itch.io

Looks like you’ve been adding more comments on my games and even some YouTube videos, and in fact, on Unsatisfied, you gave positive feedback on a specific line of text in the game that you liked, which was great!

But for the others, you ignored my suggestion and kept posting very generic one-line comments, which again made me wondered if you actually played/watched every video… It’s not a problem that various people come and post short comments, but when the same person serial-comments with one or two words of every work of the same author (and that person is not a close friend), it gets a little weird.

Honestly it’s not critical if you can’t find the right words to express your thoughts - but if you only want to post quantitative feedback to say that you like or didn’t like something, but don’t know better words for that, rating is just fine. On itch.io, there is the rating button at the top-right with a star icon, where you can give a rating and commenting is optional. On YouTube, it’s Thumb up (or Thumb down if you didn’t like it). These sounds like better options when you want to support a work by helping it stand out on the website thanks to the promotion algorithm, but you don’t have any qualitative feedback to add. This also reduces my notifications which can add to my mental workload (I don’t receive notifications for ratings on itch - I just check the average ratings of a given game when I want to).

Again, I enjoy seeing new people give me one-liner like “That game was cool!” but when it’s the same person every time and they never said they were dissatisfied with anything even in my worst entries, the satisfaction starts wearing out and the value of the congratulations starts dropping. So, better use rating / thumb up in that case.

Now, if you really want to learn how to write good qualitative reviews, have a break from posting comments and look at how other people do it. For instance, try to read the top Steam reviews of various games, especially those of medium and big length. There may be very deep and detailed. You don’t have to go that far but if you really like the games you play, you can probably find at least one or two sentences to write about them.

Of course, don’t go the opposite way either: writing paragraphs for the sake of writing paragraphs. If you don’t know what to say, a few lines, or even a pure rating without text is fine.

I’m surprised to be the first to comment on this among the 4 jams to submitted to!

Nice structure and lore with poetry told by the Jester! It’s even more Once Upon a Time VN Jam-like than my own Once Upon a Time entry.

Impressed by the very different routes at the end, although this seems a huge amount of work if you keep working on the game! The first 3 characters are likeable in different ways, strong in their archetypes: the straight paladin (I like the “unintended humor” he triggers by being so serious, like the one in Honor among Thieves), the jester who knows more than he pretends (he embodies the concept of “Chaotic Neutral”) and the scientist (perfect analysis power applies to body structure as well? Who knew Heroes’ Sylar could have been a professional masseur?)

A few bugs, that you probably noticed already:

• Landslod sprite becomes huge (head cut) at some points (when MC is surprised, after arrive on castle and maybe once more in the city?)

• Landslod sprite is sometimes on the left

• Landslod sprite confused not loaded due to typo in “confused”

• Credits line partially cut

The page says:

“Once Upon A Time VN Jam” is a three-month game jam running from October 1st, 2024 00:00 (UTC+2) to January 31st, 2024 23:59 (UTC+1) held to create fairy-tale-themed narrative stories.

since we moved the deadline from Jan 3 to 31, it’s now 4 months.

Is the 1 month just a grace period, or is it really 4 months?

Very nice! Clever use of the single picture (the hero slime can be seen at multiple places, as in the old adventure books).

I like how the shortcut makes you go back but not too much and you can go on from there (a metaphor for “there is no shortcut in improving?”).

Each slime seems to represent an emotion or state of mind in the journey of progressing toward the top. I thought they’d be more dialogues with each of them but I suppose that has to fit in 1000 words including the branching!

Also, I can’t believe I’m the first one to post here!

Glad to help!

In the same theme, I noticed Ludum Dare 24 (2020) game Phone Tree of Despair (https://jezzamon.itch.io/phone-tree-of-despair) was re-released with a web version in 2021! (the old real phone server was down) It needs a microphone though.

Or, if you prefer more “dynamic” AI there was Event[0], I haven’t finished it myself…

Oh, I like the concept and dual view! Looks like some Wario Ware challenge for DS!

Could be a competitor for Mech Jam as well?

Still got perf issues with web builds, which cause embedded view to be a bit slow and fullscreen to be very slow (so too easy… but too long to wait for next hit).

Is the music beat supposed to match when asteroids strike? If so, because of the slowdown it got offset. But there is still some margin to hit the asteroid anyway.

