itch.io

Ah, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reply to this!  I haven't been feeling well, and haven't been checking itch.io regularly because of it.

I don't think "The Golden God of Aiolia" would work well for such a project; in fact, I'm not sure it would even be viewed as acceptable, as it's barely a game at all,  just a novel with a few points of interactivity added to justify having put it in Ren'py.  It's also pretty long--about 100k words, plus another 30k of glossary and other extras--so it would probably be a bit more than what you're looking for.  On top of that, there are a lot of ancient Greek words sprinkled into the text, which would add unnecessary difficulty to the task.

Hey, I was just wondering how much editing is permitted on these sprites?  I was thinking of using one (or both) of them for my OjiJam game, but would it be all right if I changed the tint on their skin?  (Like really changed.  Specifically to green...)

I'm sorry to hear that.  I don't know anything about Linux; I just use the export feature Ren'py provides.  I'll try re-exporting it tomorrow or the next day and upload that.  In the meantime, I'll remove the broken Linux version from the page.

You know, actually, maybe I'll try the joint Windows/Linux build instead of the separate ones.  I've been using the separate one to make the downloads smaller, but maybe it's more reliable to do the joint one and that's why it's the default setting.

Ahhh, this was so adorable!  I'm pretty much obsessed with the Trojan War (though as a Patroclos fangirl, I prefer the Iliad to the Odyssey), so of course I had to play it after seeing your posts about it in DevTalk! :D  (Admittedly, it took me a while to get to it, because things are nuts in my life right now, but I guess I just need some ducks in my life to help me out...)  I love the character art, esp. the ducks, and Penelope hiding behind her veil. :)

The bonus scenes in the extras now make me want to see a light-hearted isekai set during the actual war.  (Or maybe I should make one where the isekai'd heroine is too busy squeeing over how lovey-dovey Patroclos and Achilles are to actually bother courting anyone herself...)

Yeah, the art is great; there are a lot of terrific things available as assets here on itch.  (In fact, I've been thinking it would be fun to do a VN jam where the one requirement was for all the assets to be things posted as assets before the jam.)

I admit to kind of wanting to tell the story of what happened to the poor hero's ex, though it'd be hard to get it just right, since the demon lord kinda has to be all "it was just Tuesday" about it.  Maybe if that zine ever gets off the ground, I could write up a little story for it.  :)

I'm glad you enjoyed it. :D  I was really conflicted about releasing something so unlike my usual work, so it's gratifying to know it was worth taking the risk. :)

I can't take credit for it, but I do agree that the character designs are great; I was really lucky that there are so many talented artists who put their work up for sale on itch!  :D

I'm glad you like the plot.  I hope you enjoy(ed) the game as well as the idea behind it.

(Sorry for the late reply, btw.  I've been hiding for a while in fear of how people might react to this....)

Actually, it's set in a demon lord's castle, but I was very much hoping for a Castlevania vibe to the place (or rather wishing I had the art for it to look like Drac's castle, lol!), and I thought this music fit the feeling I was going for more than straight up Castlevania-style music, since it's a VN, not a game with on-screen combat.  The game's sorta...uh...iffy, though:  it's for Yandere Jam, so the demon lord's both obsessed with the hero who came to kill him and also getting a thrill out of watching him get repeatedly torn apart by his minions.  (Nothing gets shown other than the demon lord and a standing sprite of the hero, though, and my descriptions are pretty tame, but even so it's kinda...)

Thanks so much!  :D  The email arrived safely, and I now have what I need for my game.  :)  (Next time, I'll make sure to follow the right procedure so this doesn't happen again...)

Okay...I have a problem.  I didn't realize that most of the tracks were not present in the version available on itch.io.  Only one of the five or six tracks I wanted to put in my game is in the pack available here....and I donated money during the download process, so if I buy it elsewhere, then I would be paying twice.

Huh...I have no idea why the .gif I uploaded onto the main page is doing that.  :(  I thought they'd just put a thumbnail...

