itch.io

Wow, thank you for this amazing feedback! I'm sure Illumenos and I can incorporate this into a future version of this tool! I know he wants to expand it to also offer help to artists wanting to draw the frames/expressions for lip flaps, so I'm sure there'll be an update sooner or later.

We were actually looking at "proper" software licenses first (both of us are coming from a software development background, but neither does a lot of work in the open source community or with Python for that matter), but then figured that nothing would stop us from just slapping CC BY on it and call it a day, especially since we want the rest of the repo's content to be available for people as well, and for the art and music CC BY felt more appropriate. But yeah, definitely a weird choice and we were discussing MIT/Apache as well before just going with one license for everything.

As I already said, neither of us is using Python professionally, so this was all kinda hacked together within the time constraints of several game jams without digging deeper into the language and its best practices or really paying much attention to quality. So getting pointers for this is especially interesting for us. Usually we just take a break after jams because we're all tired, and then when the next jam rolls around it's all deadlines and stress again, so no one ever takes the time to truly figure stuff out. This is super helpful and a great way to get us to sort things out.

Thanks again,

CCL

Glad you had fun and thank you for the comment!

Great! I'm glad it worked out and you enjoyed yourself :)

Oh wow, I didn't know something like this was in the Voting Advice app! I'm not surprised though, as this game was inspired by the last European election.

3 endings sounds correct. (Spoilers:) The "compliant" ending, the "swat" ending as we called it, and the "kill eve" ending.

Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks  for the kind review!

No worries, stuff was already political. I (and the rest of the team) am still  shaken by the recent European election results and art  is and always has been a great outlet for that 😅

As for the GUI, that's exactly what I was shooting for, so I'm super glad it came  across the way I wanted it  to!

CCL

Hey, thanks for the heads-up!

I saw that the ren'py website was down yesterday, so I'm wondering if maybe it needs to establish a connection/load some more assets for the web version from their server and that broke it? Could you try starting it today/some time from now and see if the issues still persist?

The error message refers to code that is supplied from ren'py itself, so if this wasn't just temporary, I might get into contact with the maintainer so they know about it if it's a bug with the engine.

If you want to send us longer error logs, you can also send us an e-mail at nothack.europa@gmail.com. Thanks again for letting us know~

It's not dead! We're occasionally posting updates on our social media :)

Edit:

To give you a brief summary:

We've got most of the sprites done and started on CGs. The story is written and currently on its second editing pass. The music is...well, a lot of it is done, but I actually have no clue how much more the composer wanted to make.

It's a three person project, so progress is very slow. When we started it, we always joked that we'd need about a decade. By now, we've decided to do it in chunks, releasing a route at a time, and that feels much better.

We're all very excited to finally get this thing out, but since it's a hobby project, life and our day jobs sometimes get in the way. But by now an end is in sight at least.

Most of our games are visual novels, so it's going to have VN elements (and we're programming in Ren'Py) but we're adding some gameplay as well since it's not a proper VN jam!

Thank you very much for the kind review :)

Yeah, we're working on one :)

Thanks for asking! I just uploaded the mac build. We sadly didn't have our usual MacOS tester available for the jam deadline, so we published it a bit later!

Thank you very much for the detailed feedback! We'll make sure to focus on UI improvements and upgrading the tutorial for our post-jam clean-up :)

When you click on "End Turn", the enemies move. But with how large we ended up making the map, you can't always see them, which turned out super confusing. Sadly, we only noticed that during our final testing, and the enemies also move much slower in the web version for some reason. We'll definitely speed them up a bit, and maybe we could add a text hint for the player, telling them what's going on!

Thank you very much. We were struggling with different resolutions towards the end, but thought that the issue was fixed. This is definitely something we'll be looking at during our clean-up sessions, now that the jam is finished :)

Eventually, we'll be  releasing a new version with UI improvements, a better tutorial, and new character abilities. Hopefully, we'll be able to fix your problems with that patch as well!

Thanks for the feedback! We'll have a look at the usability now that the jam is over, so figuring out which bits are confusing/frustrating to the players really helps :)

Yeah, we'll definitely try to stretch the tutorial out a bit to make it easier to understand after the judging period. Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, first of all thanks for your comment!

We had one programmer working full-time on the project and four people who were only able to program one of the two days or less, who were helping him out.

Since our group usually publishes visual novels, we had a large amount of artists (3.5 in total, since one of them had to help with the programming) interested in helping out, which lead to this insane amount of beautiful custom art. For that same reason, we also had a composer for the background music, an SFX expert, and someone to master all the audio for us!

Most of the text bits were written by our usual editor, who jumped in when our author had to join the programming team on the last day of the jam, haha.

Sooo if I'm counting correctly, we were 13 people :)

Thanks for the feedback! We've got some more features planned, now that the jam is over - among other things a more intuitive tutorial (lets be honest, we added that one during the uploading grace period and it shows)!

Hey, thanks for letting us know! Could you tell us what operating system you're using and possibly what your screen resolution is? We can't reproduce the issue on any of the devs' machines, so knowing these would be a huge help :)

Have fun exploring more jam games!

With a cinematic soundtrack, cute and expressive characters, and a cool mix of a secret agent-y looking prologue into a fantasy style first chapter, I'm excited to see where this story is going.