Design-wise, I appreciate that missing an asteroid means it gets destroyed and there is one fewer to care about, creating some auto-balance of difficulty. Reversely, the more you hit, the more often they come back!

I didn’t play much, but I liked the mood and humor (and the two only foxes).

It was hard to throw the carrot into the first basket (compared to what I’d expect from a wholesome game like this). But I admit playing the web version with some lag didn’t help.

I thought I had obtained a carrot in my inventory in the first cave but I still had to pick one from the ground anyway.

Web game didn’t catch up/down keys so I accidentally scrolled the page on jump/harvest/throw.

Ah, I don’t see a standalone version so I guess I won’t be able to test a faster version, unless I switch PC.

Really fun to play, I love the “Hey!” sound and the BGM mixed with radio voices too.

I would have liked having some extra visual/audio feedback on arresting suspect, retrieving a key from an ally and above all getting restored at a CCTV, since you can do it only once and it’s critical that you are sure you did it correctly. Fortunately there is no penalty in Hey-ing repeatedly.

Also, I thought the white characters were suspects too since it’s the same “Hey!” sound but in fact they are allies, not part of intruders count (but since the Hey action can affect multiple entities at once, I guess there’s not much choice here).

Finally played almost 2 years later!

I like the chill mood and retake on chess.

My main issue was that outside Pawns, the AI is rather good meaning it won’t go onto squares I threaten… which also means it’s hard to destroy all the enemy units (it’s not that easy to force a certain unit into dying by threatening its current and all its future possible positions, except slow units like the King, and pawns, esp. on a board that’s mostly empty). Fortunately the AI did a mistake, but it’s a bit hard to tell how long it will take to do so. If the enemy side also had some “king” I suppose it could be faster. But it’s also funnier to just eat all the enemy units.

After doing a stupid mistake I restarted the game, but this time the first level has a full row of pawns to fight! It was too long to kill them all (and the animations are slow and unskippable, which wasn’t an issue on my first run as I kept thinking, but against an army of pawns it’s not really interesting), so I gave up.

Otherwise I like the ability to pick new units… it seems you should get the high stars, but pawns are also useful to cover their own range. Plus high stars are limited in later game due to limited slots.

Maybe you took part to later Magical Girl Game Jams too? I should check the 2023 entries as well!

Reading the titles of the books on the shelves was really fun! Although the mood of the game itself was more serious.

I thought the choice would be about sacrificing something from your current life (choose between past and your new life), but it wasn’t the case.

I would have liked to have the choice to check the book before making my decision, but I suppose that would remove the suspense!

I also had to shoot by holding Shift, although at least after pressing the key with a “?” in the top position it read the Help manual.

Tested on Linux Ubuntu, Wine worked! But it didn’t work directly when pressing Launch from the itch app for some reason, got some errors. Had to open terminal > wine abas-game.exe

Thanks!

Second run after update! 17mn 9sec… At first I didn’t download the update (itch app seems to have a bug and not show Update button, just Launch on the Downloads window and doesn’t warn you it’s an old version!), so at least I could train on the older version before doing this run.

The Moss Garden was very interesting, and much more “puzzly” in its approach (more control, smaller steps to move the snails precisely).

I had a few issues though, and esp. with the screen where you indirectly guide the glass ball with a single snail through some labyrinth. If you accidentally push the ball left first, then right again, it may fall into a corner and get stuck there. If at least my character could kick through the wall tile I would unstuck myself, but I had to reset completely.

Still some crazy Unity physics when snails can send the character or glass ball flying, but since in the Moss Garden it’s useful to make yourself spring up very fast or push the glass ball forward, I didn’t complain!

EDIT: oh, just realized I was commenting on the devlog… no wonder I was the only one commenting here! Well, as long as you can read it…

Oh, this one was very interesting regarding going around limitations! The mask on the Church on everything but the window to show just the outside with the moon, the extra stains on The Witch’s clothes (apparently stains are drawn and not programmatical but that seems allowed to add such small changes, like facial expressions, good to know), the gray filter become removed over time…

I tried both endings. There is not much change in the middle of the story, it’s all progressive… which is okay for such a short story (plus you had multiple branches, esp. the 3 background stories at the beginning, making you hit 997 words already).