(BTW, if anyone happens to remember that in the previous devlog I mentioned I was doing a game for Yandere Jam, that game has been cancelled due to a terrible script and worse art.  (That's what I get for trying to do the art myself, lol!)  I'm doing a kinetic novel for Ace Jam instead.  Better script, and I'm using other people's assets (mostly intended for RPG Maker, but...), so it looks pretty.)

The character animations are fantastic!  They really capture the player's attention--and they're so cute!  :D  (As is the story.)  I'm looking forward to getting to play the rest.  :)

This was terrific!  I loved the visuals--both the sprites and that wonderful UI frame--and the music fit perfectly.  The slow build of the interactions between the two leads was wonderfully done, and the cultural details about the dark elves were fascinating.  I can't wait to read the later chapters!

For the later chapters--since you won't be in jam-time crunch--I'd recommend having a native English-speaker proofread your dialog.  With everything else being so fantastic, the errors became more jarring.  Not game-breaking, by any means, though.  :) Edit:  I want to simply delete the second paragraph of my comment, because in looking back it feels kind of rude, but I can't really do that because what if you already saw it and...well, my brain will spiral downward on that notion endlessly, so...I'm just putting it in strikethrough.  And also apologizing that my suggestion reads like a criticism--and worse, a criticism for something I could never do in a million years.  (Despite my occasional delusions to the contrary, I know myself well enough to know that I will never master a second language to the point of being able to write in it.  Hopefully I'll get to the level of being able to read one, but...)  I'm sorry; I'm very bad at communicating with others, even in text form.  (And I'm downright useless at speaking to people...)

I'm glad someone got the reference!  :)  That was also why the award statuette was designed to look like a crying woman.  (Although that's not entirely clear in the art of the banner at the theater, due to angles and such.  Hopefully, for the full game we'll get the ending CGs made, and one of those will show the statuette more clearly.)

And yes, Pat is definitely functioning to keep Ace more-or-less stable.  Or at least mostly harmless.  *cough*   Achilles in the myths has such a brutal, horrible aspect to him--and some of what Ace does in the bad end is in a way worse, since he's a musician rather than a trained killer--that I wanted Ace to reflect.  Though in that regard, having Pat be the narrator is a drawback:  he's so smitten that he doesn't really see just how easily Ace could slip completely around the bend.

I'm still cautiously (naively?) optimistic that I can get the rest of the game coded by the end of the month....

We're still looking for another background artist.  Especially one who might be willing to do close-ups of a radio, newspapers, television, and other quasi-CG elements like that.

Is anyone else finding that the system does not acknowledge the games as bought through the bundle?  With other bundles I've bought, like the racial justice one last year, I get a big banner across the top of the game's page, saying I bought it in a bundle for $x, so many days ago, etc., but on this one there's no banner, and the "download bundle" page doesn't link me to download pages, but to the game pages, from which of course I can't download, because it doesn't think I've bought them.  I know my payment went through, since I got the email about it and can access the special purchase URL, but I can't access anything in the bundle except to look at its page.  (Other than the ones that were also in the racial justice bundle, that is.)  Is this some kind of side effect of the script cleaning up the earlier autoadd error?  (Though I don't think I bought the bundle before that was cleared up...)

This is super cute!  :)  Is there a way to move the music and sfx sliders, though?  Or maybe to hide them?  A lot of the time, the dialog popped up right behind them...

I've sent you a friend request on Discord so we can discuss the project.

I am the writer in a team of (so far) four people putting together a visual novel to be submitted to both YaoiJam and SuNoFes at the end of this summer.  The game will be released for free, so I cannot afford to pay any of the participants, but will be glad to post links to Patreons, kofi accounts, etc., in the game's description.

The game is basically a 1980s riff on parts of the Iliad...if the warriors were members of rock bands.  As such, the music is an integral part of the experience, and ideally we would like the music to match up to the appropriate styles:  one somewhat punkish, the other mainstream rock with some Latin influence.

We already have an artist to do our sprites and CGs, and one background artist, but as the game needs between 15 and 21 backgrounds, a second background artist might be good to have.  Our current artist has a hand-drawn animation art style, so any accompanying artist would need to have a similar style.

