itch.io

Yup. I'll be uploading a fixed version after the Jam officially ends. Thanks for trying anyway.

Thanks for your optimism and sorry for the let down.

I knew early on that I might not finish (I didn't really) and so didn't want to subject a human artist to a workload that I didn't think would pay off. I'm entirely with you on commercial products not containing AI art.

Thanks for playing and for your kind words despite the bugs.

This is so good. Such a moody and oppressive atmosphere. Lots of great small touches (such as different text sounds for different characters) lead to just a very engrossing game.

Thank you very much. So glad you enjoyed it.

That's awesome. Thanks. Some of the transitions and animations in your game are great and I want to learn how to do that. I very much appreciate it.

The good news is that regardless of it being public, you still own the copyright to everything in the repo. (Even better, the time stamp on the repo can be used to prove that you created it first if someone does steal it.) No further action on your part is needed from a legal basis.

Sharktillary was made a while back (really far back, it was made in Adobe Flash) before life took me in a radically different direction and, with that same group, I never managed to actually ship the game with the evil, killer clowns.  Sharktillary was released on Android. It might have compatibility issues now, but it is technically still available. A random YouTube suggestion of someone doing a Let's Play of it is partially the reason I came over to itch.io and started looking up game jams to enter.

Being open sourced, I didn't want to make the solution of the game's main puzzle (the name of the Great Old One) too easy to just look up. That said, you can absolutely recreate it with a little knowledge of Python by finding the script that generates the clues.

Thanks for playing.

Totally agree about the graphics. I originally had an idea where the monster as presented in each sequence would move from "pencil sketch" to "inked drawing" to "colored drawing" to "actual photograph" as you became more defined as an entity. When I actually scoped out that work, the time budget ballooned out of proportion. Maybe if I were a better artist that would have been worth the time, but my skill set being what it is, I went for Creative Commons photography and photoshop filters so that the visuals would actually exist.

I'm really glad you liked the writing. (I am not a writer and so I wasn't sure if any of it was landing like it appeared in my mind.) There's 42 different animals you could end up as depending on what you choose and where the RNG decides to send you. I just made a list of sea creatures and then kept adding them through the jam ending up with some real weird ones as a result (for example, you can end up as a sea sponge if you just say no to everything).

By open sourcing I just mean posting it on github and making it available publicly.

If you've never used it before git can be intimidating. The documentation on it is horrid so pretty much everyone I know has learned it by necessity, not by choice. That said, it is a great tool for version control on even small or medium teams (and is damn near essential for larger team sizes or more complex projects).

Oh? Is there a way to actually find it? I might have to root around a bit more.

Ooh. You really nailed the "liminal space" concept with this while neatly hinting that basically the entire world (maybe thanks to the internet) has become something of a liminal space in the process. This is just the wonderfully weird stuff I love to see in game jams.

Oh, I may have failed to remove all of the save features included in the default renpy set up. That was my intent since each play through is only intended to take a few minutes at most. The "what animal are you?" is absolutely something I found while implementing the system. I ended up with 42 animals just to make that part of it interesting (an expansion of that game would absolutely have more animals but also have some sort of counter for which animals you've managed to end up as).

You are absolutely right on the calculation part. That's probably the thing I was least happy with since you don't know how much power a choice will cost before you make it. I went back and forth about adding that and eventually decided against it since I didn't want to explicitly hint at the "right" choice.

Well... since you figured out they exist either by reading my dev blog or looking at the source: "Sharktillary" and "Evil Clown" give you secret options. :)

This game pretty much perfectly replicates the feeling of driving alone at night in a backwoods area. There's sort of a low sense of dread as your headlights make weird shadows and you are never quite sure if there is some animal about set to run out into the street.

Good call on the intro. I unfortunately ended up in *just* the right spot where I felt adding a skip choice made the intro take longer since it would prevent just rapid fire clicking through. Had I been able to add more elements to explain or even just used more flowery language, I think I would have definitely taken your suggestion.

Thanks for playing.

The drops in power are a little complex to explain. Basically each time you make a choice that defines your character (such has "has venom" or "does not have teeth"), the sum total of what is known about your character is compared against a list of possible creatures. If you've then eliminated all possibilities for other slots, that information gets set also. Your remaining power is the number of unknown slots.

So, for example, since few creatures have electricity in nature, identifying yourself as having electricity will:

1. Set electricity to true

2. Eliminate all creatures without electricity (a lot of them)

3. Scale down your unknowns based on the creatures that are left (I believe lungs is set to false in this case because no creatures with electricity also have lungs)

You then have to strike a balance between killing investigators and choosing traits that define you. Ultimately, each time you finish a run through you get rewarded with a few characters of the secret name you can enter at the name screen. There are 10 in total. Once you know them all, you'll get a play through with infinite power.

Thanks for playing. Glad you enjoyed it

This was a really interesting concept even if the puzzles are finicky. Understanding the 3d space makes them all very physical and existing in space. I could definitely see this sort of puzzle working its way into a puzzle game like The Witness where the solutions and hints about the puzzles themselves rely on and impact the environment around it.

This game is so engrossing and calming. The touches with the music kept the progress through so well and the sort of paper cut art style is so perfect in its simplicity and works well with the games larger themes.

Did you end up open sourcing this? I'd like to see how you did some of the transitions to get the animations in place.

The vaporwave visuals are trippy and out of this world. I liked this sort of procedurally generated story idea and did something similar myself. Not looking at the code, I'd bet this is pulling from a list of events that changes based on each decision (the monks would not leave me alone at one point). A little more branching would be an easy way to expand out what happens as the story worms its way around.