I kinda missed The Grim’s sprite on the main menu (another clever trick to avoid using an extra sprite) so I had to imagine it myself (it was not that different, I suppose, although I imagined it quite bulky, more like a Cerberus guardian, at the beginning).

Ending 1 is quite the sudden change of pace, I now imagine The Grim like Elias in Ancient Magus’ Bride. Also extra effort from the VA for the deeper voice!

Just started the game, note for dev: flag “win” build also as Linux (in fact it’s a Windows+Linux distribution, Renpy calls it “pc” although it’s not too clear), and flag osx build for macOS.

I’ll write my full feedback after playing the game on the jam entry page since I’m myself a participant.

Oh, right. Don’t worry about it, creating big levels like this is still a good experience to have (hm, unless you mostly copy-pasted… as I did. Was fun to adapt the level to hide emeralds though).

Yes, I use Discord, I sent you an invite (you can remove your username now if you fear spam)

Oh, thanks!

Yes, that’s the fan game effect. At the same time, most players will not really look at the other games, so while it’s good to get followers, you still need to release an outstanding product after that. That’s what I’m struggling with at the moment, trying to work more on polished original games. I hope I can make them look more like yours, or some of the most popular original PICO-8 games I have played (many limitations but many animations and SFX to liven up the scene). Maybe I need to squish my sprites more? :)

You mean you used another engine before? I see that this one is also on Construct 2, and previous games use Construct 1. The only difference I notice is the use of the Cosmic Engine (which seems to be a Sonic-style framework for Construct 2/3).

P.S.: I said I was working on original games but I just announced my next fan game in development “Super Sonic Heroes” today anyway. It’s hard to stop…

Oh, it’s very polished! I came from Sonic Origins Pocket Edition, but I may prefer your original games which have a smaller scope but where you pay attention to the details!

I’m not super at ease with the reverse shot thrust + auto fire. I’d rather choose when to shoot and thrust (as in that indie game with witches I forgot the name of, or Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime with a certain engine). Although I understand you try to make games with simple controls that can be played on mobile.

Audio: very chill, I like the mood.

Eager to check your other creations!

Oh, nice! I only recently discovered Sonic Pocket Adventure (would have been of great help to know it earlier while I was working on my own 8-bit demake…)

I suppose there first stage doesn’t have all chaos emeralds and they will be scattered across the future stages, Master System / Game Gear style.

The game is working but it has many small issues. The physics/platforming issues in particular are the most important to fix first. It’s cool that you made the full stage, but I’d recommend polishing physics first because it may affect your level design testing.

Physics

• when rolling, sprite is a bit above ground. You need to adjust the sprite/collider offset when rolling. In my own game I consider “crouch” and “roll” both “compact” states with smaller colliders, and for which I offset the character center appropriately (I’m just following the Sonic Physics Guide)
• no variable jump height (pressing jump button just once gives you full jump; I don’t know if Sonic Pocket Adventure was like this, but from what I’ve seen it tries to stay close to classic Sonic on Genesis)
• Super Peel Out is incredibly fast, I rushed to the end of the level. I don’t know if it’s the original speed value and it just looks very fast in Green Hill because it was made for Sonic CD, in which case you may want to balance a bit
• there are other differences with the original game like being hurt or bouncing off enemies going pretty high, but to be honest I like those: it helps escaping spike pit, and also to chain bouncing off enemies. I could chain bounce over multiple crabs and chameleon enemies thanks to that, almost Sonic Adventure Homing Attack style! Pretty cool!

Audio

• BGM loops only after fade out. I don’t know if Construct supports BGM Intro-Loop but ideally you’ll use that for Green Hill, to get a perfect loop

Flow

• Breaking bug: stuck on Green Hill result screen, the number count down reached 0 but I can still hear the cash register SFX playing indefinitely and I cannot progress to the next stage.

Keep up the good job!

Oh, I didn’t expect that much work on presentation! I didn’t even know you could show a progress bar covering the full screen to color a picture! (I suppose it’s a rectangular mask that moves to the right?)

Nice onboarding accessibility settings (from npckc maybe?). Keyboard nav is weird, but I know it’s something to solve on Renpy side…

Moving the game quick menu to the top allows to unlock the 4th line of text in the dialogue area, smart! (I should really customize the dialogue box in my next game, after adding the background it looked ugly in our entry…)

Letter = monologue + linear is a smart choice to make it fit in 1000 words while having enough perceived content.

