itch.io

thank you!!

i don't think he cheats — i mostly think (a) making good decisions is just incredibly powerful actually, (b) you're usually shooting for 10 or lower which severely limits the number of possible outcomes and dilutes the impact of chance, and (c) a loss is far less impactful for the dealer than it is for me, which makes it more annoying that he's really good  :)

oh my god i think i remember that from 80s mlp.  i never saw an actual episode but i've glimpsed screenshots here and there.  wow

it also doesn't seem to happen to me on linux, if that helps  8)

i did a month ago and it was mostly just porn autopulled from reddit and now it's something entirely different without any of that???

Man.  This snake guy is really good.  Maybe this isn't such a great ide*loses 2 INT* i'll definitely do it next time

i LOVE combinatorial explosions and i HAVE abandoned a game because i got too ambitious with them

also omg flora game!!  wild to see compacts just casually mentioned in a strawb game, these don't come up a lot

this is a solid writing style too.  casual but competent.  lovely.

this was my very first ending:

> Becomes a full-on dragon and makes you into a partial clone of them via eating you and then letting you meld out from their tummy.

and i cannot stress enough how much i would enjoy reading this written out in full lmao.  laser targeted.  direct hit

ah, you know it's an 80s game when half of it is completely unnecessary mazes

i am swiftly running out of time to rate games so i'm having to blaze through them here, so i don't think i can brave the mazes in full!  but the sprites are delightfully smooth for what looked like atari graphics at first blush, and it just feels surprisingly slick overall.  the controls are obviously jank but you're limited to one button so, whatcha gonna do.

also i appreciate the representation of all three genders: male, female, kobold

for the second time this jam i am fucking flabbergasted at the size of the picotron's resolution.  what the hell

wait.  the dragonlight digest.  i just got it

this is cute all the way through.  i love that you've invented a dialogue tree with a timer, and the only real impediment to seeing the important stuff is a player who wants to be incredibly vorny instead.  pitting the player against themselves like this is lowkey genius and probably a fantastic avenue for horny games to explore in general and i'm so glad you've put this in my head.  it would be more of a puzzle if you had to choose your questions carefully but it seems like there's exactly enough time for the pertinent stuff and that is perfect imo

sick aesthetic.  don't really see a lot of hypno spirals that look like physical objects, but this is like a ribbon coming at you.  music is rad too

i think putting the circle so close to the edge of the screen means i end up not looking at the spiral very much, which is maybe at odds with the theming.  but the center is a vanishing point, so there's only so much you could do about that here.  hm.

i must be missing something?  i've played through eight days and only once got the option to hypnotize someone, and it was to do a chore that wasn't even on my schedule.  even if it were consistent, it seems like it's quicker and easier to do the chores myself — they're always in a consistent place and don't take very long, after all.  but then the game would just be doing chores.

other commenters seem to have had a lot more interactions though so i don't know what i'm doing differently?

also i don't love that you used the music fluffy specifically made for another jam entry, without even a clear link to where you got it...

i'm a documented fan of when a mechanic is useful in more than one context, especially if it's unexpected.  and well you definitely checked all those boxes here!

ahaha, this is lovely.  delightfully surprised how much thought was put into the card variety too.  also it is very funny to do a card game while two horses just fuck in the background.  i mean i know i'm one of the horses but i'm really thinking more about Numbers

impressive how many places your chosen colors appear!  that's a rare form of dedication

i didn't realize you could be rejected (nice touch) until halfway through the day, at which point i was suddenly rejected three times in a row.  i guess word got around about how i'm better at sex than everyone else.  call my dick exodia 'cause it's unstoppable.  wait, no.  forbidden?  no that's also bad

lmao i have NO idea what is going on.  are there little elf people in mlp??  that seems unlikely but i don't know for sure?  i am aware ditzy hooves exists but i don't know the canonicity of anyone else here

props for convincing ren'py to do something other than straight text, i know it's not the most straightforward thing

i'm slightly embarrassed to admit that this might be too vanilla for me to relate to.  going to a crowded bar is one of the most uncomfortable things i can imagine (though i appreciate that wallflowering was an option), i don't entirely know what a yandere is, and i was left wondering why he didn't turn into a hot demon before we had sex,

clearly well-written though, and putting in the effort for different body types is a really considerate touch

Rubber Wizard Goes To Hell

the vibes are so strange here but i can't tell where it's on purpose.  like i'm not into the "mommy" thing but, ok, sure, a lot of people are, so that's just me

but then, it's a little weird to get the option to stop early on and it doesn't...  stop.  i know "but thou must!" is a classic video game trope, but i don't know that it intersects with BDSM so well?  but then i said "depends" about liking big butts and that ended the scene immediately, with Wifey calling me a liar!  but if i say her blowjob is mediocre then that's fine.  these feel like they're supposed to be actual characters, not just stand-ins, but it's really hard to get ahold of what they and their dynamic are like.  it almost feels like a deliberate puzzle, but it also seems like the top option is always the "good" one and the bottom is always the "bad" one.

