itch.io

I hold Itch near and dear to my heart compared to GameJolt because of how set it is on supporting creators, how fast the website runs, and how convenient it is to search for games and post games on here. But as a FNaF fangame developer I've noticed nearly NOBODY can take Itch seriously for those types of games, for good reason.

GameJolt is known for being the FNaF fangame website, and posting on here is very hard because the first thing anyone sees when they search through the Five Nights at Freddy's category are things like "Five Nights in Anime" (a slightly NSFW clone of the original game featuring naked furry women), Five Nights at Joe Biden, a Genshin Impact fangame, a FNaF fangame around the real life music artist Tally Hall, and a BUNCH of games that aren't even FNaF related at all. How are people supposed to take this platform seriously?

I understand there are systems in place to boost small creators and brand new games and that's why those show up, which is why I love Itch so much, but when people search for horror tags there HAS to be some filtering done, because nobody searching for an actual scary FNaF fangame is going to be happy when they find a bunch of meme games. They'll just think "oh these games suck" and go back to GameJolt.

One solution would be adding a little notice for people choosing the FNaF tag when they're making their game's page that forces them into adding add a #parody tag if their game isn't meant to be taken very seriously, then filtering the search so those games would show up at the very bottom unless one of the comedy tags is added (#funny, #silly, #parody, etc).

That solution might not be enough though, and I would personally recommend making some form of movement as a platform to try and advertise Itch more for FNaF fangames the way GameJolt has. This would not only monetarily benefit Itch because this fandom is HUGE, but it would greatly benefit fangame developers as Scott Cawthon (the franchise' creator) has said he is perfectly fine with people receiving optional donations for their fangames and GameJolt has no donation feature of any kind. This is one of the only places GameJolt has a strong upper-hand over Itch, and it will stay that way unless Itch does something.

When people want silly horror games, they usually search for #horror + #funny (I know because its so common that its one of the top indexed Itch.io pages on Google). But when people want actual terrifying horror games, they just search for the #horror tag. Something like this needs to be done with the FNaF tag as well. The #horror tag itself is perfectly fine and doesn't have this issue, which is why I beg you to go through with my change because it ruins the reputation of this platform in the FNaF community.

TL;DR  -  When people search for FNaF fangames here they find ridiculous unserious pieces of non-horror and unrelated slop. It makes serious and talented fangame developers lose their games inside the sea of "Five Nights at Joe Biden" and NSFW anime FNaF clones, and it ruins this platform's reputation in the fandom. I want to post serious fangames here and I cannot.

link is dead unfortunately

I'm guessing invites to the server are closed? I couldn't find a link anywhere on his youtube or twitter

It would be really cool if he had some form of redstone system later on to control those dynamically!

People could make entire computers in this game then, with working RGB screens. Close impossible in Minecraft!

One small thing I'd recommend is making the world seed (and maybe other things) use case-insensitive base 64 instead of base 10
You can store more numbers in a smaller format using base 64 and its easier to write down for users. (could maybe use something custom too)

It'd made reading and writing seeds from things like YouTube videos a lot easier (if a lets-player shares their world seed or something) since a player would only have to copy down something like "4S25B9" instead of "29419219429194242"

what did you use to make it??

It sounds incredibly realistic even knowing all about AI speech synthesis. Thought you hired someone on Fiverr or something for it!

also cool game!! i loved the grapple/human face bit at the end.

ty :D

yw!!
Awesome game other than those 2 things!

The plot is that one of the drones managed to hide behind the car after they saw you storing all of your belongings in the car, waiting for you to throw them all in for it to drive off XD

It'd be of great help if you mentioned all of the bugs you encountered, especially that: "the most annoying one being that when trying to play again it's immediately game over" as i fail to understand what on earth happened there

I only had around 4 days to make and think of something for this jam as i wasn't that interested to join it at first, and the game also runs on a beta build of the Godot game engine so there are some bugs i won't be able to fix until the stable version of the engine releases.

Anyway, thank you! Glad you had fun!!

I'll try to fix as much stuff as i can when voting ends

I really like the story and the way it's presented,
I have had some issues playing however; specifically, seeing the monster is close to impossible for me so i always just end up running directly into it. Something like 3D audio could've helped there perhaps, or maybe making the cat's flashlight (idk what else to call it XD) illuminate more of the surroundings
The text was also a bit hard to read in the beginning since it was pixelated
5/5 yee-haws if it weren't for those 2 things! Art was really good, story was really good.

I've already mentioned Kuno on the Discord, but i'm not sure if they check Discord or not and there are only 12 hours left so I'm gonna post this in a hurry here as well XD

I won't be able to finish this jam because i ended up running into a bunch of Godot 4 AI navigation bugs, and my jam partner (Kordesii) was busy the whole day with irl stuff.