Scrolling BG while reading also puts you into the world.

Was it indended that it scrolls so fast to the character’s head, then stop?

Credits used centered text like classic credit roll, I’ll remember this (for a change of my usual About page).

Typo:

• “I could have asked for a better family” -> “I could not have asked for a better family” (otherwise it’s a bit funny and breaks the mood)
• “as your sister that will always love you” -> “who will always love you”

But surely if a developer doesn’t have the courage to make a string variable for every choice and duplicates a choice text string for convenience, it would also count as once? (it makes more sense to me to evaluate the game on its final result that on how it’s made internally - for instance if I paste 5 static sprites on a background together for convenience of tuning precise sprite placement, but the sprites never mode, it’s identical to a CG in final render, and nobody would be able to tell otherwise without looking at the code)

Either way I used the variable trick and found out I was already below 1000 words so I could submit the game!

Yeah, I’ve been thinking more about it after posting my OP but I was busy so I didn’t have time to edit my post.

Basically in the whole writing I forgot my real question which made the post legit: is there some kind of bot check on itch (it’s been a while since I have signed up and I don’t remember if there was a captcha or so), and do my Reports contribute to adding extra checks on already existing users?

Because if there’s a solid system, I’ll just rely on it: I assume 99% of users are human, maybe 1 clever bot could pass the test, if I suspect it, I report. 1 month later, I still see the user: itch decided it was not a bot. OK, then it may be useful to reply to that user. If they don’t listen, then they are just a standard annoying user, which I know how to handle as I would deal with any other human.

EDIT: in the meantime I checked my old games again and found that maybe the last uploaded version was more decent than I thought, and people could honestly just enjoy playing them (maybe not worth an “awesome” but OK. Sorry for all the bother. You can still read the rest of this post if you’re curious about my particular reasons to do things, but if you don’t have much time, the part above with my “real question” was the most important anyway. Now, if I hadn’t done all of this and read your reply, maybe I wouldn’t have had the idea to check my old games again, so I guess our efforts have helped, in a weird way.

Without this, my first post seems like a very circumstantial question and I was expecting people to tell me I would overthink this or just have to decide on my own (sorry for not taking the time to edit my post and make you spend time writing a long post). To be honest, I thought about most of the things you said after writing my post (whether I’m overthinking this, that there are some things I must decide on my own), but if I hadn’t written it, I’m not sure I would have managed to go forward and think this way. Plus it’s like management, you can do it all your way esp. if you have authority but the key is to be open to discussion to find the best compromise. I feel like I must spend more energy alone than asking for help (but if people tell me I’m already putting too much effort by asking for help then I’m stuck, because I’ll feel bad in both cases).

I also stumbled on a few other people who blatantly ignored written instructions but still communicated things clearly in the end, making me think it’s possible to do so in good faith.

Otherwise, it’s not as much about making effort to actively looking for spammers (I don’t have many comments on my games…) than trying to get a peace of mind: the act of suspecting a bot and feeling annoyed is a passive thing, and I’m looking for ways to feel better: which could be confirming a bot/human spammer and blocking it, or convincing myself that I’m dealing with a human acting in good faith.

I’ve already had to deal with human spammers on Discord, who prove they were humans by their acts but communicated in very obscure, disturbing ways. And the fact they were in that gray area made it even worse than obvious spam emails you just spot and delete, because you take the time to talk to them at first, but they don’t reply in a natural way, but you know there’s a human on the other side, so you enter that weird uncanny valley, except instead of bots looking like humans but not exactly, you have humans looking like bots but not exactly. Offline, it would be quite easy: oh, it’s a kid, or an adult with some attention deficit

To be honest I was about to give them another reminder to strive to write better feedback so I don’t put them in the spam category and start deleting their posts (and it’s hard to write a second reminder to someone without sounding authoritative and antagonistic). I think they got the impression I just wanted quality feedback to improve my game, as I gave this as the official explanation to be polite, while really it was more like a custom captcha check (which again is hard to say politely).

