itch.io

Fun jam game! For a short experience you've cornered all of the essentials of a mystery game: there's clues, a numerical puzzle, lots of interrogation of strange and interesting characters, and the game ends on a surprise twist. The exteriors are minimal, but that adds a little monochrome noir charm and the characters have a lot of personality, particularly the player, who bobs around the streets quite quickly! Just a lot of neat little things here. 

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects. 

Thank you for taking the time to play SHELLIE'S SECRET - I really appreciate it! Yes, the speech synthesis is pretty unique! I tried to tweak it a lot to make it the right mix of ridiculous and creepy. Cheers! 

Quite a lot going on here! Definitely a confronting and challenging game that relies on a confluence of faint allusions to themes in your prior work: erotic, fetishistic, and guro provocations. There's a satirical dissonance between those extremities and twee uwu tenderness, and the player inhabits an interesting space between doing abjectly cruel things and being dominated themselves. 

It's, as others have said, impressionable and deeply uncomfortable to play, which is the point. I'm interested about the design approach and whether the game speaks to something underlying. Can objectively cruel systems be disguised as affectionate ones? Can we disarm doing horrible things by making them twee and satirical? Are we, in fact, not the good boys we believe we are? 

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects. 

This is a fun proof of concept for animating cutscene sequences. I think you have a good eye for the cinematic potential of creating scenes. Some of the techniques around mixing 2D and 3D sprites illustrate the kind of creativity used in 90s games to create visually interesting graphics with limited approaches: the pseudo-parallax used at the end of the cutscene comes to mind. 

Given the dialog system preview looks really cool, I'd be curious what sort of ideas you have to build on this, given that you mentioned you see there being potential for a fuller experience out of this! Hope you can find some interest. 

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects.

Thanks Josep! I was wondering why that comment didn't turn up on the other page. I am going to check this one out next! 

The game is a thoughtful and irreverent autobiographical expression of trans-ness. The Decker style and choice structure lends itself to a sort of digital memoir and collage of imagery that is reminiscent of the e-zine or DIY scene. So it was no surprise that you'd explored this before in Ur-Fascism! 

One aspect of the game that I enjoy is that the personal is interspersed with the political - although this game grounds it through the lens of reflection and experience. There is never a more critical time to stop and think about how our experiences are shaped by the hellscape that we live in, particularly identities subject to discrimination and violence as part of the fabric of survival. 

Transparency and vulnerability are powerful tools in prose and I hope that the expression through Thriftgirl - its idiosyncratic navigation of how capitalism defines and defies the trans experience - was reflective or cathartic for you. I think the patchwork approach to personal and political messaging works well.

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects. 

Oh! I remember your proof of concept for Hero's Engine and thinking its use of older tools was very cool! Thank you for coming on board with this jam. 

All projects are small steps towards building more ambitious things and this is no exception. This looks like it adds a few new things that help carry your games closer to the structure of a realized 3D point-and-click adventure: there's more frames that help convey a sense of perspective and space, the game contains dialogue and interaction, and the design is more ornate. 

I haven't checked out Realms of the Maestro but it looks like the Daz3D characters and dialog plays a role in a broader narrative. They are a little uncanny in the same way FMV characters pop into existence in 90s games and I am here for that. The dialogue provides limited hints about where the story will lead but it seems like it'll be comfortably surrealistic and creepy!

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects. 

Decker is such an nice platform to work with, isn't it? This is a cute game that explores micro and macro spaces through three storeys of an apartment block. I like that each scene is accompanied by a poetic quatrain that brings life to the game's concept of homes: each space has a place for something, be it people, ideas, vegetables, or microbes. The inclusion of a few stranger detours helps add flourish to the game and reinforce that the world around us can be quite interesting!  

It reminds me of an experimental game I played a long time ago where you would click through a hierarchy of menus to explore submenus with increasingly smaller scale: cities to streets, streets to buildings, buildings to rooms, and so on. I think there is plenty of ideas to play around with when interrogating how we make sense of perspective through this sort of categorical thinking. 

Thank you for taking the time to participate in DITHERJAM! As a small jam, I really appreciate it. Hope you're able to explore dithering in future projects. 

Here is the late submission link! https://itch.io/jam/394626/add-game/3176764/11443671?token=11oCRcXfsnfgp1gML6p60...