I'm wondering if the jam time could be extended by a day, or even possibly 2 days as it'd allow us to post our games on Halloween.

There are currently 0 submissions, so i don't really see anyone being upset from the jam being extended. And me, Kordesii, and CherylRai all agree to the time being lenghtened by at least a day.

:0 Thank you!

The game was more-so inspired by the Venge remastered chase sequences than Nextbots since the game started development before the YouTube nextbot videos started showing up in my recommended, the nextbot looking NPCs were almost like a happy side-effect XD

The cutscene skipping mechanic is kind of funny, I originally meant to add that in but i then realized that I'd have to hard-code every single event that happens in the cutscenes so it would happen after the cutscenes ended aswell, and since i myself managed to beat the game in under 2 minutes i thought it'd be fine to just remove it XD. I'll try to add in some way to fast-forward cutscenes after the voting ends however!

I am also thinking of indeed turning it into a full game, tho keeping myself motivated when i don't have a hard deadline and when possibly no one would play the game once it's finished is quite terrifying and it's kinda why i joined the game jam XD

Thank you for the really nice light-hearted review!! And thank you for hosting this game jam! I learnt a heck of a lot from it and i legit managed to publish a game for once, which is incredibly hard for me since I've been making games for the past like 5-6 years and i didn't manage to even publish one single game before this game. Seeing everyone playing my game and reviewing it has legit made my month xD

I too agree, that is the ugliest brick wall i have seen in my life. And that is why i used it XD

Haven't played the game fully since i got stuck at the photos not knowing what to do XD

REALLY unique movement and look tho, being able to essentially free-roam in 2D, and it looks like it'd be pretty spooky later on XD

The chase sequence should be framerate independent since i used Godot's animation system XD

I'll specify that you need to hold shift to run somewhere on the game's page, if that was the issue.

Thank you for your feedback btw! Makes me really happy seeing this many people commenting on my mess of a game :D

Tbh i kinda just expected people to know you can press F for the flashlight since it's very common in horror games XD

The subtitles are supposed to be active by default, i'm not sure what went wrong there! Subtitles aren't available for videos tho since i got lazy and i didn't wanna risk the subtitles getting out of sync from the video and confusing people XD

Thank you for the feedback! I'll add the controls on the game's page

This felt like a fever dream and i love it

Only complaints i have is that i kinda got lost not knowing how to open doors, and the UI is a bit messy to navigate/read trough. It would've also been nice if the player movement was slower since i kept finding myself bumping into walls XD

9000 points when it comes to uniqueness and story tho,

I do kinda wonder what the inspiration behind this game was XD

thank you :D

Amazing lil game!! Especially since it was only made in like 3  days or less?

I do feel like the  maze section was a lil unfair since you couldn't really dodge or anything, i feel like something like a 'hide' cooldown ability where you could temporarily block damage could've helped there.

Cool wholesome game tho!

Sound effects would be welcome, and the controls do hurt a bit XD having to tap WASD all the time. Simple effective game tho!

I kept getting thrown off a cliff by Principal Pete but overall fun game XD

Unironically better than Pokemon for me because it's less confusing lmao

poggers

Whatever you do, just don't give up. This was a really good game for your first game made outside of a game jam!
It was one of the first ever horror games I actually played by myself and enjoyed playing. I usually just watch YouTubers play stuff since I'm too scared of jumpscares and playing horror games by myself in general but this game handled jumpscares pretty well and the actual arrangement of all the events was pretty good aswell (the day/night cycle, where you're safe at day but in danger at night, and later on the danger sorta leaking into the day aswell)
And the story was also REALLY good, and the actual reasoning for you to go out and do all of those things was both cute and terrifying (having to keep Fio safe)

A REALLY good game, the only problem there is with it however, is that the instructions are just unclear. I couldn't complete this game or even get to half of the game without reading the walktrough, and i don't think most people would be able to complete it without the walktrough. (and having to read a text file outside the game just to complete the game really breaks immersion) You need to do certain things in a certain order, and the game doesn't do well at pointing you to the next thing or telling you why you need to do the next thing. [SPOILER:] like with the present, having to dip the present in water to get a key to a room you never thought about opening...? A lot of the actual puzzles aren't really puzzles since there's no way of finding out the next thing you need to do without having to run around the whole place. Some inner-dialogue nudging the player in the right direction after they completed doing something would've helped, and even after the ending of the game i still don't fully understand what happened (maybe that's just me).
Other than that this game was really good, great artstyle, really good atmosphere (day is all cutesy and happy and the night is full-on a horror game), and the story from what I've understood was unique and well-written!