If you think you might be interested in working with us on this game, please reply here or contact me on Discord at PyrrhaIphis#6749.  If you have any questions, please ask them here.

Thanks!

Okay, I've signed up for Discord now.  My Discord ID (or whatever it's called) is PyrrhaIphis#6749 and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, so it will probably take me several days to figure out how to use Discord correctly.  (I'm on the PC right now, but I've also downloaded the phone app; I'm hoping I'll have an easier time with that, even if it will make me type more slowly and with more errors.)  Fortunately, the jam doesn't start for another month, so there's time for me to wrestle with Discord. ;)

Yes, I totally need an artist!  There are going to be a fair number of characters (I have a depressing tendency to wing it when I write, so it's hard to be 100% sure of how many), with most of the primaries being rock musicians and their management.

I'm on my phone right now so I can't do much that requires typing (I am a super-slow phone-typer), but tomorrow I can sign up for Discord and we could talk and see if we could work together on the project.  (Y'know, so as not to take over someone else's thread here.)

I won't be starting the project until July, but I will be needing a programmer at that time for a visual novel I'll be submitting to YaoiJam and SuNoFes, which both run for the same two months.   (Sadly, YaoiJam has rules against starting work before the jam starts, so I only have plot summaries at the moment.)   There won't be any NSFW content, as SuNoFes doesn't allow that.

The game is kind of a 1980s riff on parts of "The Iliad."  If the warriors were all in rock bands.   (Though in the good ending of the game, everyone lives.)

The game will be free, so I can't pay a programmer (or an artist or a composer), but if you're interested, I will definitely be needing the help.  (I don't have Discord at the moment, but I'm likely to have to sign up in order to coordinate with any collaborators I can line up for the project.)

If this sounds like something you might like to help out with, let me know!  :)

Sorry to jump into someone else's thread here, but I had a similar question--similar, yet different.  I will shortly (well, in a couple weeks) be uploading a lightly interactive TWINE version of a novel I wrote some years back, and I'm completely baffled as to what to put on the "average session duration" for it.  As it is a full length novel (a bit long for some genres, in fact, being over 100k words) I would expect most people to take a couple of days to read it all.  (Whether or not they want to read it all is unfortunately not something I can predict, naturally.)  I have no idea how long most people would want to spend sitting at their computer reading it at a time, and as everyone reads at different speeds, I can't even guess how long it would take someone to read a single section of the book/game.  Do I try to guess how long people might want to spend reading at a single sitting, or do I put "Days or more" since that's how long it would take most people to get through the whole story?  (Unless they decide to stick with an early "Game Over" ending, that is.)

LOL, kind of a late reply, but here's my situation:  I finished and submitted The Cousins some time ago, got the glossary added to my previous game, Are You A Better General Than Agamemnon?, and then tried to start writing an inverse dating sim, which I did not get very far into (like, not even to the first hint of interactivity!), and then started working on converting the rest of the novel that The Cousins came from into a game, too.

That's going...well, better than the inverse dating sim, but it's still a bit slow and sporadic.  When I rewrote the first half of the first chapter of the novel into The Cousins, almost every word of it was new.  This one, I'm keeping some scenes almost in their entirety, keeping bits and pieces of others, and writing others from scratch.  It's hard to go very far in that at a time, because I'll get in the groove of doing one of those things and then have to switch to the other, which throws me out of my groove.  And I'm very much the type who writes on momentum above all else, so when I lose that momentum, it really mucks me up.  Still, I'm liking how it's turning out this time a lot better; the new material has been light years better than the material I'm ditching.  (Hopefully, that means I've improved as a writer in the last six years...)