Here is the late submission link: https://itch.io/jam/394626/add-game/3176814/11443671?token=rre0O41QiW8LyYxAzElCQ...

Thanks! I'll action this in a little bit when I have a laptop on hand. Its basically just me sending you a link you can click to submit it to the jam!

Thanks! I'll action this in a little bit when I have a laptop on hand. Its basically just me sending you a link you can click to submit it to the jam!

Hi there, not a problem! Shoot me a link to your game and I can give you a late submission link.

No worries! You can shoot me a link to your game when you're done here and I can provide you with a late submission link!

It's a bit creepy. There is one jumpscare but the imagery is not graphic. 

Oh, apologies! Yes, any engine is fine! Had a moment there. 

Yes, if you've identified where it's used based on itch policy, it's absolutely fine to use gAI, as this jam is non-competitive and has no rules otherwise!

[EDIT] No  Yes and no - although obviously the more accessible the game, the easier it is for others to play!

That's right! The jam is open ended and doesn't have a specific theme other than the use of dithered graphics in the game.

Congratulations on creating this game: it's quite thoughtful and profound. Looking at itch.io, it seems few games have expressed experiences of tinnitus and hearing loss, so this is a really unique authorial voice. The visuals correspond nicely as an allegory to the narrator's distortion of perception.

I think of art games like Dys4ia where the interactive elements of the visual novel enhance and reinforce the meaning of the experience being conveyed. I think you did a good job at integrating those elements into the game. 

I am not familiar with neurological tinnitus - I have some from hearing loss - but was very interested in how the narrative does not fixate alone on the physical experience but how tinnitus has psychological impacts. 

The prose really elegantly captures the distress of having uncertain sensory input, which carries into the game's feelings of self-doubt, hopelessness and decay. Not sure if these are informed by personal experience but there's enough here to suggest a good literacy of how these things carry lifelong legacies. 

In terms of feedback, as you asked - I think the key things that stand out are balancing surrealism with narrative. It can be hard trying to find ways to ground strange or dreamlike sequences - such as the room escape segment - with the earlier flow of the narrative; I interpreted it as a sort of transportative mental break but this wasn't clear.

The player choices at the ending have several paths, with the 'good' ending reconnecting with the motif of the paper cup and learning to live in spite of tinnitus, which I found quite nice. The 'horror' paths are darkly effective too. When players have one choice at the end of a long linear path, they may frame their experience by reference to that ending. It is interesting that two players may ultimately interpret the meaning of this game much differently by the tone that the endings suggest. 

Great work. I hope you can continue to create interactive stories like this. It's an incredible medium and you have a good voice for this sort of thing! 

Shocked this doesn't have any reviews so thought I would add a comment that this is great work creating a puzzle game using negative space as the hook. 

I liked the interplay of the black-white spaces and how the areas weren't quite perfectly symmetrical to make navigation part of the puzzle solving. I think the puzzles work best when the inverted spaces require the player to consider different movements and solutions in the black and white sides of the game. 

If you want to build on this idea, have a think about how the puzzle design could exploit the fact that the player may need to multitask doing completely different objectives or avoiding different hazards to meet the same goal in both spaces.

For a jam game there's plenty here. Also the visual design is super cute and simple - not very often you get to see the spritesheet in the background of the page! 

Great work! I had fun playing this!

I'm glad to see the SimTunes reference because this was reminiscent of mucking around and creating little spatial soundscapes. Always a pleasure. 

As a music toy / generator, I like that this is much more chaotic and atonal. SimTunes follows predictable rules, and this does too, but here you've got dozens of critters interacting with the grid and causing it to slowly decay. Beauty and melody is here but sometimes the best tools are those capable of being broken. I spent much longer on this than I expected I would! 

I enjoyed playing your game and thought the idea was ingenious - I sincerely hope you consider creating a post-jam version. 

I think that having an organic sanity/scoring system that rises and falls with the performance of keys is intuitive and helps ensconce the nuts and bolts of game mechanics in the performance of playing the piano. But I get that long-term play might need something more. 

Agree that melody could be an opportunity to build the musical aspect of the game experience - perhaps harmony and discord could be used to reinforce the player's sense of success and failure states? 