Then I remember about my similar, pinned but locked post about issues with commenters in the “gray area” and that I also had to ask a question about this at some point, as they never replied to my email, so I ended up merging the two questions at once, hoping to get some definitive answer. Otherwise I would have probably just sent a second warning.

I don’t see your point about being on the spot light on the itch.io discussion board:

• my other post has already pinned for a while, so I’m already on the spot light… for people who actually come to this board. A new thread won’t make me much more “exposed”. Plus non-pinned threads just go down in the list over time (it’s already the case)
• if you’re talking about said user to see the post because it’s on the public board, I thought about this too but looking at the activity on this board, it seems that only people with specific issues (and mostly creators) are coming to this board.
• there’s not much choice when asking for help on the Internet, esp. within the same community. One day I had an issue with a teammate and wasn’t sure how to behave, I asked for advice on the very same Discord server I met that person on, so there was a certain probability they’d see it - but then they would also see that I’m acting in good faith not to hurt them and to find the best compromise.

Now, it seems you’re also a fellow adept of the long posts, so I’m sure you understand the issues about automatically making inferences after reading something and feeling the need to jot it down. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now so I just did that before the end of the jam to get some peace of mind.

I think I’ll just tell the user to elaborate on specific games because I’m honestly interesting in knowing what they like in my games, esp. to drive them to play several of them one by one. And for the specific game was I think is bad, I’ll just ask them if they really found good parts in it and by “awesome” they mean it’s ugly yes, it could have some potential.

Oh, and I wouldn’t mind a bot giving me good ratings: I rarely check them, rating comments are typically made to be short, or sometimes empty, so a human could totally do that and that helps with the recommendation system. It’s the comment without rating that has no impact on the algorithm (I think) but may have a side effect on my mind. That’s why I was also intending to tell them to just rate me, since it’s great for short comments. Actually, if everything was done in ratings, I wouldn’t mind even the abusive ratings: I got a 1 star “it sucks” on a game that gets 5 starts otherwise? Things will average in my favor. I got a 5 star “Awesome!” on a raw jam prototype? Well the user could be ironic, but in the meantime they really gave me a 5 star, so maybe they’re kinda serious after all (it’s like someone applauds after a terrible song but still gives $10 to the singer - yes they may be trolling to get more people to check the game and be disappointed, but that only makes sense with massive rating).

Anyway, there’s a bigger thread on actual (obvious) bot fight somewhere, so I’ll head there if I got real bot issues.

The suggestion threads may be good for my more specific requests (which I thought about while writing the first post), I may post my suggestions there later (it’s just that you don’t get a pinned post everyday). I still think it’s relevant to give a reason for pinning if it didn’t turn out obvious during the conversation - I saw a bunch of other topics that are very important, that are not pinned, after all. And I don’t mind about priority, when I have a suggestion, I just post it, then it’s the devs’ job to assign priorities to tasks.

For text of choices, I often have duplicates (if player chooses “A”, character will say “A”), I suppose it doesn’t go against the count?

Even then I need to be smart so my word counter does not count redundant text. I stored them in variables and injected them with “[this syntax]” on both menu choice and the text that appears when selecting that choice…

EDIT: it doesn’t work with Word Counter+ as it will count string variables as 1 word per variable, so the count will be too optimistic. You can manually reinject that count anyway.

Thanks, for O2A2 the trick is to alternate between define wordcounter_menu_is_character = False and define wordcounter_menu_is_character = True to define the lower/upper boundary of your character counts, which vary depending on the amount of repetition between choice text and actual text (character/narrator tends to repeat the choices).

To go further I turned choice text into a variable that I injected in both choice text and actual text below using “[variable injection syntax]”. This way I can keep using define wordcounter_menu_is_character = True and it gives me the proper count of unique words!

It’s complicated to do and mostly useful for O2A2, plus it may be annoying for translators, but it works! It still has some benefits: no risk of messing changing a choice text and forgetting to update the corresponding dialogue/narration text, and you can still _(“localize”) the variable string so localizers can work translate them only once!

EDIT: oops, no, it doesn’t work as Word Counter+ will count text inside string variables as 1 word per variable, so the count will be too optimistic. Better manually remove the few redundant words if you’re really near 1k words…

I am currently having some “invisible” issue with a user who is frequently posting very short and generic, but positive comments on my games. At first, I found it nice, but over time I realized that the comments never mentioned anything about the game itself. On one game, which was an obvious incomplete prototype (https://komehara.itch.io/finding-inspiration), they even gave a positive comment which, honestly, sounded ironic if it was done by a human.

