itch.io

good to have around for when i feel crazy. though i have only read this today, i’ve been following what is basically this manifesto for a while now. i’m a solo dev so the crushing weight of being in control of my own “marketing” and “success” in the current internet climate is harrowing. my art is how i communicate with others, and my work is free to play because i care most about making real connections from it, but i just haven’t been able to drum that up in an environment that treats everything as disposable. even when i know deep down, the internet as we know it has been broken, being able to hear it from someone every once in a while is great. it lets me know i’m not alone in longing for the real connection i used to experience online, and that there are people besides me out there who give enough of a shit about this stuff to write a manifesto about it. it was a pleasure being able to sit with these feelings i’ve had as not just a set of inside thoughts, but words laid out for me on pages.

she ate and left no crumbs

Read this because I also have a vampire-related story in the Queer Halloween Stories bundle, so I’ve been scoping out the other vampire-makers. I need to emphasize that no singular piece of interactive fiction has ever allowed me to depict the startle I feel when someone knocks on my door and I’m in the middle of something in my kitchen. “fuck the Brita, fuck the water spill.” You were so real for that. Toward the end, I treated my best friend kind of how I would want to be treated if I came out to them, which is, “don’t ask too many questions, just let this part of me take up space,” and I feel like I was able to do that pretty effectively, even with such short responses. I know it probably feels like I’m reading into this too much, but I feel like a lot of games like this tend to push you into asking all sorts of probing questions in order to pad out the substance of the game, and I wouldn’t want to ask too much about my friend being a vampire. I really loved just being able to say “oh cool!” and ask if they could have human food or not. Treating being a vampire like it’s a food allergy is so funny to me, but it’s also so real. Being a vampire can be being a vampire, but in this case, it’s just your friend, so I take their confession as like, “hey, I just wanna tell you that… I’m probably really old.”

Also, love when vampires can have human food/aren’t repulsed by it. Love when vampires just get to be people.

I love this thing. Absolutely fantastic. The artwork especially is so dynamic and expressive. Just looking at this thing makes me want to pick up my drawing tablet and start searching for some scratchy ink brushes to use. I sent a link to this page to a bunch of my friends and every one of them has said something along the lines of “this looks sick as hell.” And they’re right!!! This looks sick as hell.

I hope you know how much it means to me to have someone read and recount as much as you did from my project. Whenever my friends make games or write stories, I always try to give them detailed reviews like this, because it brings me so much joy when people write this kind of thing about something I’ve made. I’m gonna be self-indulgent and give you some comments on your comments and a bunch of behind-the-scenes about the making of Act 2!

-I’m glad you like the backgrounds! They were originally supposed to be fully rendered. My friends saw the fully rendered backgrounds, and rushed to tell me how bad they looked. It was the first time they really told me something I was doing was bad, but I don’t like ignoring criticism. They were the ones who suggested the more minimal backgrounds with lines. I’m so glad I listened to them, they were SO right, and they saved me a TON of work rendering backgrounds. Sometimes, less is more!

-Val’s cute new outfit is based off of a bottle of perfume! It’s based off of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male Terrible.

I saw this bottle, the name, and the razor blade necklace, and felt so inspired. This outfit has existed since before Val was nice. He used to be kind of terrible! I’m satisfied with where he was then and where he is now, because I was able to write a nice guy who does messed up things as a result. I looked at that bottle, and thought, “whatever man wears this is trying so desperately to be a bad-boy type! Let’s put this on this Scandinavian dork!”

-oh my god I’m SO glad you said what you did about saturday because AAAAAAAAH! I really have trouble writing side characters. I mean, I don’t have trouble writing them, I just feel weird letting side characters be side characters. I want every character to have a spotlight, in some way, so when I have a side character like her (I have such a soft spot for her too) I worry that I’m letting other characters take too much of a spotlight over them. I really wanted her personality to shine through.

-Lupine is a trans guy, and Dash considers himself transfemme (he/her), but is not explicitly a trans woman. When I was writing Dash the most, I was in a transition period where I was in the same kind of spot as him, but I’m transmasc (so, inverse almost!) Now, I’m in a more explicitly masculine place, but I have a lot of friends who have settled into their gender feelings in a place that’s more like Dash’s. He’s a character that, whether people are transmasc or transfemme, they have told me they feel represented by. I feel like a lot of trans characters out there are put into neat little boxes, when in real life, gender is messier than that, yknow? I wanted to convey that with some of my characters, especially with Dash. Even I feel represented by Dash, despite being on the other end of things. For example, I still use “she” pronouns despite being a man (he/her). the important thing about any of my trans characters is that they are trans and that me and other trans people can look at them and go 🥰🥰🥰 omg i’m trans too

-The parts where Lupine or Dash say “don’t think, it’s bad for you…” This is something known within my circles, but my husband says this to me. I stole it from him! I was having trouble wrapping up a lot of scenes I wrote between my characters, because there were just so many thoughts and words that bubbled up inside them. But sometimes, you need to have silence, and I knew when they needed to have silence. I remembered what my husband tells me when I’m thinking too much. We’ll be in the car, I’ll be staring out the window, and he’ll say, “you’re thinking. Stop that.” And he’s RIGHT!

-Donna wouldn’t have killed Val lol. I know that, but I don’t think Val did. She’s too scared to kill anyone anymore, I think. Both her and Val could never kill anyone like that nowadays. She was a character that took a lot of work to write. I didn’t want to let people down with her. I didn’t want it to seem like Val was the good guy the whole time. I wanted to show how traumatized she was and how much she tried to look tough in front of him. So I gave her a glock.

Anyway, it’s been a pleasure to read and reply to this. Thank you so much for reading!

