itch.io

No worries. It's apparently possible to get trapped in the dining room in my game, but I've been unable to reproduce the issue.

Funny about the car. I'd marked that to fix before release but never got to it. I only ever got to make one pass at other collision, so it's really spotty.

the car at the start is an event instead of a tileset because I had an ending where Norm leaves Nat and Val behind. But I never got around to making the alternate endings. (Or Norm's whole basement route.)

Thanks for the compliments and the notes. I do plan to clean this up for a redux some day.

Sort of?

The ending splits and then merges based on a choice right at the very end. So the final-final scene is always the same. There are 4 other endings in the script, but I had to take a week off in the middle of the jam, so only the "perfect" ending is actually implemented. (Nikki's presence in the epilogue was going to require finding certain pieces of information when exploring the house.)

I'm hoping - if I still like the story in a year - to put together a "Redux" version which has the other endings, points to investigate inside the house, and the ability to play as Norm as he has his GOOD TIMES in the basement.

(Unlike the other characters, the entity does not pose as one of the other players when messaging Norm, but rather it appears as his mother. Also, spoilers, I guess. Some text messages do not come from their apparent sender.)

I really wanted to modify the save system for my game - I wanted to make a fresh autosave directly before each story choice - but I realized too late that would require learning a new plugin. So I had to settle for just letting the default autosave do its thing.

(Which is not exactly well tested in my project. Don't look too closely at the upper-left corner of some rooms after loading. Sometimes copies of the three protagonists are just... hanging out. In the walls.)

I had a great time with Harvester. It had a good, systemic base for ongoing struggle and drama. The core mechanic of harvesting, butchering, and placing the meat into troughs was excellent. It's a toy well worth exploring.

Special shoutout to the art. The character and tileset are excellent, and the meats and cuts or both gross and humorous.

I'd love to see it expanded with dialog and a bit of plot. Lacking a drip of narrative, the experience grew to be more "bleak" than "horror".

Borrowed Book feels really robust. The gated progression through the space can feel really constraining - moreso every time a character calls it out in text - but the gameplay areas all full of depth and objects to investigate.

The character and hand-painted feature art are excellent. The writing is clever if a little hard to read in the font sometimes.

Sadly, I was not able to complete the game beyond an early "cruel end" ending.

There's a crash if you go left at the art gallery without interacting with anything else. 

TypeError: Cannot set property '_layer' of null.

You were not kidding. It is a very frustrating meme game.

Lacking the ability to restart from the chase, the trial and error of the maze room gets really frustrating. I liked the setup - the animation, text, and sound are excellent - but the long process of restarting made it to frustrating to try to reach the ending after a couple tries.

Some sort of checkpoint when exiting the carrot room would be a huge plus.

Do we rate submissions to the jam through some special interface, or do we just rate them on their pages?

I thoroughly enjoyed the game(s). I particularly liked the story that was a variation on "Lights Out". Was there an alternate ending to it?

(Without a chapter select, it can take a while to get back to it.)

Is it a missing asset error? Were you in browser or the windows release?

For the browser version, I needed to disable my ad blocker or else all the music files showed up as missing assets.

Oh, I did not mean to imply that the game is hours long. A playthrough is only about 20 minutes.

Finding all the dialog can be done in two runs and a replay of the starting scene.

I've ended up in this silly position where I need to either remove some of the choices or fix them. Some of them lead to the other character taking over in dialog because I just never implemented the alternate branch.

I got... uh... some hours...

I guess...

We only have a scant couple of days left. "A Ruin Called Hope" is just about complete. There are a couple of holes in the dialog. A couple of bugs to work out. But the whole thing is playable from beginning to end.

Unless uploading a project proves to be a nightmare, I'm going to ship this thing. Warts and all.

Here's a video I took before wrapping up for the weekend.

Tomorrow, I'll make sure all the audio files play on the web browser, do a test upload, then just fix what I can.

Good luck, my friends.

Has it really been 4?

I've had a lot of life stuff going on, so my particular project is cursed. But it will begin. And it will end. I guess.

Anybody else out there still alive? Who's getting close to done?

Here's the rough in of the Good Ending for A Ruin Called Hope. I hope I get the chance to add blocking.

My wife's music really kills it for the credits, though. Love it.

We made it, folks. Weekend 3 is in the can!

Same three questions as last week:

1. Did you make anything you are proud of?
2. Do you think you are going to finish?
3. Is there anything you can't readily figure out?

Life got VERY complicated this week, so I've not made as much progress as I'd like. However, I have made a good, spooky moment and gotten text messaging to look and play well. So that's something to be proud of.

Will I finish? No, not to my standards. But the game will start and reach an end. So that's something. I will need to patch in some serious bug fixes.