One problem with it is that suddenly I kind of want the title of the whole game to revolve around cousinhood (yeah, that's not a word, is it?), because I realized there was a lot more of that going around in the original story than I thought at first.  So, the two girls who are the title characters of The Cousins, when they finally escape their slavery and end up in the remains of the Greek camp outside Troy, they meet Eurysakes, the son of Aias.  Aias was the cousin of Achilles, and since one of the girls is the daughter of Achilles, that makes Eurysakes her cousin.  That part I was always aware of.  But in this new version, Eurysakes is going to Troy as an official delegation from his uncle, the King of Cyprian Salamis, to the new King of Troy, who is the son of Alexander.  Alexander, of course, was one of Priam's sons, and Eurysakes' uncle was the son of one of Priam's sisters.  (Seriously.  When Heracles destroyed the previous Troy, killing Priam's father and brothers, he captured Priam's sister Hesione and gave her to his buddy Telamon as an enslaved concubine.  And on her he fathered Teukros, while he fathered Aias on his wife.  Ironically, there are lots of different names and family origins for Aias' wife, as she was mythologically irrelevant, unlike Hesione.)  So once there was this official visit angle on it, I suddenly realized that "whoa, Teukros and Korythos are cousins, too!"  Like I said, there's a lot of that going around, suddenly.  (Technically, there's just a lot of cousins in Greek mythology in general, what with half the gods and heroes having been fathered by Zeus or one of his offspring...)  So I may still tweak the title away from The Walls of Troy to something more family-related, but I'm not sure what, yet.  I may see if any further insights strike me as I continue the rewrite process.

As to playing...I've probably done more of that than I should...but mostly it's been Animal Crossing and My Time at Portia... *cough*

Yeah, I wish I'd known how much better SugarCube was when I started!  When I give that game its total overhaul, if I stick with TWINE, I'll definitely be converting it to SugarCube from Harlowe.   (Honestly, I'm not sure why Harlowe is the default format in the first place.  If it had defaulted to SugarCube, I'd never have wasted my time with Harlowe...)

Just an FYI, but the old link is no longer functional, because I've uploaded the final(ish?) version of the game.

With my multi-project situation, it's hard to measure how I'm doing, progress-wise, but I think I'm more or less where I'd like to be right now.  The game about the cousins escaping slavery on Lesbos is almost done; I've gone through and polished the text (though it probably still needs more work), and added all the formatting and graphical doodads, so now I just need to play through it and find all the problem spots that need fixing.  I started the playthrough yesterday, but got distracted (SQUIRREL!) and didn't get very far.  Hoping to finish proofing it today or tomorrow, and then upload it the following day.

I've done a pretty hefty amount of the basic writing to add the glossary to the game I uploaded earlier, too, but I need to go hunting for just the right piece of TWINE code, as I was hoping to be able to have all the glossary entries on one page so that when you click on a name or word it shows you the entry, but then you can click the name again to make the entry go away again.  I know I can make the text appear, but I'm not so sure I can make it disappear again.  (I'd just put them on separate pages like I did in the escape game, but that is a ludicrous number of pages, and this game already has a ton of them as it is.)  Ooh, I'll also need to go through it hunting for various coding errors, as it was reported to me that there were still some lurking about that I missed the first time.  That may take me another couple days... :(

Haven't put much thought into the project I want to work on after that, though.  I'm thinking it's going to be the anti-dating sim I want to do (or rather a parody of a dating sim where the point is to avoid getting in a relationship) for either the Aromantic or Asexual Jam, whichever comes first.  (I think the former is December and the latter January, but last I checked it was too soon to see if they're going to be on the schedule again this winter.)  I haven't got much in the way of planning or anything, so if I assume I can start on it somewhere around the 15th or so, I doubt I'd have anything postable by the end of the month.  Which is a pity, because it's a genre I've never attempted writing before, so I'd love the ability to get some feedback on it.  (OMG, I said that as if I had any kind of history writing games when I've done a grand total of two of them...)

So, a game jam I was in just completed its ranking period, and in looking at the final ratings, I can't help but noticing the two columns:  "Score*" and "Raw Score".  The asterisk next to Score to me suggests there ought to be a footnote somewhere explaining how it was calculated, but I see no such footnote.

I'm assuming the difference between the two is something itch.io does automatically, but I'm wondering what the logic behind it is, because it doesn't seem to serve any purpose but to punish everyone who got fewer ratings than the median number.  (And yes, part of that is indeed irritation since I got fewer than the median number and thus my scores were reduced, but part of it is genuine confusion.)

How is the Score* calculated, and why?