Sometimes the simplest concepts resonate - pun intended - so I'm glad you got a lot of positive attention through the Ludum Dare. I liked this. It was very thoughtful take on the rhythm action genre. Great work! 

Congrats on publishing your first project! Hope you can build on the game. It's really cool to put something together from complete scratch and will set you up really well. Here for the 1-bit aesthetic and scanlines. 

Cool experience! I think the assets and sprites complemented each other really well for a survival horror game and it's pieced together excellently. Monochrome is perfect with the dimly-lit interiors. The enemies that skulk out of the dark and only show their true colours when agitated by a weapon is a fun horror behaviour. Their hitboxes can be a little tricky if positioned right over the player given the directional nature of attacks, I think. Having quite a close-up perspective draws more attention to the interesting environmental sprites, but it does mean it's easy to get lost in the eerie bowels of this creepy facility. 

Congrats on making a first game! 

I never thought of the possibilities! I use a WinXP machine for trackers to make music, but never thought of the potential of using old software. I hope you're able to keep on with these ideas and breathe life into old software. Can't imagine there are many people left that still use it!

Wrestling with BASIC to figure out MSX emulation is quite the feat for a 3D game. How did you find the experience? The refreshing and slow loading of the elements of the maze is very nostalgic and creates a striking effect. Awesome stuff.  

Nice Hypercard style monochrome collage photography. How good is Bowery Electric? It's cool to use experimental games as a medium to bring imagery to music; I'd not thought about doing something like that. 

Thank you for including DITHERJAM in your jam directory for your followers - it's very appreciated! 

Thanks for creating the proof of concept for Hero's Engine. I thought the approach of creating a Myst adventure game using legacy software is really cool and has a lot of potential. How did you go about finding and putting together the game from this software? 

Thanks - yeah, I made a call on trying to double down on a very specific aesthetic and focus on the presentation of that, and it seems to have worked well. Tried to make the font, image dithering, speech synthesis and glitch/bg sound feel just right, so really appreciate it! 

That's awesome - thanks for playing. Glad to be your first foray into text adventures and parsers! These were all the rage...a long, long time ago. 

I have plenty of faith the post-jam version will be pretty damn good. Planning to do much with the background story?

Yes, the themes are a bit full on and I hope the warning was sufficient. Im glad it left a strong impression; it's very hard to gauge the effect of something especially when you're writing about things that are serious and risky. Thanks for the kind words!

A devious and grotesque idea that's perfect for horror. I can see the challenge for the player is figuring out which if the equally gross-looking options are the ones that they should go for - it turns into a bit of a roulette. The mechanics are quite thought-out and I like how there's two health systems in place, but also additional properties such as poisoning to add to the challenge. The real thing that shines here is the text that describes the foul effects of eating the final feast. With some clearer guidance, set-out stages and maybe a bit more of a strategy element, it would be cool to see where this game goes! 

Good on you for co-ordinating voice acting to create a cinematic experience! There's some funny exchanges and in-jokes with the Portal gun and allusions to the stage getting dark. The water gun is a funny idea and the character's reaction to it is golden. The Portal comparison, whilst not immediate in terms of mechanics, does come to mind in terms of a well-scripted, voice-acted game with puzzle mechanics. In terms of level design and puzzles, definitely recommend thinking about how the designs aid or get in the way of the flow and how they make sense in the context of a level. For instance, I wasn't too sure how to proceed with the switch and button setup in the first puzzle room; I assumed I had to find multiple blocks - sadly not the non-interactable one in the same room - to weigh them all down or there was a relationship between them I didn't quite get. Nailing this stuff takes time and it's shocking how much you were able to setup in a week for something very ambitious and imagining a much bigger scope than the space of this jam. I hope you're able to refine this into the game it absolutely has the potential to be. Would love to revisit this one especially if you can share a bit of guidance on the puzzles. Great work! 

Very accurately captures the trials and tribulations of being in customer support and having to put up with people that have no idea what they're doing. Some of this delivery is very funny and absolutely would be the kind of trivialities people would call into tech support for. Fun twist at the end! I think there's plenty of ways you could merge this with some gameplay mechanics if you were so inclined - why not multitask and have to field calls whilst keeping an eye out for the guy behind you to ward him off?