This is the least cursed reply I could have hoped for, thank you for explaining! Yeah, Val is genderfluid, so the “transgender protagonist” tag makes sense, but the “gigantic breasts” tag…? My friends and I had a really good laugh wondering how that may have occurred. It was probably tagged as “protagonist with gigantic breasts” by someone as a joke. It makes my heart warm that someone would love Val enough to spread misinformation about his boobs.

this is killing me. is that how you found this game? were you searching for protagonists with gigantic breasts? not that there’s any shame in that. I don’t know why it was tagged as that, and i am sorry for any misunderstanding. but my protagonist IS a 6’4” Scandinavian with not much muscle tone, and therefore, his chest is quite large and pillowy soft. to me? his breasts are…maybe not gigantic, but special and worth mentioning nonetheless.

I did my best to make Act 2 a satisfying experience, it means the world to me that you would take the time to tell me this. Thanks so much for reading this far ❤️

First of all, thanks so much for playing! It means a lot when someone takes the time to read my work. I hope you’ll forgive me for the text wall of a response, I just enjoy talking about this project a lot.

It always makes me happy when people point out how ambiguous Val being a vampire is in the beginning, because when I first started writing it, I debated whether I was actually going to go through with making him a vampire, or just some guy who is extremely committed to the bit. I threw it around a lot that maybe I could make people believe he was a vampire, but then when he turned out to just be some delusional loser, it would be a big twist, but as I kept writing Val, I wanted to be nicer to him than that, haha. He goes through a lot, I didn’t want to make him more pathetic than he needed to be, even though it would be kind of interesting. I would really like to hear what you think of Act 2, if you decide to play, because while everyone is very caring about each other, there’s a little more spice in the second act, and it’s addressed why Val is so saccharine-sweet all the time. Act 1 is cute, but so far, Act 2 has been hitting people like a bus, so I hope you enjoy it!

I’m sorry for it being such a trouble to download from an external source, but I don’t think I can make the game smaller, nor will any future installments be smaller. If people are afraid of the file having a virus, they’re gonna have to make that judgement for themselves. There’s really no point in my game containing any sort of a virus, because I’m a developer with an online presence, a Patreon, a website, etc., and if I were to put a virus on people’s computers, that would completely ruin my reputation. It would be pretty weird for someone to spend years of their life on a project, only for it to be an elaborate plot to put a virus on people’s computers. The external download link is also the same one on my website, priro.pro, and I’ll actually be selling the game as a physical copy on some pretty custom-made USB sticks soon, too.

I’m not sure what you exactly mean by that the game could use more visuals, but I assume by the context that this is a criticism of how static my sprites are. The reason my sprites are so static is because I have to cut corners in order to produce this game by myself, and also preserve the cadence of the game. It’s commonly advised for visual novel developers to add more body movement to sprites, or something that makes them a bit more visually interesting to the reader, but with the way my dialogue is written, a lot of body movement in my sprites feels strange. When playing, the player’s eye is usually focused on the dialogue box with more banter-like, back-and-forth dialogue, which is predominantly what Parfum Nostalgique has. I set up my sprites so they had a wider range of facial expressions rather than body movement, because when the reader inevitably breaks focus from the dialogue box, they are not left staring back at a sprite with an unfitting expression on the character’s face. I find that some games with more limited sprite range prioritize body movement, and it works well for expressive characters, but facial expression was where I could more easily add range in my characters’ expressiveness with my work capacity, being one person working on this whole project. I tried to add this range with Dashiell’s sprites especially, in the scene where he’s talking to Val in his room. A lot of subtle changes were added to Dash’s face every time he’s about to cry. If I were to make sprites with lots of different facial expressions AND movements, it would have been too much for one person to handle, and it also would have been an absurd amount of sprites, especially considering my characters have multiple different outfits and hairstyles depending on the scenes in this series. I also wanted to prioritize visually interesting sequences of stills, like Oberon’s scene and Val’s inner monologue scene, rather than creating a game where only sprites take the floor, so I had to consider that part of my workload.

Also, yeah the game doesn’t save screenshots when you save! I preferred the aesthetics of the roses, and Parfum isn’t really long enough that someone would need to make multiple save files.

I hope this explains why the game is the way it is, and that it was at least mildly interesting!

Thanks so much for playing! It really means a lot to me. The game is free now because the accessibility of the game is more important to me than the very small profit I was making from it. Most of the money I make for this project is on Patreon, but most of my traffic when it comes to downloads comes from in-person events and word of mouth, and lots of people who want to play aren’t familiar with Itch.io as a platform, and find it daunting to navigate it. Because of this, it’s been easier for me to make my game accessible for free on my website for direct download, and use Itch.io as a tool for spreading the word to whoever uses this platform. The age range of people who enjoy this series varies wildly, and some people who have played it don’t even know what Steam is, but scanning a QR code with their phone to a direct download link is something they’re more familiar with. Might not make a whole lot of sense, but it’s okay, because the joy of this game being accessible to more people has been more rewarding than any money I could get for it!

Ah, I’m glad!! Val’s a real sweetie, I hope he captures your heart <3

my dearest darling, you know they are going to suffer

YESSSSS! Please tell me what you think when you play!

Just got to reply to this now!! Thank you so much for playing the demo. I worked really hard on it. I haven’t heard my art described as “dreamy” before, but that is such an accurate word for what I’m going for that I have no idea why it has been out of my project’s descriptive vocabulary before!! I hope you’ll play Act 1, it came out like. A DAY after you wrote this, and when I saw your comment I was rubbing my little hands together like, “good because I’m about to DROP this thing.” Thank you for being enthusiastic enough to leave a comment!!