itch.io

Definitely enjoying the game! There's definitely a _lot_ of hidden words and combos here.

I do have two questions though, both... very mild spoilers I suppose? 

The first, is she always supposed to come back as the ice version? It seems like she used to come back as human, once as a grim reaper, and then every single time after that the frozen/frostbitten version. Unsure if that's on purpose or not. 

The second, I'm somewhat "stuck" on this one hint which asks for a word that means "disagreement or conflict," yet all words I could think of (argument, argue, fight, quarrel, spat, even disagreement and conflict) seem not to be the correct answer.

Just to reiterate, I'm definitely enjoying the game! I don't mean to pop in the comments just to complain. One thing that actually made me feel happy was her comments on "gender" which is like, yeah same 

Just to show you what I mean by "mostly goblin huts and hookup spots"

Entertaining as always! While I can't quite say I understand the battles 100%, I definitely love what you're going for.

A fun (yet almost certainly unintentional) thing you can do is focus entirely on the city building. I wanted to see how far I could go if all I did during combat was press "play" with no prep, and with the right city setup (mostly goblin huts and hookup spots) it's possible to max out your 𝆕citizen mood at 99. It's mainly a combination of "so many goblin huts nobody cares if you lose" and "max out lewd so you go on a take-no-prisoners fucking spree more often". 

While this is fun and I wouldn't really want the ability to do this to be removed, if you did want to prevent players from doing what I've done, making certain buildings less likely to spawn in the pool depending on how many you already have would probably be the best option. I mainly just went for goblins and lamp posts whenever, so yeah. I mean, I'm genuinely having fun doing it this way, but also it's your game and if ignoring battle mechanics is something you don't want people to be able to do, I totally get that.

As for the combat itself, one thing keeps coming up: how exactly does the AI work? I originally assumed they'd just try to rush you, but there are definitely times in which they just kinda patrol a single layer and don't hunt for you. Being able to predict where they go might make setting traps a little easier, but idk if you're looking for a "set a bunch of traps" kind of game or more of a "set one huge trap at the beginning and then have her pick up the pieces" kinda game.

This was truly beautiful in so many ways <3 Thank you for writing this.

I love this! It's a cute little game that has a lot of heart!!! <3

Would love to see more by you, be it comics or games or whatever! <3

this is really really cute!!!!

Really love the game so far!!! Quick question that may be spoilery, so just gonna do a few linebreaks:








Hopefully this is far enough. In any case, uh, how do you progress once you get to the "goldfish" puzzle? I've tried moving the seed to the bowl, the hall, the back room... not entirely sure what i've gotta do unfortunately. Love the game, though!!!!!!!!

...for me my main problem is when I got to favorite food it just made me start to crave burgers

oh my god this is so so so so cute!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I actually got really excited when Baba is You was mentioned because I'm a huge puzzle fan and my gf makes fun of me for it and showed the screen to my gf (also a trans wlw, you can guess why i wanted to play this game) and it's really really cute!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyways, uh, Yes. This game is cute.

.....I have no idea what's going on here in the comments but honestly all of y'all are valid

I love this! While I'm generally not a huge fan of this style of game, I really like the art style and the feel of the game overall. Plus, I certainly can't pass up a game that's overtly queer :p

This is so cute!!!!!!!! I love the characters <3 <3 <3

This is so, so, SO adorable!!!! All of your content is always really cute and lovely, and I really loved seeing these characters come to life even more and spend time with one another, it was wonderful!!!!!!!

This was a really fun read! Even though I have trouble reading due to ADHD, this was more than captivating enough to get me to read the entire thing. Thank you!!

One silly question, what's up with smoking oestrogen in "The Pearl?" Is it just like "hrt but it makes you really high?" Is it like a special Estrogen Weed?? Would I get high if I smoke my hormones??? The people (me exclusively) demand answers, ma'am.

It looks like by running the game directly and not through itch.io's launcher, I was able to get it working. The game restart, actually, and this time instead of having my default name be like, "itch.ioplayer456543" or whatever, it was my name on my computer. But yeah, I think it's just that running it though itch.io's launcher made it get confused about something.  I guess I kinda answered my own question, in that case. Thank you, though!!