Oh, I like that.  Thanks!  I think I'll go with "The Cousins" since there's a lot of emphasis on their relationship, and also because I figured out how to say it in Ancient Greek.  :P   (Okay, technically what I found was "kinswomen" not "cousins" because apparently only men got to be cousins, but...close enough...)

I am terrible at naming things.  Could anyone help suggest a title for the project I'm starting out this jam working on?

It's a piece of interactive fiction, adapting and expanding the first chapter of a novel I wrote back in 2014.  It's set in the Late Bronze Age on the isle of Lesbos, about seventeen years after the Trojan War ended.  In the prologue of the novel (and the pre-title screen of the game), just weeks before his own death, Achilles has to go to Lesbos for reasons, accompanied by Odysseus, and as they're both lecherous horndogs, they both get one of the female slaves pregnant before they leave the next  morning.  And their daughters are our heroines, seventeen years later.

The plot of the game is about the two girls (who are cousins, as their mothers were sisters) learning that their master plans to separate them, giving one to a Thessalian horse-breeder who's currently visiting him, and the other to a mysterious man from the far north.  Being separated is the one thing the girls cannot allow to happen to them, so they make up their minds and escape.  The interactivity is in that there are two places where you can follow one girl but not both, and then in the course of their escape you can decide what items they should try to obtain to take with them, giving multiple game-over scenarios.  (The main body of the novel, of course, was what happened after their escape, when they met up with another offspring of one of the Greek heroes of the war, and went to the partially rebuilt Troy and helped fight off a terrible threat not only to the people of Troy but also to the gods themselves.  The book's title is not yet certain, either, as its first title was awful, but I'm thinking of calling it The Walls of Troy, which doesn't mean much in or out of context, but is at least moderately punchy and not as spoilery as the first title was.  Said book will probably also get converted into a game, because I had fun writing all the ways things could have gone wrong for them.)

I have no idea what to call this game version of their escape from slavery, though.  Anyone have any ideas?  (The girls are named Atalanta and Ariadne, btw, if that helps any.  Because...actually, I don't even remember anymore why I wanted to name them after those two famous heroines.  But we know women in historic times were sometimes named after mythical heroines, so why wouldn't they be named after them while it was still the Heroic Age?)

Hey, just wanted to make sure my plans are okay with the jam.  I'm used to doing NaNoWriMo, but was driven away by the horrible site redesign (which sounds shallow, I know), but I continue to work on structured writing projects in November out of sheer habit...although I'm being less structured this year than most.

Anyway, I'm working on a game right now for Yuri Jam, which is adapting the first chapter of an old novel of mine, but I've already written the bulk of the core text (in fact, I've posted it as a draft looking for feedback, if anyone wants to wade through nearly 20k words of text), so what I'm doing every day for the first part of this month is going through that text to clean it up, act on the only piece of feedback I've gotten so far, and then to look for every name, term and concept that needs to be listed in the glossary section, and then write said glossary.  (It takes place in a fusion of the real terminal Late Bronze Age and the Greek Heroic Age, so the world is a bit complex, and rooted in a lot of fairly specialized knowledge that feels like second nature to me but is probably not so well known among most people.)

I don't expect the work that game needs to take me the whole month, though.  After that, I was planning on adding a glossary to the game I did for the TWINE 10th Anniversary Jam last month, and then getting a jumpstart on a game I want to make for the Asexual or Aromantic Jam, whichever comes first.  (Or I might start working on adapting the rest of the novel into a game.  Depends what I'm feeling like when the time comes.)

So, in short, is it okay to be working on multiple games during this jam, one (or more) of which are also for other jams?

I'm not one for horror, so I was a little concerned about playing this, but fortunately it was just the right level to be spooky but (hopefully) without giving me nightmares.  You might want to put some kind of "play again" type feature at the end, since there's more than one way the story can end; I had to close the tab and open the page again from this page to be able to try again.

Also, one grammar note:  the plastic buildings should "peek" out of the water, not "peak" out of it.  I think there was also a missed apostrophe in there, too, but I forget where it was.  (Mostly I was too caught up in the story for my grammar senses to start tingling, but the use of the wrong homophone often triggers something akin to OCD in me...)

