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LOVED THIS! Everything from the purposefully overstimulating UI to the story that kept me invested. Only had the time to get one ending, but definitely want to revisit this after October to fully explore and get other ends. 

Also Penny is like super super cute. I'm totally biased design and personality wise. 10/10 would let Penny "help me" again. 🤞

The story brings up some really good morality conversations. Super well made! Loved the different forms of media that feeds us information and gives us pieces of the story. Definitely interested in going through malViolence after October!

Such a cute game with interesting world building. Definitely interested in playing some of the previous games which I've been told feature some of the same characters. 

Thank you so much for informing us! Can I get you to try downloading version 1.04 that we just released and see if it allows you to save?

Thank you so much!! This is our first time entering a game jam / VN jam so I wanted to make the most of it! I (Elly) have been having so much fun going through as many VNs on and off stream! Honestly the VNs are such a breath of fresh air for me to stream and it's amazing to see what everyone has accomplished in just a month! 

I'll be honest with you I wasn't even aware that the our art files and such were protected until you mentioned it. Though I did a little digging and it's because we have files set to be classified upon building distribution! 
Here's the Ren'py documentation for it You can insert the lines of code that is shown in the documentation into your project's options.rpy.

Though honestly I really just learnt what this meant because I used https://feniksdev.itch.io/easy-renpy-gui as a starting point and built on top /modified everything. The easy ren'py gui's option file has all the classify lines already scripted out. Definitely recommend checking it out even to see as an example!

Killer aesthetic and a fun story! Very well put together and love the 2.5 style.
The lag was bearable for me, though a certain portion I felt like I was a bit unsure what to press so it took me a couple tries.

The otaku / gamer references had me DYIN. Everything feels over the top and it's absolutely great. The style of everything put together was so cool and I really enjoyed even the little things like the text colour changing to match the colour of the background frame. 

Also mad respect for body horror + gore. They did the job so well! 

A very well put together relatable story with THE CUTEST lil ghost! Loved all of the art and animations. Kinda just want to give Milo a hug I think he needs it. 

SUCH a fan of the style and characters. The animations are all so cute and the voice actors did an amazing job. Oh and of course the music is sick!! I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for the full release in the future!

I touch on some areas I think could be improved in future iterations in the vod, but here's something I didn't mention:

- The rhythm game songs weren't tied to the volume sliders in preferences as far as I could tell? I'm going to guess you are using movies for that portion. If so I'd maybe recommend adding the "channel" tag and setting it to "music" so that it shares the same volume as the music audio channel.

Thank you!! The professor's expressions were some of our character artists' favourite to work on~ Very hellsing inspired!

Hiya! You should be able to drag and drop or right click and upload file to the Google drive but this also totally works! 

Both stories were very fun short little read throughs. Vamp Me! had me dying.

p.s. I accidentally state during stream that you're sisters and I am SO SORRY I didn't go through the credits until after stream ;w;

The art and character designs so far are wonderful! The panel animations are very cute and expressive. I will look forward when you are able to update the game. I think if you have the time to even just update the demo, I would suggest adding a quit button to the main menu so I didn't have to force quit it each time

The art style and sounds really do a good job of creating a haunting, anxious atmosphere. 

Had a minor issue with the running gameplay specifically when it wanted me to press A (Doing so brought up the accessibility menu for renpy) so that may need to be changed in the future?

Very well put together story that had me captivated from the start! The aesthetic and cinemaphotography was beautiful. The music and sound effects suited each moment. Amazing work to everyone on this team!

SUPER charming, funny and cute short story

Had me meowing for almost a solid minute

3/3 cats

All the characters have really cute designs! I love all the interaction when looking around the different areas of the game. The camera movement was really cool. The spooky atmosphere is suitable in later parts. Also cat <3

Minor thing that might be able to be touched up on in future updates, some lines of dialogue stretch outside the dialogue box? e.g. "Let's wait for Kyle before discussing the details."

Also some of the collision in the maze may need to get updated? I was able to just click to directly walk from the beginning to end of the path, but then had to backtrack to follow the path in order to trigger the event.