i do like that Wifey was attempting to fill my heart meter too.  there's something about symmetric UI between the player and the game that really gets me

the cost increases are pretty brutal here and i've got some arm issues going on so i'm gonna have to refrain from mashing all the way to the end (if there is one)

it's cute though, and there's definitely something interesting about an upgrade not doing what you'd expect it to

this activated my statistics brain too hard and i wound up more "this guy is way too fuckin' good at this" than "wahoo take all my willpower" haha

but i see from Incredibly Horny Hypno Avatar commenter below me that you knocked it out of the park with the target audience, so well done!

my main critique is that the starting INT seems a bit high for a guy who seems to pretty consistently make really bad decisions

bless u pickledoge i never know what to expect from your work.  asking an enemy i just defeated "how do i jump" is the funniest fucking thing i've seen in the whole jam.  i actually missed that the controls list a jump key so i thought i was supposed to just guess, which made it even funnier

wow this is interesting.  like interactive fiction crossed with a mindmap but also not really either of those things.  i could swear it reminds me of something i once saw ages ago, but i can't remember what it is.  i'm pretty sure it's a compliment though

thanks to this game i found out i am really bad at sex.  i was literally inside this person and they rejected my attempts to cuddle

this is SO chill when all three whatsits get going and i love the starfield kinda background too.  props for giving me a compelling reason to stare at a spiral too

the description did tell me to get as big as possible though and i assure you: i could get bigger

honestly, bold move putting the end of the maze in the center of one cheek instead of.  well.  you know

sorry to hear about the life emergency!  hope you can achieve your original vision sometime

nice try, evil mew, or Wamew as i will henceforth be calling you, but i've solved your devilish puzzle.  the password is BALD.  no i'm not especially familiar with this genre, why do you ask

stealth with an opt-out combined with puzzle mechanics.  cool.

i love this scrawny nerd guy and his inability to pick up boxes is very funny

i actually watched my spouse play this (we didn't notice the two-player support until too late, oops) and they got turned around a few times, so i think it could maybe use some landmarks, or at least like, something to match buttons to doors?  if a door is already open it's not obvious that it's a door at all, too, which i think got us lost a couple times

but obviously an incredible upgrade over the original, wow

alright.  alright.  fuck.  okay.

obviously this is very good.  i've gone back and played it again several times because it's very good.  this is the kind of game where i would expect it to have like three potion ideas and then that's kind of it, even if it weren't in a jam, but there keep being new ones somehow even after i've logged like four hours of this.  absolutely baffling.

and obviously it is great when a Thing happens to me.  i mean.  of course.  (though it maybe could do with some more visual feedback; i'm usually staring at my own cauldron and don't notice whatever is going on on the other side of the screen, so sometimes things just sort of happen and i'm not sure when they happened or why.  (i know the game is turn-based but i keep trying to go fast anyway))

that said there are some...  light, mechanical, issues...

• the swirly candies are insane.  every single time i ran into them i got locked into an overflow loop and there is just nothing i can do about that.  at all.  the only approach seems to be "win really fast", but i'm generally trying (in vain) to do that anyway and the candies reduce my ability to do it.
• i have no idea where this bovine potion came from but it basically ended the game immediately.  i'd just picked up the elixir that increases your brewing time, because i'd never seen it before and wanted to see if it was worth it, and i ended up getting dealt basically just that and bovine potions with no accelerant at all until i was out of space.  i didn't even cast or combine them a single time and they just kept coming and i could not get rid of them.  i can't believe this is post-nerf too omg

i think the upgrade pathing is pretty interesting, certainly moreso than just straight deckbuilding, but it does mean that it's very difficult to try out new potions -- it's random whether i get offered them at all, and then it's difficult to make them work if i only take one (which usually happens, because my pool tends to have two allure potions in it, because i need those, because they're what wins the game).  i'm not sure where else to go here that wouldn't be a radical change, but it adds a massive amount of sheer dumb luck to a game that already has a lot of it happening.  maybe it would help, maybe even enough, if i could unlock some coarse adjustments to what i start with, like, different preset loadouts?  or maybe just offer a wider selection of existing potions to modify, but only let me use three of them.

also i'm surprised that combining potions doesn't...  do, anything?  as in, if you combine two allure potions that would each give you 2 allure, you get a higher-level potion that would give you 4 allure.  which is the same thing since both of the smaller potions would be cast anyway, right?  in fact if you're going for space efficiency it seems like you might want to avoid combining potions at all, and instead keep them all as vials, the most compact shape.  at level 6 the potion does vanish entirely into the background, which is cool, but that's only happened to me a handful of times.