Yes, that is how I found out about the document in the first place. 

I'm going to try running the game directly, rather than through itch.io's launcher, and see how that works out.

Honestly, I really love this series. Part of me just wants another game where it's like "all of the characters just have a nice gay day together and work out their issues without anything u͕̣͎̳̰͜ņn̫̦͖̪͙ͅa̲͉t̫̠̙̱̯̙̣u͕̥̜̠͖̤̖͘r̞aĺ͚ happening," but that's just me thinking queer thoughts. In any case, thank you for working on this series! It's been really fun to play through thusfar.

I downloaded the game through the itch.io application, and I am unable to find the document with the code to the safe. It's not in my own documents folder, nor can I find anysort of "documents" folder in the itch.io app itself. Does anyone have an idea where I should look? So sorry to start a whole thread just for the one question, but I wanna make sure I'm not like, missing out on parts of the game,

Great game, and tbh I love these characters. I'd love to see more in the future!

Trans flag said trans rights

Fun little game! I don't really see how it falls into the main theme all that much just from the side of gameplay, but yeah! It seems like there's a few ways you could go with this thing in the future. I like the idea that the fish is piloting the uh, "fish tank" and that it's using up its own water, but as-is the only penalty for using up the water is just instant death when you use up the last bit. Maybe if you were to expand upon this in the future, you could have it so that the water is a resource that can be used for multiple things?

Also, I found the different colored water an interesting idea, although possibly could be a bit better implemented in the future. Yellow didn't seem to do anything, red seemed to just be a slow bullet, and the green bouncing bullet just reflected back to you, not bouncing off the walls with any other sort of reflection (although that requires some weird math if I recall)

Still, I like it! Thank you!

No problem! I'm sorry technical difficulties got in the way, I'm interested in seeing what the game looks like, and look forward to being able to play it when possible.

Seems more like a demo than an actual game, so I can't really rate it fairly.  In any case, thank you for submitting! 

I'm actually p curious about that sawblade thing, especially because you decided to use it for your thumbnail. What's the idea behind it? Is it more of just testing something out, or a thought on some future project? 

Pretty fun! A very simple game, but still quite enjoyable. I'd say that the main thing that I noticed, though, was the way that the screen just suddenly switched from gameplay to the bright-red game over screen, which kinda gave me a bit of a headache. Other than that, good job, especially on your first jam game!

I'm getting a notification that I can only run this game as like an administrator which involves giving the application my password and stuff, and while I'm 95% sure this isn't malware or anything, I'm still a lil uneasy about it, sorry! Any possibility you could re-upload this in the future?

Can't run the game either. Using the itch.io app, and even tried running the file directly from the file explorer with no luck.

I really enjoyed it! I think it needs a bit of polish, but yeah!

Fun game, but the controls are a little iffy. This seems like the kinda game that could be played on a keyboard and mouse, and in terms of the controller's uh, controlls, it's weird having the left stick/right bumper for one character, and right stick/left bumper for the other. Honestly, I think the main thing getting in the way for me is simply a hardware issue on my side, as the controller's left bumper is kinda crap, but still.

In any case, thank you! I'm rating this one real high <3

22 deaths! fun game <3

......?

I really want to try this game, but when I press "launch" via the itch.io app, it doesn't work, and if I try to run it from the folder, I get an extremely zoomed in perspective. Is that perspective supposed to happen? Or is it supposed to look more like the screenshot?

Wait, okay, so that's what I thought originally, maybe I'm just confused about the story?

If you do "Hang up", you go to the scene with your therapist, but if you do "Pay", you go to the scene at the baseball field with the character's girlfriend. 

Is this girlfriend a different person? Did paying for the dinner and leaving somehow make the relationship work while hanging up and continuing the date didn't? Am I just being a total dingus and missing something obvious?

Sorry for the billion questions >_<

Can't run the game for some reason :(

The game keeps freezing for me in the very intro. As in, sometimes it freezes before I can put in my name, sometimes it gets to "that is an interesting name" and sometimes it freezes in the middle of that line. With some lil fixes, I'd love to try it out!