Unfortunately I ran into a bug that made me unable to progress. Not sure if this is the game breaking bug mentioned on the page but I'll leave this here just in case. This probably happened because I didn't really follow the path and clicked to move from the entrance to where the glitching started. 
(Don't worry about how zoomed in this video is I just wanted to display it at a bigger resolution)

The pixel art characters and backgrounds are REALLY well done. The atmosphere and music at the party is great, but maybe the beginning when they're waiting in front of the club could use some ambient background noise. Not sure if it's just that I happened to click a lot of the wrong options, but I was hoping to learn a bit more about or see more of the zombies in the story? I really hope you update this or add to it because the art and set of the situation is really great.
Here's a few issues I found when going through this that would be good to fix if you decide to update this:

- Spelling mistakes - plauges -> plagues, straing -> straining (there are more but these I caught immediately)

- During one of the drinking scenes, Quincy covers the other girl who was in the middle 

- The panel with the character that is away from most of the club goers moves down out of place oddly if you say "I'm not really sure"

p.s. I recommend adding screenshots to your store page this art is seriously so cool and very eye-catching!

A very intriguing story and intricate gameplay system! I really enjoyed the personalities of each of the residents and their personal stories. The aesthetic and character designs are super cool and well made. 

The stat / rpg system is a VERY interesting concept, but may need some tweaking when it comes to balancing rolls.
With such a complex system there's bound to be some bugs, but I hope you'll be able to squash them in updates!

I LOVED this. The wonderful guest is very charming and reminds me of a golden retriever.
Characters with the guests.. condition are generally more sexualized in media so this VN feels like a breath of fresh air. It's short, but the interactions felt very personable.
Only minor thing I'd want out of this in an update is an option to skip previously seen dialogue. I messed up a bit trying to get an ending and had to click through everything again ;w;

The character interactions felt very genuine and I think the story was broken up well. The story really made me want to find out what was going on even though sometimes you felt kind of helpless or stuck doing your job. Thinking back, I think maybe some moments are a bit repetitive and could use some trimming. Nevertheless good job on this. There's a lot of content put together for this VN.

The world building implications and character designs are really fun!

Though sometimes I felt like I didn't really understand what was going on or what I was doing?

Amazing video! I had so much fun watching your playthrough~
Though I was like OH NOo during a certain uh number writing mishap lol!
Honestly makes me so happy to hear how cool you find our lore! We've had bits of the lore and story in the works for almost 2 years now, but we've just now made it more accessible/interactive.

Thanks again~

Hiya! We're honoured that this is one of your favourites! We have an ending guide (and achievement guide) on our tumblr below. It's linked under fun extra stuff though I can understand it's easy to gloss over with how our store page is set up right now!
https://www.tumblr.com/novaswarm/730053033222963200/a-guide-for-our-visual-novel...

A beautiful and haunting story. I didn't have time to do all the routes during stream but I went back to get all the endings off stream! The cinemaphotography is amazing and you really feel for all the characters involved in the story. The suspense really built up as a OH BOY WHAT DO WE DO NOW? The gallery is also super cool!

Honestly I'm a lil conflicted because I kinda wish we had a glimpse of Miltruad and Siglind's appearances considering the role they play in this is (in my opinion) pretty big and might give more weight when you er... don't follow their lead. BUT I do understand the nature of this VN to be very storybook like and for the focus to be on Isgard, Faralda and Odan. The usage of silhouettes for everyone else really highlights Faralda's beauty.

P.S. Apologies for thinking Isgard was a male character at the start of the playthrough.  I didn't remember the character images at the time :')

Confession: I knew I would love this the moment I saw you were working on this. This is all SUCH my aesthetic. Had so much fun going through and reading this during stream. Everything about this fits the style and is put together beautifully. I found myself just staring trying to deconstruct certain effects. Will 100% be streaming the next acts when you put them out. Amazing job!! 

This felt so unique and how the story was framed was very beautiful. The effects, sounds and animation all worked together very well. LOVED the choice effect of the (I think??) tv effect. There's something about one of the scenes that gave me a bit of nostalgia of watching the flash animation cutscenes from Homestuck. Really cool experience overall!

Beautiful graphics and a wonderfully descriptive, dramatic story. I was interested in Eleven but you had me heavily invested in the Mimi route. Honestly may revisit the VN on stream after October to go through Eleven's route! I'm very curious and had SO much fun reading through this one. Ps I still want Mimi's charger.