but again it's not immediately obvious what you might do to change this, since you're using a lot of small whole numbers, so you can't say like...  each tier is 10% better than two of the previous tier.  that might work for allure where you could just add some decimal places or whatever, but it doesn't work when a potion's effect is "downgrade N of your opponent's ingredients".  but maybe it doesn't matter.  just strikes me as odd that the most visible Thing the game does has relatively little effect on the gameplay?

anyway this is real cool.  it's good actually if you make a game that has enough for me to think about that i write like eight paragraphs about it

well this just oozes style, god damn.  the channel thing is really interesting (both as theming and as a battle mechanic) and while the level of control here is fairly coarse, i imagine in a larger game there would be more influence over it

unfortunately i got stuck in a loop where their healer could heal an insane amount of damage every turn, and meanwhile my alleged 30% chance to hypnotize him failed seven times in a row, which is about where i gave up.  but this feels like a numbers-tweaking kinda thing

i think you're slightly overselling how much the pico-8 does for you, haha

i think there's some basic stuff you could learn to tune here -- and when i say "basic", i mean in the sense that it's a basic part of a game, not that it's something everyone knows.  it is actually very fiddly to make controls and camera and whatnot that feel really really good, and most new game developers don't!  especially if they're building from scratch.  but you could try stuff like making the camera stop at the edge of the map, or making it so that if i press right, press down (so now i'm holding both), then release down, i'll resume moving right.  you end up doing some weird special cases, but it's not anything beyond your ability, just a matter of noticing the little rough spots and figuring out how to sand them down.

i do like the concept!  stealth usually means a lot of dawdling while waiting for enemies to move away, so being able to mash a get-out-of-jail-free card and charge right through is a great improvement

honestly this is about as far as i got too

lmfao incredible deployment of piss christ

this feels like a window into a slightly alien world.  i'm piss-shy like you wouldn't believe and have peed in a publicly-accessible bathroom like three times in my entire life, so i've developed the bladder capacity of an elephant.  even in my own home i will hit the point of needing to pee and then forget about it for several hours because it's just not that urgent.

so the politics around needing to ask permission to pee while you're in school would never cross my mind (even though you're obviously correct about all of it) because i didn't.  i just didn't.  as far as i can remember i never once used a school bathroom, all the way through the end of high school.  i would simply enter a sort of bio-stasis for eight hours.  same thing with crappy entry-level jobs.  it just didn't come up.

so i guess thanks for writing this, because it's one of those things people don't really write about very much even though (or because?) it seems universal, but nothing ever truly is.

i appreciate the nod to that phenomenon of prepubescent fascinations becoming kinks later on, or whatever is actually happening there.  that happened to me as well (albeit with different things) and i'm so curious what my brain was actually doing there, but of course it's hard to talk about.

the cam intermission was surprisingly vulnerable and then damn the last act really got me.  it's funny how there's a sort of buildup from typo-laden chat logs, through what's mostly external narration, and then into internal narration that wrenches your guts completely independently of how much you're here for the omorashi, so it's almost a surprise when it happens.  there's a depth and thoughtfulness that's hard to find and also hard to write.

so.  well done.  damn.

oh interesting.  kinda do-it-yourself hypnosis, in the sense that you don't have someone narrating it to you

there's a conspicuous tension between weakness-vs-comfort that tells me you have all kinds of very strong opinions about hypnosis haha

it's a little thing!  i like it

huh!  i thought it was just me who jacks off like this

ahahaha this is really cute.  the sprites are fantastic (Are Those Tiny Giant Dongs) and the mechanic is very very good.  my little guys are absolute nimrods who get themselves killed immediately but honestly that makes it better

this might be the perfect video game

big fan of roguelikes and grid mazes and cubes.  not so big a fan of doritos, as discussed elsewhere, but c'est la vie.

you have requested: Beam

this is one of those games where i don't know if i would describe it as "fun" and yet i kept playing it anyway, which makes me wonder what i think "fun" is just as much as it makes me wonder how else i might describe the game.  wandering around mysterious hallways is compelling, after all.

i think my problem is that i hit the point where the game abruptly transitioned from a Space into a Spreadsheet.  i know the library always needs Transform at the end, so if i set foot in the library and i don't have Transform, i shouldn't even bother.  this meant an immediate pivot away from exploring and into doing as little exploring as possible, which is perfectly rational given that exploring drains my Juice.