To make something superscript, use this:  20x(text-style: "superscript")[2]

The various text style commands can be found here: https://twine2.neocities.org/#macro_text-style

Try unzipping the folder and then playing it.  The images should work that way.  It didn't occur to me until a few minutes ago that it was even possible to launch the game from inside the zip folder, but then I went and tried it, and sure enough the images didn't work that way.  I'm a relic of an older time when the contents of zip folders were impossible to access without unzipping first; using files that are still zipped is completely outside my mental box, you know?

Mostly I loved this, but that mirror puzzle killed me.  My brain is not wired in a visual way; I can't manipulate images inside my head like that. :(  I don't know if TWINE is capable of any better way of doing that puzzle, but the way it  is was very frustrating for me.  (I may be alone in this, though.  Given the way certain people (like my parents) cannot grasp my mental limitations, I suspect they're uncommon.)

The questions in the movies and games category have a very odd imbalance, shifting between the most basic of common knowledge and "I went to Wikipedia to look for something obscure"-type questions.  And the question about "man in green armor" had the oddity that when you select Master Chief as the answer, it says it's wrong, and yet when you then select a character who *doesn't* wear green armor, the following screen says that yes, Master Chief is a famous character in green armor.  (Also, asking your player to Google something is not really a good idea.  Many people do not want to have random searches in their search history, and it is also breaking the fourth wall in a way that is neither humorous nor clever.  I would recommend rephrasing to simply ask "which of these characters wears green armor" or "which of these characters do you think is most famous as a man in green armor," or whatnot.  Something that will not actively *instruct*  the player of your quiz game to turn to a search engine for an answer.)

In the mathematics section, rather than writing things like "20xSquared", you can write the expression correctly, because TWINE does allow for superscript text.

(I did not bother with the cars section; I have neither knowledge of nor interest in them, and no desire to hit up Google/Wikipedia for answers.)

Everything is in a zip folder, yes, but I didn't rename the .html file.  Since it's set to be downloaded rather than played online, I wouldn't think the name of the .html file would matter, though?  Whenever I update it to add in a glossary and any corrections I can make, I'll be sure to rename the .html file then, just in case that was the problem.

Thanks for that tip about being able to have visuals without requiring a download!  I will definitely try that out! :)

The number of ships they have is actually rather irrelevant in the game as it stands; it was just a carry-over from the Catalog of Ships in the Iliad.  I do want to make a future version that will have some kind of stats page--and actual stats to go with it--though I will probably migrate it to a different game engine for that.  I may add a glossary to this version at some point before that happens, though, which would certainly repeat the info from the introduction, as well as giving a basic sense of "this guy's a bad-ass" or "he's a so-so fighter", which would hopefully help a little.

I'm glad you were enjoying the opening; I hope you enjoy the rest, too. :)

Thank you so much for your kind words!  I'm so glad to hear you enjoyed it!   I'm sorry about the bugs; this is only my second game, so I don't exactly know what I'm doing yet.  (And I learned a lot in-process, which I had hoped to go back and apply to the early years after I finished all the writing, but then Years Nine and Ten took forever to write, so I ran out of time...)  I spent most of the last day of the jam just playing and replaying, looking for bugs to squash, but with so many different combinations of events, I couldn't find them all.  :(  I'd like to be able to fix them up, though.  I'm not sure what you mean by "the artist", but as to the endings, which ones failed to appear, and what scenarios had you gone for with the characters whose fates didn't show?  The conditional statements dictating those passages are convoluted nightmares, I'm sorry to say, and some of them depend on checking the history instead of just looking at variables, which made checking if they work a particular nightmare, because I couldn't just use my variable-control testing page to just jump right to the end and check on different permutations.  (I really should have just added extra variables...)

I'm not sure what choicescript is, but Ren'Py is definitely one I've been thinking of learning; I definitely want to remake this in a different engine that will make things like stat pages (and, for that matter, stats period) easier to incorporate than they would be in TWINE.   I may update this version with a glossary including basic info on all the characters and some of the key archaeological, mythological and cultural concepts and terms before that, too.