A challenging platformer with great presentation of the theme!
Especially the path from the 3rd bonfire to the 4th was impressing! Great job!
(叼游戏!血压给我干起来了!)
Twists from the well-known Werewolf game:
1\ The dead ones can return to the game as the operator of Ouija (if they can beat up all other dead spirits). If the Ouija leads to a meaningful result, the debate section will be just skipped.
That means, the dead person can kill. XD
2\ The game has a Ouija section in every turn, which can lead to really funny body contacts.
For me, the most funny experience in a party werewolf game is not the logical deductions and debates, it's the accidents and external or physical hints.
3\ No innocent villigers. Everyone is here to kill.
That is me trying to give everyone a reason to disturb the ouija.
Nice concept of posting on multiple social medias!
It makes me look forward to a story-rich game in which your posts get comments from the characters which contains hints on next photos needed, and progress the character's personal stories to get them in your shop or bring some new plants to the shop.
BTW It is so good to have the "emotional support" member in your team...
Thank you for your advice! Truly useful!
The fantasy side will definitely become better experience as anything like action, platforming or even RPGMaker-styled games, rather than just clicking, which is now duplicating the interaction experience with the "real" side. Besides, those more "playable" ways will have better visual cues for the "fantasy" concept, as well as enhancing the metaphors of the "unstability" of the fantasy worlds.
And the work side can have more staged feedback to make a rhythmic cycle, and include more humor, absolutely.
I love the idea of wasting money in gatcha! That's too real, and sad, bringing everyhing into another level. I'd never add this in my game XD.
Sorrrry for the laaaaate reply... And I may look at the critical bug some time.
Soooooooo glad to have your patience guessing the meaning of those inferior parodic of Phagspa-script-ish characters. Of course the answers you want is all "yes".
But I have to mention that the game will not be finished (unless having other devellopers want to take over the idea and my unfinished novel-version of it). If you want to stream a unique AVG game, I recommend "7 days to the end" or "mojibake" which were the original inspirement of this game. AND just mention this pathetic bug-full little demo where a developer tried to add some spice in this genre, by making NPCs remember what you typed.
And for the music, it started from a randomly generated midi file by DopeLoop.ai. Then just copy the mdi track three times and change each to a different voice range and sampler instrument. Then add an improvisational drumbeat. Then stress the drum with some bass. Very very fast since drum is often the easiest part for me.
√ (long ago) Install Stable Diffusion which is always ready to produce junks.
√ (a month ago) Downloaded a trained model of 80s-anime-style, and a flat-color extention for SD to stylize the generated pictures (which is ultra-useful for batch processing, compared to those "fancy" ways with too many details).
√ Downloaded and tested a Fake Pokemon LoRA which I just noticed on the Civitai after this jam started.
√ Batch process every type of monsters (with different prompts).
√ Batch stroking and cropping in Photoshop using its lame and amazingly slow batch process.
√ Manually check, select and sometimes fix the images, as well as typing (or generating with a function) the Excel data for them.
Thanks for your comment!
The battle has too many uncompleted works, including almost all the feedback animations...
I will remake the battle after the jam ended. (I don't know if adding things is against the rule, which makes a great reason for me to be lazy.)
The audio is a bug and is now fixed. Actually I made 2 clips of bgm generated by AI (again) with a little tweak and sync. It was made in 10 minutes and I totally forgot to test.
Nice sfx!
And the "H.E.A.V.E.N." sounds so cool lol.
I took some time to understand the gameplay. I think the randomness of dealing cards can be removed in the 1st level , to make it more "tutorial".(something like giving same 3 cards in a turn until the right move is performed). If there are only 3 kinds of cards, the shuffling feels somehow meaningless.
I think it is a great ruleset for the battle part of a deck-building rouge-like game (SlaytheSpire-ish)! I like deck-building games so much.
Thanks! The rewinding definitely should have been done! I forgot that, and it should be easy since everything was just timeline animation!
But one thing, I intentionally made this game feel so random, because the cencorship I have been through in my last job felt just so random. You may not believe how many things are banned by Chinese government for no reason.
There is no bonus for getting all the points censored (actually you can never do that, because everything can look politically or sexually suggestive.).
The only divergence of ending is whether you find any reason to make the movie die or you lose the job.
The theme was too realistic for me to make this game feel better for players.
Actually this game is mainly based on my last job in a Chinese mainstream game company. And one thing we found is that THE CENSORSHIP CAN NEVER BE WRONG SINCE NO ONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEBATE ANYTHING.
We were even asked to change red fonts in menus because it's "bloody", so with our black ink in cutaways because it's liquid as blood (though it's black.). And all wineis replaced by tea even tea is totally ridiculous in that historical setting.
And you might have heard that Dungeon Fighters Online in its Chinese version changed all cross of the clergies to a stick. And all tattoos are just covered with black.
This game is realistic to me, and many people in the world.
I thought this jam meant to be in a week, and made a rather simple one.
Well... Please share your own levels in comments, and try to find all 4 hidden cat photos in the game!
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Some self-critique:
1\Lack of choice. The mobility of the main character is bad and there was no extra abilities or skillsets to change the game. That causes lack of choice since every move is just a selection between 2 or 3 directions.
2\Lack of in-level loops. The game rules made the map so "unstable" that became one-way and one-time. That means unlike a regular puzzle in which you might get back to the same stuck point many times in one level, this game cannot "trap" players like that, making it not feeling deep enough.