itch.io

I got to read this before publication and: the vibes are immaculate and I love the poetic styling of the text. It rules. People should read it

I started playing this game and within five minutes was recommending it to a lot of my friends (i finished it. it’s really good. i’m in love with all the presentation and prose choices you made)

Oh, good question! I was personally thinking of it as just shifting the tone a bit—it certainly can and does still encompass being “smitten,” but in changing the move name I wanted to imply that it could also include, say, being Cady Heron and becoming obsessed with Regina George in an all-consuming way, or stuff that edges more into gothic romance. Flat-out hate isn’t what it’s getting at, exactly, but the kind of enmity that might turn into an Adora and Catra situation.

I read this while Literary Game Jam was going but kept putting off leaving a comment, since I wanted to do the experience justice. Honestly, this game helped some of the really interesting possibilities of the personal-experience-as-game format in addition to just being incredibly poignant. The sense of helpless dread and tension that comes off the page is palpable.

;) glad to be of service

Oh, I’m so flattered! Thank you 🙏

Thank you! ‘v’

Hm—tried it, and I get the same crash, unfortunately.

Hi! Just bought the program since it seems really neat as a markdown editor. I am having a little trouble opening settings; whenever I do (either by button or via hotkey) the program immediately exits.

I checked and the universal build has a little more luck than the x64; I do get a brief moment of seeing the prefs window before the application closes, but there’s still the same end result. I’ve attached the error output below from the “program closed unexpectedly” window just in case it’s useful. I’m on a Late 2022 Macbook Air with an M2 Apple Silicon processor, and running Sonoma. Deepdwn version is 0.40.2.

The system error report is too long to paste here so here’s a pastebin.

By walking around, the walls will start to degrade and disappear; once they do, you can walk out and the game ends.

This is really the kind of searing, painful, compassionate work that I direly want whenever the topic of queer games comes up, and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.

Both the mechanics and the interspersed short fiction are cutting and smart—I think the poker-like mechanics for spellcasting are really evocative for a situation where everything feels like a risky gamble, and the stress mechanics are an interesting touch in that when the pressure is on, you’re more likely to succeed, but at the cost of it maybe just getting you killed in the end.

I legitimately got teary-eyed during several segments; once again, this is a commendable piece that paints a picture of a flawed and beautiful world, and I’ll be looking forward to seeing any further work you choose to put out.

omg… I’m so delighted to see someone printed it out! I’m really glad it resonated.

Ah, thank you!! It’s really all I can hope for to be emotionally affecting so I’m glad it landed so well.

Thank you so much! I’m really flattered that it felt so memorable.

This is so charming… your little pixel drawings really make the whole piece. I also want to go in the forest now.

thank you!! i'm really glad it feels like a good read all these years on

this is short and sweet (and very beautifully rendered) but also i'm looking at it and trying to tally up the amount of work it must have taken to make bitsy do this, as an engine, which i have an immense amount of respect for. love it!

Is there a preferred email you have and/or a way to DM you?

Thank you so much for leaving this comment! It really made my day to hear that there are people out there having so much fun with the setting and really vibing with it.  🙏 It's incredibly cool that you've done so much with it!

I'm actually working on a longer new edition with more content + my take on some mechanics and if you want, I can get your group the link for the beta manuscript!

We had a great time with VKiller!   ✨

Oh dang, ty!! I got the mic to work by launching it via the terminal but this is a much better solution, haha

Hi! I played your game on stream, so I thought I'd drop a link to the VOD in case you want to show people how it feels in play:

This game was so cute and nice! I only wished there was more of it because I love doing picross puzzles.

I've been turning this over in my head a lot since I initially read it a few days ago, since I've had thoughts about it also. I suspect some of the TTRPG appeal to conservatives/fascists/what have you comes from a mix of some of the below:

• TTRPG origins in and overlap with things like wargaming, which in turn has overlap with military history nerds, which in turn has a venn diagram overlap with the fash
• Game design around immutable and measurable race (and sometimes gender) characteristics
• Ability to take refuge in the misguided notion that something being "historical" or "medieval fantasy" means excluding broad categories of people from agency
• Stories focused around combat, which probably has some appeal to people who are really invested in the concept of might making right
• And probably the most important one: TTRPG players haven't run enough of them out of the hobby

I'm really serious about the last one, because there's that saying about how if you don't chase a Nazi or two out of your bar, suddenly it's a Nazi bar? I think, essentially—the problem really is that a lot of gamers are kind of wishy-washy about icing people out—like, a lot of people were nerds who got excluded a lot growing up, so it's really hard to convince a lot of adult nerds that they should do that to someone else, even if the "someone else" genuinely sucks and is a literal fascist.

Like, don't get me wrong, I agree that there are absolutely ways in which this is a design problem insofar as I direly want to delete any reference to "race" as a mechanical concept, because that shit deserves to die off. I think TTRPGs could also stand to rethink the relationship they have to violence and colonialism and branch away from those things. But I'm not kidding about earnestly thinking the solution is to make facists feel incredibly unwelcome and unsafe in gamer spaces, which will probably need to involve convincing people in more "mainstream" TTRPG spaces to stop straddling the fence and help out.

absolutely loving HONK so far (i'm veryroundbird on twitter!) and i'm starting to work on implementing expression toggles for models. I don't know if anyone else has requested this yet, but if somehow you could toggle multiple expressions at once to wombo-combo them, it'd be super useful since I'm realizing I'm definitely going to run up against the 8-expression limit, ahaha

hi! I think it's acceptable to submit published games, yeah, so go ahead!

strictly speaking i own like one set of polyhedral dice i never use so i'm honestly a little fuzzy as to which ones are in the set, but it should have a use for a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20 (d100 optional).

but also shhhh i'm not going to check that hard as long as it's in the spirit of providing a use for fancy sets of dice

:v ah, thank you!!