but then it struck me that i wasn't really making many meaningful decisions, either, which is a classic balancing issue in roguelikes.  (by "classic" i mean i think about it a lot, not necessarily that anyone else talks about it.)  i can't see beyond the Power Cubes, and i can't tell what a room is (or if it's a room at all) before i go into it, so all i can really do is bumble around and hope i get something useful spawned.  if i find a stairwell then it's most efficient to take it immediately rather than explore the floor, since the cost for doubling back is twice as high, and there are ultimately only a finite number of steps i can take per game.

by the end i had the sense that the main cerebral element was trying to remember if i'd already gotten the whatsit from the coffee shop or if i'd be wasting N steps + 30 * M cube breaks checking

on the other hand there's an obvious correspondence with hunger in nethack and other, ahem, serious roguelikes, but that's a bit different since it mainly serves to drive you forwards -- you can't twiddle your thumbs indefinitely because you need to, at the very least, go find a lichen you can eat.  here the Juice Meter serves to limit how much of the game you can play at once, which is normally the function of health, a resource that's usually easy to lose and very difficult to restore.  in a way it's sort of both, a slow (or fast) drain that sends you inexorably towards a soft game over.

the only way to avoid it is to do nothing.  i wonder what metaphor might be found there

i think this would probably work better, as all roguelikes would, with more variety -- different possible gates on different rooms, perhaps (or is that equivalent to shuffling the order of skills, as you've already done?), or just a much wider selection of rooms and little guys, six of which are selected per game.  i ran through three times and i am feasting on the same raccoon my grandfather did.  he's like an heirloom except i have to luck into bumping into him.

and the luck factor is what gets me.  i assume you have to collect all six guys and their thingamajigs to win, but i have almost no influence on whether that actually happens.  i can't do anything to increase the odds of finding the thing i need to finish the game.  completed rooms will happily spawn again with no external indication that i've already beaten them, so i suspect i could traverse an arbitrary number of floors without ever winning.  i can't even meaningfully plan a route through a floor.  the only real decision i can make is to minimize how much Juice i spend while investigating as many rooms as possible, which drives the experience into minmaxesque territory pretty quick, and i don't think that's good territory.  somewhere to visit, not to live.  especially since the optimal thing is to avoid breaking any more cubes than necessary, and now i don't even get to watch number go up.  i love when number go up!  let me number go up.

i wonder what would help here.  i have all these vampire powers but none of them are "see beyond a cube" or "listen for heartbeats on this floor".  but sprinkling in gameplay upgrades amongst the skills would make the narrative skills feel worthless, i think.  tricky.

anyway

the narration is interesting but feels like it's balanced on a knife edge.  on the one hand it's deliberately compact, crammed into a fixed-size box, in the sort of self-limited way that encourages imagination.  on the other hand the rest of the game is so abstract that for the first ten minutes i was completely baffled by it.  i hadn't noticed the room name in the upper-left corner, so i would approach what is clearly a Video Game Lock and be told about a person doing an action with an object in a place, none of which were present anywhere.  it read like a surfacing memory, maybe?  only a couple delves later did it click that these were literal things happening, abstracted away so many levels that no visual cues remained.

i feel like there must be a middle ground between drawing all of that stuff and showing a literal lock, and that i've played games that employed such middle grounds, but i can't remember any of it right now, so, that's not very helpful.

but i think the real lesson here is that there is nothing to fear from vampires, because if they so much as jog a hundred yards they will collapse from exhaustion

This unit is a good drone.

🧡

hmm.  obviously a lot of skilled effort was put into this in a lot of places, but the current state is a touch rough.  i guess a prime example is that the cooldown between basic attacks lasts longer than the animation for doing them, which means there's a period where i don't seem to be doing anything, but if i try to attack, nothing happens.  there's no other indication as to when i can attack again, so the most common part of the combat feels like a dice roll.

this game is oddly difficult to comment on, because it has these palpable gaps that i strongly suspect are places you intend to fill in later?  the VN parts are so unlike the combat parts that they feel like two separate games sharing the same characters.  and, okay, given the dream theming, that makes sense.  but (at least as far as i got) there's very little narrative connection between the two, which is an obvious avenue to explore, so you probably have something in mind?  but i don't know what it is, and it's exactly what would tie the two parts together, so saying anything now feels...  premature?

likewise you seem to have put a lot of effort into making solid models of curvy fish girls, but then they only appear in the form of inch-tall enemies; the VN and sex scene assets use unrelated 2D artwork.  so again i get the sense that i haven't seen the whole idea yet.

you'd think this happens a lot with jam games, but something here specifically feels more like "free demo" than "prototype".  which i think is probably a good sign, just an unexpected one

curious to see where you go with it!

oh, does a higher-level lure mean you get a wider variety of fish?  yeah that'd make it much harder haha

sorry little otter.  there are plenty of fish in the sea.  too many actually