EDIT: turns out the version uploaded at that time wasn’t that bad, at least gameplay-wise, which makes the positive comment much less odd. Normal readers coming here can probably ignore the rest of this post (and thread). Moderators may still want to check the bottom section starting with “One last thing”, which is a kind of unrelated issue that I mashed up in this post.

So I started suspecting the user as being a spam bot and checked their other posts on their profile page (removed as solved). Most of them are generic one-liners indeed, but a few do mention contextual information found in the game page (ok, an AI could scrap that) or even the game itself (much harder to scrap for an AI - screenshot reverse image description does exist but video description is another deal, and it would be needed to see that there is “bounce” in a platformer for instance).

I gave them a friendly warning on the page of the prototype mentioned above, they seemed to have understand but later they posted another generic comment on another of my games.

At this point it’s hard to tell if I’m facing:

1. a spam bot that sometimes becomes very good at parsing information
2. a spam bot that is sometimes overridden by a human
3. a human with limited understanding/writing capabilities
4. a human who makes fun of me (troll)

I was about to tell me once more to post qualitative feedback, and otherwise use the rating button for purely quantitative feedback (scoring), but it’s a bit tiring to write this anyway. I’d like to know what you think about it.

I thought about punishing the user (Block, or Ban from each page - the latter not super useful since user posts one comment per page, so by the time you Ban them it’s already done) but if we’re dealing with 3. (or if it’s really just a misunderstanding) that would be too harsh.

I realize my initial warning maybe was not too clear as I wanted to be too polite… Should I just ask them, one last time, to give more precise feedback? Should I explicitly tell them to do so in order to prove that they are human? (any human would feel offended by that, so I want to avoid - at the same time, I’m dealing with an individual who says “OK” to anything, so maybe that could work?)

It seems like a very little thing and most people would be glad to get free positive feedback, but right now I’m working for a jam and the user commented my stub page (which is basically empty) just to say they’re eager to play the game, which out of context would be great, but with everything else considered just made me more stressed (like stalkers who compliment you, but still). It wouldn’t be an issue if I had people commenting regularly on my games, but on an empty page it really stands out (and I don’t want other people to have the impression I’m asking a friend or even paying someone to post positive comments either).

P.S.

Once more, this is a topic about handling users commenting on my game, so there are similarities to the pinned thread: https://itch.io/t/2105616/moderating-conflict-between-multiple-users-in-game-comments but this thread has been locked so I cannot keep posting on it, and to be honest I’m not entirely satisfied by the answer I had: if I understand correctly, nobody else monitors the comments nor has the duty to moderate users, and therefore Report button is basically useless if you are the owner of the game page, so your only solution is to decide to Block or Ban the user from the game page.

One last thing: I was surprised to me my thread pinned without being notified. I was at the same time happy that my thread could help other people and embarrassed that a small issue I wanted to fix became pinned like this without me noticing. Since the thread was locked I couldn’t post further there, e.g. to ask why it was considered so important, or to ask further questions (in particular about whether the Report button is actually useless for the game creator) to actually make the thread fully complete, and make it really worth pinning.

I sent a private email to itch staff about this but received no reply. So:

• could you implement a notification when one of your threads get pinned?
• could you establish a policy that when pinning a thread, moderator should post that they are pinning the thread and give the reason, leaving a chance to the OP to reply?
• ~~could you establish a policy that when locking a thread, moderator should post the reason for locking~~ EDIT: just saw that the reason was posted at the top: preventing spam
• could you reply to the email I sent (from komehara@…, subject: “My topic has been pinned and locked for a while on the Questions & Support forum”)
• should I open a new thread to finish the discussion now? (about the Report button and other moderation subtleties)

I get it, I’ve been playing several life simulation games after making ours, doing activities and writing narrative text much better, so I didn’t feel like going on…

That said, we have a USP (unique sales point): the game is about writing and you can get inspiration by researching on the net or going out, as well as having your parents, friends and editors proofread you, and there’s a micro-balance in this (basically friends are nicer but give less useful feedback, while editors are harsher but give more interesting feedback). Well at least that looked very good on paper (the best game design diagram I’ve ever written).