I love all the backgrounds and character sprites that are in this. They're painted wonderfully. Millie has such great aesthetic. The world building and the mentioned power have me intrigued. The dialogue between Millie and Rosalline was pretty funny as well.

If you decide to update this I suggest changing the background colour of the UI to be a dark brown to match your main menu. Currently with the white it is incredibly hard to read all the yellow text that appears in the VN. 

Also there are a fair bit of typos I found that I'll list here so you can quickly fix them if you so wish.

• "Becuase"-> "Because"
•  "theives" -> "thieves"
• "busicuts" -> "biscuits"
•  "voulenteer" -> "volunteer"
•  "sarm" - "swarm"?
• "leder" -> "leader" or "elder"?
•  "thier"-> "their"

This is a good little survival story with creepy atmosphere and ambiance. I enjoyed each of the different survival locations and think the setting was appropriate. I was only able to find 2/4 endings, but sadly encountered a bug when getting to one of the endings.

The bug appears on the route where you have the noisemaker at the police station. Around line 469 of your script. I think it may have an issue that it called your sound that should play there "new33-3" It thinks that it should play a sound called "new33" instead. I suggest renaming the sound effect that plays there to a name that doesn't use a "-" as a quick fix. 

If you update this I suggest maybe also adding the beginning narration in as text that shows up in the middle of the screen for accessibility sake.

First of all good job with the amount of art needed for this VN. There are a lot of scenes. The art style is very charming and the kids are so cute! I LOVE the design of the little girl with the knife

Some of the interactions like when the girl is teasing the two older kids were funny.

I'm not sure if the area titles like "The shadows" are really necessary to have on screen at all times. It may have been nicer to have the main images be a little bigger and only have the area name show up for a few seconds during the transition.

Sometimes characters have their actions shown between *. I think you could make use of the narrator consistently to show these actions instead of grouping them in with the character's dialogue. For example right now you have *He turns to him quickly* in Max's dialogue. Instead it could be something like Narrator: "He turns to Max quickly" and then continue with Max's dialogue. Don't be afraid to have single lines in the narration. You don't have to completely fill the dialogue box.

First of all very nice job on creating a VN using unreal engine, I can't even imagine all the programming must go into that. This is a very fun premise and series of events. The character design for all of the characters (including some of the antagonist characters) are very fun. Great job on the backgrounds especially with the variety you had! Your use of lighting is very good and does the job of leading the eye to important parts of the scene. Also all the character interactions felt very natural and well written.

A few notes that I think could elevate this should you choose to update it and work on it more:

• The volume sliders don't work even after hitting the confirm button
• "Went left/right" sounds a bit awkward as they are past tense. I suggest changing this to "Go left/right" potentially?
• There's currently an uneven white outline on the character sprites. I don't know if it's because of how they were exported or if the transparency was created after the characters were drawn. One easy method of cleaning this up is to apply a black outline to all the current sprites that would go over this white outline. Most drawing programs have a 'stroke' effect you can apply to images
• It's currently a bit difficult to see your characters and background due to the size of the dialogue box. I suggest either moving the characters and the background up or shrinking the size of the dialogue box down and splitting up the pieces of longer dialogue so we can see your art better.
• I found the character name a bit difficult to read with the current text box colour. Especially when Aaron was right under it as he has very similar colours to the name text colour.

Overall this is impressive for how much time we had and it's a very promising story! I hope that you keep at it and potentially update the VN if you can spare the time.

I like Travis' enthusiasm towards Halloween it made me laugh and also he's kinda right? (I like bunnies though so that I don't agree with him on)

I really like the type of art style used around when Travis says "It's hard to pinpoint when exactly I fell in love with halloween" and also Craig's style. If you're able to potentially cut out traditionally drawn characters and put them on a transparent background for sprites I think it could look really cool with your style.

One minor typo that should be a quick fix, the intro says "Novelel" instead of "Novel".

I sincerely hope you keep working at this!

The animated character sprites and pixel art battle are very charming and cute! The narrator is so mean ;w; geez, but I get that's the point. The narrator's performance was very good and it reminded me of the narrator in the Stanley parrable at times. 

Not sure if you're aware but there's some pieces of dialogue that just shows up as a square in Benji's route? 

This could possibly stem from the font you're using, not having a symbol used in the written dialogue. 