I adored the attention to detail in this demo like the little bouncy animations the characters do, as well as the other animations.

Quentin's complaints over the struggle of a web developer hit too close to home, making him a very relatable main character, haha.

Also... THE SNAKE IS SO CUTE!

Thanks for the comment. I'm glad you enjoyed it :)

Glad you enjoyed it :)

I've got a busy weekend, but I'll check out your video as soon as I can!

Hey, thanks for the super detailed feedback, really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to watching your video :)

I don't know if you saw the little note below the download button, but we experienced some issues with covid in our audio team and will be updating the game with the rest of the Artur voice lines as soon as it's possible, so you could wait until then to play the rest!

Thanks for your lovely comment. There will be a sequel for NaNoRenO :)

A cute game with atmospheric music and adorable art for anyone who seeks some wholesomeness and friendship for Halloween.

Hey,

I can't even beging imagining working on sounds in addition to all the other stuff :O

Good thing you kept working on this, it would've been sad if you hadn't finished it! 100% worth psyching yourself up every time!

And I wouldn't worry about the horror elements. Imo the story was great as is. We tried to run at the first chance, just because we wanted to see if there was a cool dead end, and we were not disappointed lol.  The comedy ended up being amazing and you still had some horror elements, so I think overall, that worked out :)

I actually started making VNs when I was couch-bound due to physical issues for far too many months and getting into a really dark place mentally, so that whole "working on something single-mindedly for all of your waking hours" sounds spookily familiar.

Anyway, I'm glad you liked the feedback!

Yeah, it's impressive how much you got done on your own. For me it's the other way around. If I do the art (as I did for the paint jam), stuff looks awful. I suck at anything more complex than stick figures, haha.

> "I love you both. You should... /// erm, hold hands. ;3"

Our editor/composer totally ships them lol

>  I want to know more about it all!

This is sort of a spin-off of our long-term project WYSAPOOMP (which is still in development). We released a demo for it earlier this year, but it's not on the same level as PePaThin, as far as assets go - some sprites are missing, there is only one pose per character, we don't have all the background music we want, no voice acting etc.

It's mainly there to gauge interest in the story and figure out what works and what doesn't work with what we've planned. The whole thing currently spans 450k words while the demo includes about 40k of those. We'll also be updating the demo every now and then with some quality of life improvements.

WYSAPOOMP is about the same cult Artur hails from. We follow a fairly young member (~ university age) that has been tasked with keeping an eye on the cult's chosen Host that they want to use to incarnate their eldritch being into our plane of existence.

10 days before the ritual, strangers show up looking for the Host in order to stop the ritual, engaging with our MC and causing him to reconsider this whole sacrificing business. These strangers are some of Emma's buddies and their goal is to assassinate the Host before the ritual goes down.

While Artur stars as a side character (PePaThin actually just started as "some spin-off that should have Artur in it"), Emma sadly hasn't made it into the script yet. Maybe we'll find a place for her in the later routes.

This got kind of long >_<

Anyway, thanks for your comment, it's very much appreciated!

Yeah, that's exactly how we started. First we made sure we could finish making games on time, then later we started playing around with the UI. One thing at a time :)

Edit: also yeah, cows are awesome lol

What an interesting concept for a VN. I think what really elevated this was the fact that you didn't just use standard emoji but these cute ones that fit the rest of the art style. Also the fact that they don't just always appear the way regular text appears, but sometimes have special animations.

This was a cute little story and it was understandable without using any words. The art is so adorable :3

Oh, and the character's "voices" reminded me of lylat wars and undertale!

I checked out all three endings. Luckily, the last one I read was wholesome, so I ended it on a good note :)

Thanks for the nice comment!

And you found a "bug". I simply forgot to put the unlock code for that entry into the VN! I'll fix it whenever we push our next update (there are some other small things we want to change).

The entry in question is about Emma's calming technique! It reads:

"The 5-4-3-2-1 technique is a way to ground yourself when overcome by anxiety. There are variations that involve all five senses while some switch back and forth between only a select set of senses. For Emma's version, she counts five things she can see, then five things she can hear. Next, she goes back to her sense of sight, counting four things she can see, followed by four more things she can hear. This repeats until she counts a single thing each. Between rounds, the same object may be counted - this isn't a competition, it's not supposed to be stressful to come up with items to count."

Thanks for finding that issue :)

Don't be sorry, you did amazingly for a first game and errors happen to everyone. We're all rushed during jams and have to cut corners. The most important part is actually submitting a game! 

I'm also not a native speaker and you won't believe how many stupid mistakes my editor has to catch because of that :)

Now that the jam is over, you have all the time in the world to change whatever you aren't happy with and expand the story as you see fit.

Spoilers below.

You perfectly captured the single-mindedness expected from an AI tasked with a single duty. This was a hilarious little story.

A while ago, our editor told me about Roko's basilik, actually. I found this thought experiment pretty fascinating and am glad to see it in this VN!

The backgrounds are really cool and your character design is both cute and symbolically fitting, considering the way Leena comes off at first vs. what you later find out about her. Love the victim blaming towards her father and the resistance lol.

Also, the voice acting! This was such an amazing display with a huge range of emotions. Beautiful.

And underneath it all an epic soundtrack to round out the experience.

Overall, this was just a cool little game.