In yours, it’s the presentation about spoons and randomness that makes it unique. I suppose you could also have things like random events that affects stats to show that every day is not equal. But really, you could just get the game “out” with its current gameplay since you’ve already worked on balance, collaborating with artists to polish art and add audio.

Thanks, I’ll check the Discourse forum next time then.

Otherwise I’m talking about general rollback like Renpy (it takes more work when dealing with animations, but for text-only games + static graphics that seems more doable).

I saw the save system in action in Spoon Survival so that should be OK for “big rollbacks”, while scrolling up is good to check what has been said. The only issue left is if player messes up a single choice.

OK so text can be cleared but then there is no way to see what was there before unless loading an old save.

I’ll play with the engine a bit so I can tell what I really need. So far my novel has been linear so I didn’t have issues with choices and only cared about pages. But I could decide that I only clear the text content on new chapters, and offer player to save game before each chapter so they can easily access to the full story if needed.

Hey, I recently heard about Narrat (during O2A2 VN jam) and checked this out.

I learned about the spoon concept in French comic book “La Différence invisible”, and I also made a similar game before (except I used stamina for spoons), so I immediately saw what this was about, and as you could see, the activities and balance is key to making a good experience.

But you went farther with the random life setup generation to show how things can vary between people.

Difficulty varies on the life but generally it’s simple and easy to grasp (even more simple that the writing system in our game). However it’s easy to mess up as you underestimate a cost and don’t pay attention to some low gauges as there is no warning (I thought I had enough hygiene to work, but no). Like printing a big document a realising there’s no ink left mid-way…

Bug:

• on one life I was told I had a salary of 500 and rent of 500 but it turns out my rent was only 300 (which was very advantageous; I still lost, probably because I went to work with low hygiene)

Our own jam game if you’re curious: https://komehara.itch.io/finding-inspiration but I was working on an upload with new stats and activities that I never submitted so currently there is nothing to do in the game… I’d definitely redo it in 2D if I had to, to save time and focus on balance and writing.

Hello, I’m considering different interactive fiction engines for my next game, and one limitation I noticed with ChoiceScript (by Choice of Games) was the lack of rollback ability. Since besides, text is shown per page (page changes after each choice), it makes it impossible to both rollback to change a choice, and simply do a read-only rollback to check what has been said (what Renpy calls “fixed rollback”). And it has not text log either.

On the Narrat demo, I see that all previous text is still available on the huge scrollable area by scrolling up, so at least we have access to what has been said.

The remaining questions are:

• is it possible to truly rollback to make different choices?
• is there a manual command to clear pages after a while, to start text from the top again (I use this in Renpy NVL mode for new pages and new chapters) - and in this case, if there a way for the player to still read what was on previous pages? (whether read-only or true rollback)

I’m surprised this is the first topic, the engine seems promising! I see some issues on GitHub but I need to know if it exists first before opening a feature request.

I also see a bug related to choices but that’s another issue so I’ll open a bug on GitHub for that.

Hi again! I tested it a little more for O2A2 and found out that the text from menu choices was not counted (neither the “question” statement displayed in the main box nor the “answers” displayed in choice boxes). However menus are parsed since the count of choices themselves are counted.

Since O2A2 includes choice text in the 1k word limit it would be nice to display their count. A parameter flag could be added for devs who really want to exclude them (in some games, the choice text is repeated sic as a new text line just below so it makes sense to ignore it sometimes - but generally the “question” is unique anyway).

Yeah, I wanted to add speedrunning with/without rings for more variations, but I got caught up in technical stuff. I’m currently focusing on cutting the game code and level memory usage to make it work in a native PICO-8 cart.

I don’t know how much time it will take though, so at the same time I’m setting up my next fan game which should have more room for tunable difficulty and speedrunning.

In fact, some people just grabbed their emulator (or some Action Replay physical adapter) to unlock Swim early and went to check the truck… nothing. French-speaking website Pokelord (launched by Mr Bibou) was pretty efficient at checking those rumours.

I heard some other rumour to name your character “Mew” or “New”, some friend tried it… no success.

Until the much later confirmed Mew glitch was discovered (https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch).