There's line cut off with Benji where he says "my dad buys another house that he only uses for his--" I'm unable to see the rest of that line since it goes outside the dialogue box area and history space. 

I wonder if maybe there should be something like a tutorial level of the battle game before interacting with Benji to give some context of the game or tell us about the game before having the chance to interact and talk with him? I understand wanting to incorporate the game in during his route to impress him, but teasing it in some way may work well.

The fighting mini game is a fun little addition though it may draw on too long considering how much damage your character does and how little choices you actually have. A very promising feature, but may need to be balanced or added to in the future. 

Nevertheless good job on this VN. I know programming in mini-games isn't an easy task.

Here's the finished character collage made up of 65 characters! Thank you to everyone who submitted their characters!

Hiya fellow Devs! I'm looking to put together a collage of all the characters from the submitted entries this year! If you see this feel free to add your Sprite to the google drive linked below, but please read through and follow the rules or else your image may get deleted.

Spooktober VN Jam 2023 character collage

Rules: 

• Rename your character sprite file to your VN title
• 1 submitted character per VN
• resolution doesn’t really matter as long as your sprite isn’t for ants
• preferably have a transparent BG
• if your VN has no main character choose a character that is seen
• if your VN has no characters choose a notable item or monster
• submit before Oct 28th.

A VERY intriguing story with a cast of characters that make you want to learn more about them. I wasn't able to completely finish all the routes on stream, but I went back off stream to go through everything. I'm writing this after completing the routes off stream. This is a complex VN and so I'm giving you a complex critique.

First of all I must commend you on all the features and style added to the game. I think you achieved the effects and vibe you were hoping for. The writing and descriptions are detailed and beautiful. Ezekial feels like a unique protagonist/pov that I haven't experienced in a VN before. Ezekial was the character I enjoyed the most, but I did also like Macy's route and story. Honestly this really didn't feel like a dating sim to me, as each of the girls aren't really my type, but that's 100% okay and more of a personal thing. I viewed it more like watching someone take apart a bunch of clocks and open them up to see how they tick. I enjoy how the choices appear after you've already chosen the 'wrong' choice. There's so much care and work that went into this and it shows. 

My two biggest issues stem from accessibility. While I understand that certain on screen text is made to be read quickly, they do not stay on screen long enough to read out loud. I understand that the text maybe wasn't supposed to draw on too long, but it had me going ??? what did that say??? Most of the time. In addition there was a few ear splitting sound effects. These sound effects were well placed and did lend to the story, but one of them had no ties to the volume slider in the options. Meaning if I wanted to stop the ear ringing noise, I had to mute the game entirely. Going through another route, same with the bubbling sound effect. It's so loud that it makes hearing the voice acting a little difficult despite having Voice Volume maxed out.

Also during my on stream playthrough I did encounter an instance where a door closing sound effect was looping instead of closing once. 

(Writing as vague as I can) The cards are a fun addition but the update of our current cards feels like it breaks up the dialogue too much if there's no visual. I like when the cards are shown in a specific route and wish that they would show up for the others as well.

The intentional crashing of the game. I get it. I understand the effect that it's suppose to create. Though from a streamer's perspective, it was slightly annoying having to adjust my program to capture the game every single time it 'crashes'. There are other games that do a similar effect and crash the game, but because of the nature of VNs and how many possible 'wrong' answers that can be chosen, the crashing happened very frequently. Not sure what can be done as replacement, but have the same effect. Maybe have an option that doesn't 'crash' the game exactly but just returns the player to the main menu idk? With the many times the game goes back to the main menu, this also makes the 'ending' of the game a little anti-climatic or unclear whether it was the end or not. The only way I could tell was that the 'continue.' no longer allowed me to play.

All in all this is a very promising visual novel with a lot of to give. If you ever consider updating it I would maybe try to mostly look into the sound effect control that I mentioned. 

A charming wholesome and light hearted story with dialogue that left me cry laughing. Doesn't take itself too seriously. Character designs are on point. Amazing UI Design. Cierre is my favourite golden retriever disaster gay (affectionate).

Would love to know more about this world or story if you ever plan on expanding~

Cute relatable characters in a funny replayable game! Really enjoyed going through this one. Minor scene changing continuity that could be fixed in the future, but great job nonetheless! SvenJAMMIN will be remembered.