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

I wish that there was a "restart" button like you mentioned so you don't have to close out of it and stuff. I still don't get 100% of the story atm (I'm gonna continue playing it), but I really like it. 

The few notes I'd like to add are:

• Add a small little optional trigger warning thing at the beginning of the game. I know some games have that, where the title screen thing has "start" and "show triggers", so that if you want you can see the trigger warnings ahead of time. 
• Add a restart function, yeah, but also a "back" button so that you can kinda run through some of the other choices without having to do the whole thing again. Just a small little thing!
• Make it more clear what your options mean. The biggest example I can give is on the date, where "hang up" seems to be like, end the date, whereas "pay" seems to have it so you continue the relationship? idk if I'm just confused about that or whatever.  

But in any case, I really like it!!!! I'll be honest, I was kinda searching through the submissions for a game like this where it's a little more narratively focused and where there is some form of queer stuff. I'd really love to see more things like this in the future; your writing style seems very real and like, accurate to the emotions and stuff. 

I'm gonna play through this a few times again, and hopefully come across a happy ending or two, if they're there.

Please... please explain to me what you mean by juice. I'm dying over here. Why are you looking for juice. Why do you need there to be juice in a chess game. Turn on your location I just want to talk.

Quite fun! The character felt a little stiff, possibly just because of the lack of acceleration/deceleration or whatever, but yeah!

Unfortunately ran into a similar issue...

I really wish I could rate this, but I can't seem to actually play it. So sorry!

I love it! I'd like to leave a few thoughts on what I love and where I think there could be some room for improvement, if that's alright! (also I'm not a developer so feel free to yeet my comments into the sun):

Atmosphere: I honestly love the atmosphere of this game, ESPECIALLY as shown in the title screen. One thought though is that the "overworld" music is a little unfitting, and could perhaps be made a bit more meloncholy or adventurous, depending on where you want to go?

Shifting: I like how you did the shifting in this! It's cool to see "shadows" of creatures in the other dimension. My primary concern is clarity. Although I LOVE the little animations and such, as it is implemented, it looks like you are changing the world, perhaps with some sort of time-travel thing, whereas from what I understand, you are trying to go for entering a parallel dimension or something similar. My suggestion would be that when you shift, that "circle" that starts to close on April expands from her in the first place, changing the scenery around her. If it is within the technical limitations, it would be great to see things outside of the circle be the "normal" world while everything on the inside is the "demon" world. That way, it looks like she has an aura around her that temporarily alters the terrain to be more like that parallel world. I have a lot of thoughts on other ways you could make this more clear, but I don't want to bombard you with any more than I already am.

Combat: The combat is quite fun! I think the only issue here is clarity. Would it be possible to make a "hit" sound when your weapon strikes an enemy, not just the enemy hurt sound? That way it feels like your weapon is connecting with the enemy, not just phasing through them. Also, I feel that in a lot of ways, shifting is MUCH more effective than dashing. After all, enemies can't hit you in the other dimension, and it's just as fast as dashing is. One last little thing would be to perhaps make it so that the last attack in the combo feels a bit more different than the others, like maybe a slightly different sound, having it push back enemies, and a delay between finishing the combo and starting a new one.

Movement: Again, I love it! I hate to be nitpicky, but would it be possible to implement something like little dust particles while walking? And I definitely think that adding something like a small dust cloud or something when dashing would make it feel much more "real". Also one last little nitpick which I know would be a huge pain in the ass, would it be possible to add sprites for moving in the diagonal directions? It's not just for looks, it would also make combat more enjoyable, as you'd be able to attack diagonally rather than in just the 4 cardinal directions.

Animation: I hope you're ready for just unending praise, because goddang!!! There are so, SO many little things here that make the game feel so alive and interactive. The way that the bushes and leaves drift, the little bob on the character's movements, the way that you can see them lean into the weight of their attacks, the way the screen shakes when you strike an enemy, even the little animations for your "stamina" being used up and returning, all feel really awesome! 

I'm sorry if I came across as overly negative with a lot of this stuff!!! There was a lot that I liked about the game, and I am really excited to see how this game progresses. As-is with the framework, I could see myself paying at least maybe $15 for what I predict the full game would be.