with a conflict so grounded in reality, it was hard to tell.

(To be fair, I also didn't fully get if the procedure was meant to be a lobotomy. It seemed like they managed to avoid all of the guaranteed complications while removing exactly what they wanted to, so it might have been more of a sci-fi style thing.)

Either way, I'm excited to see that you might revisit these characters in another game soon! I'm very interested in how their stories might develop.

I just added a text walkthrough to the downloads section if you're having trouble!

First, sorry my first comment wasn't super detailed or helpful. We're approaching a deadline, and it was super late for me, so I wrote it in kind of a panicked haze. I assumed the plugin was working as intended rather than being bugged somehow, but in hindsight I wouldn't be surprised if it's interacting poorly with another plugin.

I'm playtesting this one through someone else since I bought the plugin for him, so I'll have to wait for him to wake up to test it myself on a clean slate.

For more information, though (in case you wanted to quickly try replicating it), the issue isn't parallel events or a crash.

If we show a message normally without plugins, the game waits until hitting a confirmation key before running any code after it on the same Event page. (i.e. if we showed a message, then immediately set Self Switch A to true, Self Switch A would remain false until that message box was gone.)

If we ask the player to input text with this plugin, MV doesn't wait. All of the contents under it continue running. (i.e. If we call text input, then immediately set Self Switch A to true, Self Switch A will become true as we're still inputting text.)

Because of this, when a message is shown right under text input, MV seems to be getting confused on what to display where. The default input text is partially overwritten, and text disappears from the beginning of the box in a typewriter effect.

If it matters, the default input text is something like "(Type with your keyboard!)," parentheses included.

This happens consistently on MV, so if it's not a conflict with another plugin it shouldn't be hard to track down. Will update once I can test it myself with my teammate.

Using the MV version. Is there any way to make this pause the event processing as you would expect? Right now, everything continues to run when text entry pops up, which makes it hard to find a practical use case. If you try to show messages after running the plugin command, they just break entirely.

Hi. I'm working as a writer and helping with puzzles and art for a submission to this jam. I'm not the main developer, but I would like to be counted as having worked on this game.

I know some other jams allow you to form teams so you're all included on a game's submission page and can rate other entries. Is there a good way to do this with the RPG Maker Horror jam?

you should make a 2D platformer

you should make a uhhhhhhh like uhh ummmmm

where is my html version

amen to that my friend

this fucking rules

still sick

this is sick

unfortunately i think you have to take the L on this one

(If anyone cares, this response has some vague spoilers for the ending.)

I wanna preemptively say that I'm not arguing or saying you're wrong here; I'm not fully happy with the ending either. I genuinely just really like talking about my art and the reasons I make certain choices, and you're the first person to bring up the ending. (You can still think the reasons are bad.)

0. Thank you for playing and for your kind words! I really enjoy writing so I'm glad this slight dip into a narrative-focused game is resonating with anyone.

1. The exchange mechanic is meant to keep people from sticking with one combo for the entire game. Certain pieces might be more favorable to you, and I like the risk/reward of deciding whether to use them on an easier boss or wait for the chance to have them at the end of the game. Some bosses are already easier with specific movesets over others, though, so this might not have been necessary.

2. I mostly wanted the ending to be "disappointing" for thematic reasons. For one, gameplay-wise, it's hard to have a slow progression when the game is structured like it is. The format of "here's a specific insecurity, fight it, here's the next one, fight it" just didn't lend itself well to a traditional narrative. It wouldn't make sense to have the protagonist realize it's okay not to have a connection to their own sense of humor, for example, and then have the exact same conundrum over their talents. Having another ending would have required a really harsh flip in tone at the very end of the game.

From a narrative perspective, it's just impossible to say where an arc like this is supposed to end up. I feel like the "happy" ending that most similar stories present is the main character finding out the one thing that makes them unique, but I really didn't want to go that route. For one, it just isn't a realistic finale for a lot of people; it's much more common for them to be forcibly squeezed into a specific role they have no interest in just to survive. As people grow up and are forced into deciding their one area of study and their one career path for the rest of their life, the stakes become too high to really scrutinize their choices this much. Self-satisfaction and happiness become less important than just getting through each day with the money needed to survive. The game doesn't focus on these larger societal issues, but I still wanted to avoid a message that portrays the issue unrealistically.

I also don't think this style of happy ending gets at the heart of the issue, which is that everyone is just a collection of traits that they got from other people, and this is what makes us people in the first place. I mostly incorporated this into the bosses themselves. Even if they appear as individual, cohesive designs, each of them have different art styles for different attacks. Sense of Humor's pie attack shares an art style with the final boss, and its cross attack shares an art style with Talent, whose music attack shares an art style with Sense of Humor, etc. The protagonist is so wrapped up in their own insecurities, though, that it doesn't really cross their mind. (This is another reason I didn't think it would make sense to suddenly spell this realization out at the end of the game. They're just barely starting to realize self-acceptance is even an option as the game ends.)

TL;DR This inner turmoil affects real people a lot, as you pointed out, it's not something that you just get over one day, and I wanted to reflect that with an open ending that implies there's a lot more growth to undergo.

This was fun! I enjoy bullet hells a lot, and I liked the simpler focus of this one's projectiles. Not the most original use of the theme, but a fun time.

I don't usually make posts like this after a jam, but I'm really happy with how this one turned out! I tried a lot of things I haven't before, (e.g. a higher resolution, visual collage, a more emotionally-driven narrative) so I would really appreciate if you could try it out and leave a rating. Especially if you like weird experimental art, I'd love your feedback.

It only uses the keyboard, (or a controller) so it's playable even if you're just sitting in bed with your laptop. Just click on that picture and it should lead you right to the entry page!

Thank you everyone!

Super fun! Obvious that a lot of passion went into this. Only things that frustrated me were some of the hitboxes, mostly on the green boss, and the final boss's projectiles almost killed me after I had already beaten it.

Very pretty game. The character design was very cool

This one was very fun! Unfortunately couldn't finish it, though. The deaths are very unforgiving considering new concepts are introduced in every fight, and they will almost definitely kill you if you don't already understand them. I'd definitely play a version of this that had some kind of checkpoint system.