Interesting concept. Swapping back and forth between gameplay modes is something I haven't seen in a game since Contra 3 and they definitely didn't do it like this. The mechanic for the final bit (your location in the side scroller influences your location in the top-down) has a lot of potential for mazes and puzzles similar to Fez.

Here's mine. It is a visual novel based around sort of exploring the narrative space.

https://itch.io/jam/acerola-jam-0/rate/2581788

Rules of the jam say

"2. Your submitted games should be made with YAHAHA Studio Horror Game Kit."

Very interesting mechanic that works very well. Generally it is easy to determine what will happen to the gravity when a do a specific thing.

Another plus is the pro union propaganda aka world building via interactable signs.

The beginnings of a twin stick shooter genre game. The enemies move too quickly in comparison to fire rate and I would have liked a bit more player feedback for when I hit/get hit.

I love this puzzle mechanic. Easy to understand, but leading to chaos if you aren't careful not unlike a Rubix cube. Lots of possible variations for different "worlds" (tiles wrap around, collections to exit, nintendo ice, minotaur maze, etc.) mean that is has long legs for a full game.

Delightfully macabre art builds out a world played as a solid 2d platformer. Back half is a little janky with the new mechanic and I was expecting a little more explicit of a win state at the end (although maybe that's the point?), but the art carries it through.

Update from the dev today: Pushed up against and experimented with a bunch of options for transformations on renpy. I've literally taught linear algebra and multivariate calc, so fighting with matrix transforms is pretty embarrassing. Saving face a little... however... is that it was just the syntax, not the math. With transforms generally in place, the last step is getting all of the visual and audio elements in place and running final checks.

Renpy has some weird parsing a formatting designed around making it friendly for writers and artists that just rub me the wrong way as a developer. The smart searching of image names, for example, is interesting but makes me generally nervous from a data reference perspective. Of course, I know that a lot of the work here was about dancing around Python syntax and making sure the renpy specific functions don't conflict with Python functions. This is apparent with the lack of f-strings in renpy. It likely won't make it into the jam submission, but I did learn about persistent data in renpy and multigame persistent data. It is an interesting solution to make the concept readily available to non devs. If the feature makes it in, I'll probably end up writing a good-old json file instead of using the persistent data.

Hey, someone else using renpy. Awesome. Good luck

Ah... yeah, I don't think that can be spun into a feature. That would have to be something to actually fix. Too bad.

Thanks. I'll give it another shot.

The mouse sensitivity seems ridiculously high. I got stuck at what appeared to be a shooting range after which I tried to quit out. Esc did nothing so I eventually Alt F4'd out.

This game has a ton of charm to it. Lots of great absurdist humor and random, unexpected twists.

What isn't working about the mechanic? It is possible that your idea of broken is just a broader aspect of the design space. (But understand why the bug is happening, you don't want to accidentally fix it and remove a hard to get back feature.)

Big fan of the original Doom (and only sort of wishing you were using the gzDoom and making a WAD), so I'm very interested in this project. I'd love to see images of your monsters so far.

You absolutely should. This is such a deep puzzle mechanic.

I've seen RenPy get mentioned independently several times over the past few months so, as a professional Python developer, I figured I had to learn it. Then someone mentioned this Jam at work and I saw my opportunity.

Arise Ye Old One is a visual novel where you take on the role of a mysterious creature that has awakened in an eldritch temple under the waves. Could you be The One? The True Great Elder God who will bring true and lasting chaos to the world? It is time to find out via your cult of worshippers. Unfortunately, as is the case for all Elder Gods, a group of investigators who don't value their lives too well have taken up the case and are exploring your temple. Kill the investigators so that no one can stop your ascent, but be careful. Your mysterious nature is what gives you power and anything you do that defines a part of you saps that power. Losing all of your Mythos Power will reveal you to be just an ordinary sort of animal, not the face melting horror you truly are.

The basic flow of the game is a narrative race between losing Mythos Power and killing the team of investigators. You are essentially a horror movie monster jumping out at the investigators and picking them off one by one. Different selections of powers lock out other choices. Some choices will cost more or less mythos power based on your previous selections. (At the start, Electricity powers cost a lot but Gills cost less, for example.) To that end, you'll be exploring the narrative space and determining what combination of powers let you kill the most investigators. In my early tests this gives it a sort of narrative rogue-like experience, or maybe like a horror movie version of "Guess Who?" Each time you lose all of your Mythos Power but aren't banished by the investigators, you will learn some of the runes in the name of the True Great Elder God. Figuring out the True Great Elder God's True Name unlocks the final secret of the game.

I streamed the start of the project on twitch where I set up the basic flow of the game. There, I set up the basic class to store the player's state, qualities they've defines about themselves and what is known to the investigators. All said and done, one loop of the game was playable end-to-end during that stream with barebones placeholder text and the stock images from Ren Py.

In the meantime since that stream I've added story content for each of the encounters with the cult or the investigators and built out a much easier way for me to add new animals that you could become. (The more animals with dissimilar qualities, the less Mythos Power each decision costs thanks to how those two systems interact.) I also added the process by which you reach the true ending of the game via the Great Old One's True Name (and two Easter egg endings based on past projects... all secured, of course, you'll have to reverse engineer some Python if you want to learn the True Name).

My big task now is figuring out how animations/transforms/etc. work in RenPy so that I can build those in on my next dev stream. (1PM EST on Saturday.)

This is a great mechanic for puzzles. The whole world takes on a sort of rubix cube nature and so it could likely be used for a bunch of different puzzle types beyond just mazes. I hope there's enough time to really explore that design space.