I really hate the title screen, and there's a bit of a flex I can't figure out how to do. I'd like to leave the title image on screen when the title screen fades out, and only remove the title image when the game has fully faded back in again. Is there a way to leave a picture OVER the fade out/fade in?

Well, it's not getting any easier. But we made it, folks. Weekend 2 is DONE-ZO!

Same three questions as last week:

1. Did you make anything you are proud of?
2. Do you think you are going to finish?
3. Is there anything you can't readily figure out?

I'm still going to finish, but I am going to need to cut out part of Norm's path through the game.

I have, however, gotten the whole darn game to run from start to finish. Not its time for art, sound, and a whole lot of better scripts for these kids. They sure do have a lot to say.

Here's this week's video. This one focuses on the climax. There's one more choice after this one - whether to wait for Norm to come to his senses and follow you out - but I'll focus on that later. Now that the hooks exist, there's just a huge amount of cleanup to do.

That looks lovely! I had been wondering about using pre-rendered 3D as a parallax background. Do you just paint over with invisible tilesets for collision after? How do you make the edge collision not jaggy with that isometric projection?

Yeah. I had two menus-related things I had planned on doing, but - having never worked in RPG Maker before - I soon discovered that even simple menus are a CHORE to learn to make. So, in the end, my project is essentially a visual novel with a walkaround rather than a 16-bit take on Fatal Frame.

Though, now focusing just on cutscenes, mood, and dialog, I do wonder if the action elements would add or subtract from the current game. We'll see when the actual "scares" happen. But this is more of a spooky story than a scary game.

I am literally wearing the SGDQ Omori Picnic shirt as I type this.

WE CAN DO THIS! WE SHALL ALL MAKE IT THROUGH THIS JAM!

Hello, Rachel.  It is a pleasure to be doing this with you.

I really need to watch Midnight Mass and Hill House. That said, The Midnight Club's trailer already has me gripped.

We made it, fam. We made it through our first weekend on the jam. I have three questions:

1. Did you make anything you are proud of?
2. Do you think you are going to finish?
3. Is there anything you can't readily figure out?

I'm definitely going to finish. I regret trying to make dynamic lighting on my own, so I'm skipping that for now.

I'm really proud of creating a multiple viewpoint story. I made a little "Weekend Update" video to track my work. No sound, just plot as these three young adults arrive at this haunted mansion. Throughout the story, you have the chance to change your control to different ones of the protagonists.

I think take a poke at using Text Picture or one of Galv's test plugins. I think I'm going to whitebox the messaging as simple test displays while I make the bones of the game. RPG MAKER is at such a low resolution that I still don't quite grasp how LITTLE text can display at once.

• Itch Name: trickdempsey
• Preferred Name: Trick
• Pronouns: She/Her
• Favorite Horror Media: The Haunting (1963) - as watched huddled in a shelter during a tornado in Texas at age 16.
• Professional Field: Game Development
• GameDev Experience: 15 years or so.
• Why are you here? My friend and long-time collaborator said she was going to join this jam and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to both share an experience with her and to learn a new engine. I am desperately trying to resist the urge to code my way around actually engaging with RPG Maker on its own terms. But it's hard. I like to code and don't get to do it enough.
  • Also, I love low fidelity horror. Great stuff. Totally unique experience to the medium of games and live theatre.

We're a couple of days out from starting this jam, and now's as good a time as any to get to know each other. Like in our games, we're a diverse cast of characters some of whom are doomed to not make it to the end. (It's a Game Jam; games are VERY HARD to finish.) Our best hope of getting through this at all is by doing so together.

Reply to this thread with the following:

• Itch Name: 
• Preferred Name:
• Pronouns: 
• Favorite Horror Media: 
• Professional Field: 
• GameDev Experience: 
• Why are you here?

Your favorite horror media can be a story or experience in any form. Maybe it's the local theme park haunted house attraction. Maybe it's a movie, book, or comic. Maybe it's the tales of the mountain man who visits the local community center every full moon.

For your professional field, feel free to leave this blank or very general. "Education" could mean being a student, a teacher, an administrator, or an author. You may be as specific "The 3rd Best Mazda Service Center Oil Change specialist" or as general as you like. This is an icebreaker on the internet.

Use as much space as you like for "Why are you here?" I'm certain it is possible to overshare - and that was not a challenge - but it's just nice to know what drew people to take part in a Game Jam. We are all weirdos; it's nice to see what makes us tick. 

I have an odd need. The characters in my game will be extremely online, and will be messaging each other frequently. I'd like to mimic the style of Discord or Facebook messenger for these messages, and leave them on the right side of the screen as the conversations go on in real time.

I don't think this is very achievable with the out-of-box text messages from RPG Maker. Does anyone have a suggestion for a plugin?