I remember the thrill of believing in a glitch, although the strongest feeling I had was not on Pokemon but on Zelda: Link’s Awakening and the Screen Warping Glitch, that would allow you to jump to the other side of the screen by pressing Select at the right time. I was so eager to try, I immediately ran my emulator and pressed Select when changing screen… which did nothing. I was upset, and even contacted the admin about not posting unverified hacks. They even apologized.

I swore I would not believe anything that was said on the net, esp. something so powerful, without having some proof or checking it myself.

Years later, after learning many more glitches on Zelda and Mario 64 contributing to speedrunning, I got curious about the Screen Warping glitch again as it didn’t seem that impressive anymore compared to the crazy hacks you can do in the other games. So I checked it again, this time we had videos, and indeed, it was working! I simply didn’t have the right timing (and I didn’t have TAS on my emulator to use frame-perfect input). I’m sorry for the admin!

Back to Pokemon, another glitch was the Safari -> Bug City, which was easy to confirm. But I found the reproduction steps far too complicated (go back to the cabin, look at the poster, then move down…). I got the intuition that only a few key steps contributed to messing up with the game’s memory, so I tried to find the “minimal reproduction” (a term I only learned much later when becoming a developer), the minimum steps required to trigger the bug. So I could explore different kinds of Bug Cities much faster. I’m proud not to have just blindly followed the steps found on the Internet but actually identified the right triggers (if not what actually messed up memory in the code; at the time I didn’t have an emulator to inspect memory, much less a tool to disassemble ROM code). That skill is still useful to me nowadays to debug my own games!

Nowadays, we’d make the distinction between glitches (unintended consequences of code not tackling edge cases) and Easter eggs (cool stuff placed at places hard to reach by the designers, generally of cosmetic nature). Then Mew under the truck would be an Easter egg… if it wasn’t an actual Pokemon that could fight.

Yes, I was about to say this in my comment! Due to a bug causing a 1 frame lag allowing you to open the menu because a trainer spots you and challenges you, but only when the trainer is looking down.

I didn’t pay attention to that kind of stuff at the time, but after playing Tales of Symphonia for years and finding numerous glitches I was surprised I had never noticed that in Pokemon. That said, I’m not sure if you could exploit this to actually walk past the trainer, or if you just have time to open the menu, which strongly reduces the interest of the exploit, until you understand that flying/digging out to interrupt the spotting sequence causes some bad memory state in the game (which would probably sound crazy if I hadn’t seen other glitches and learned game programming myself - although this is much less likely nowadays with object-oriented programming and such, as opposed to raw memory reading).

Would there have been such a rumour, we would have believed it and tried it… and quickly confirmed it was working. Thus it wouldn’t be a rumour anymore. Maybe the fact that a rumour, esp. of an easily reproducible action, stays a rumour after a few months is a sign that it’s not true…

Thanks, it’s quite useful for me to assess my future work on O2A2 based on previous work.

I had to dig a bit in the comments of free version to find what the $1 version was bringing (namely label stats), maybe you could expose this more clearly directly on the itch page description.

Since the script is put inside the game folder I’ll have to be careful not to commit the paid version into VCS (at least for public repositories - I suppose it’s OK on private ones only shared with team members) - but I see the free one is under MIT license so I could push it to open source repositories too.

Oh, curious about this one! I considered writing “just the end” as a short story writing exercise, but the idea of having to introduce many characters at once and assuming spectator knows their background stories was a bit overwhelming… so I turned to action games in the form of Boss Fight, which are still technically difficult because player still didn’t have time to learn all the moves and combinations, but I found it feasible using some tricks (such as learning the moves between bosses in a boss rush, or between boss phases for a single enemy).

I’m eager to try the narrative version of this though!

This has been around for more than 6 years: https://itch.io/t/167852/multilingual-game-pages

but still not done. Coincidentally, I’m gonna start to translate my pages today and just found this new thread from you opened two days ago!

I opened a GitHub issue for this: https://github.com/itchio/itch.io/issues/1615

… and now we got Sonic Rumble! But I assume it will be much slower, esp. if inspired by Fall Guys, itself inspired by those entertaining sport-competition TV shows.

Funny that Aurélien Montero worked on this, I meet him here and there at dev events!