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Ferarum

Chat with a cute schizo in an abandoned cafe. · By Jonotastic

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A topic by neo261 created Mar 05, 2023 Views: 509 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 4

It's rare for me to get intrigued by an evn, especially a demo but honestly this ticks all the right boxes. Art is visually pleasing, dialogue seems to flow well and feels like it matches the character design and the music similarly also seems to be a match for the scenes. Multiple meta layer story seems like a nice hook, especially the weird interview. Only negative that I really noticed is that on v.4 you can easily click past the ""hanging around"" scene but it could have been due to playing 3.0 already.

Definitely looking forward to reading next versions.

Developer

I'm really glad you enjoyed it! And those are quite some nice compliments, thank you!!

The skippable hanging around scene is just an engine quirk. It bloody annoys me too during playtesting. I tried adding an interrupt but it just doesn't flow properly when the player is holding ctrl to skip dialogue (at least I'm assuming people know about that lol). So for now, I'll just keep trying different things and hopefully 6.0 will have it fixed. No promises though.

And DAMN. Did you really get the weird interview??? That has a 1 in 222 chance of happening so you must have some pretty bloody good luck!

Well I did fudge the chances a bit more in my favor :p. Not really sure how secret you want to keep the easter eggs and plot but right now it's easy to see all the triggers by just opening the script. Doubt it's something average player will do but with the meta layers and 4th wall breaks the chance is probably higher than normal.

Developer

Hahah, ya little cheater ;) Might need to drop in some more spaghetti code to catch out stuff like that, might make for a neat double meta break. Either way datamining and whatever doesn't bother me at all, it's all just aforementioned spaghetti code and hash comments of me getting pissed off at Renpy lol, so go nuts.


Def glad you aren't dead and/or project isn't abandoned lmao. Enjoyed the new update, the new CGs seem higher quality/better made than before but it might be just my monkey brain.

The new threads and hidden shit is nice and I feel like there's already some stuff you could figure out especially with the spoiler thing but honestly it mostly flew right over my head. Some caveats to think about with the secret stuff - at least for me it kinda feels hard to sometimes tell if something is a shitpost or a secret lmao, but I also dunno how important they will be for figuring shit out or if that's supposed to be part of experience. Sure wish itch had spoiler tags but example on the top of my head is hash comments. Some do seem related to the narrative, but it also looks like only some of them. Phone number thing also prob should get censored unless it actually works, wouldn't be first time people phoned a fake number expecting something.

Completely unrelated to previous things and I'm not a programmer so take it with a grain of salt but wouldnt it be just easier to have one variable that increases with every iteration for Jojo denies rather than making new variable each time?

I did also get an error "While processing text tag {W=0.6} in u'No.{W=0.6} Is Styx another woman?'.:  File "game/dinnerfortwo.rpy", line 1743, in script    Jojo "No.{W=0.6} Is Styx another woman?" Exception: Unknown text tag u'W=0.6'" If you need the full traceback I've put in the pastebin. https://pastebin.com/qxE0Mknw

Wish luck with the rest of the dev and hopefully no more accidents :p

Developer

Hey man it's great to hear from you again! I'm glad you're still interested in this game even after all this time, it makes me really happy so thank you! I'm 30 minutes from flying out of the country for a month so I'll try to answer all your queries.

When it comes to secret stuff, even if they're shitposts or memes, they're still relevant in some way to the plot. Anything in-game is 100% related, anything in the files is sort of a mixed bag but generally it's just me getting bored and making jokes at my own expense. Also the phone number, from what I remember, doesn't work but you're right, I'll take it out as soon as possible anyway.

When it comes to the variables, Ferarum uses persistent.variables almost the entire time so that the player doesn't actually need to save the game. For that specific sequence I think there was an issue tying persistent variables to numbers, but you can see for the Interror portion (in it's own script) that I did use numbers instead of words. That's a good suggestion though, I'll have another look once I'm back.

Aw fuck, bloody knew something was gonna happen lol. Renpy's a bitch when it comes to capitalization so that W is supposed to be lowercase.

Thanks for all the help man, I honestly really appreciate it all and especially code reviews! Have a nice rest of your day and stay away from cute goth girls in cafes alright?