Find My Mind

Thanks for playing and leaving the kind words in your comment!

Thank you for writing your thoughts over the various snippets (rating, collection add, and the comment section here). I'm glad you enjoyed the VN despite it being of different structure, and that it posed a challenge for you! Sometimes I'm not sure if it even counts as a VN, but the O2A2 jam with its very specific rulesets did allow for more experimental short narrative works. There's no room for playtesting to gauge the perceived difficulty when the dev process took up the entire jam duration. So my plan was just... to draw as many details I could on the canvas to hopefully misdirect the player sufficiently. This led a totally different art style than what I'm used to, somewhat of a hurried freestyling, and as you could guess: loads of fun while drawing.

It's a bit open-ended what the future holds for the Novelist character and it's up to what the player fills in. Personally I'd like to imagine that they will do fine, although nothing suggests a happy ending.

Thank you very much for this detailed review that goes into what you liked about the different parts in my game! 

I've always enjoyed playing these hidden object games but was initially put off to create one myself due to the many detailed illustrations I need to draw. I found Through the Cracks super neat how this is all achieved in Ren'Py VN format. As a coding challenge I want to implement a draggable view to give the illusion that the world is quite big (as it does not fit on a single screen), which I believe is quite tricky to do in Ren'Py. So this is also the main reason why it's made in Unity as I already got familiarity with it.

I'm glad you can 'feel' the setting! It was easier to pinpoint after I picked the genre to focus on. At least I can use the excuse that you can't see the characters to be all part of the plan of not being allowed to draw more assets for the O2A2 jam. Truth is, they're kind of faceless abstractions, so besides not having to draw the character designs, I'm happy I don't need to draw a BG either.

You're the first person to comment on the drabbles, and I'm overjoyed about it. I know they are super niche and there's that risk about allotting half of the word count limit to them when I assume that most people care more for the main narrative. At the same time, thanks to the minimalistic nature of this jam, I felt more free to be self-indulgent. When I'm already making a one-off short narrative game, might as well go full on experimental.

I'm happy you played my game and made it to the end! :) Thank you for leaving a comment.

I was a bit late with adding the guide with the hints.

Thank you for your review! Ah, I'm feeling super giddy when you call it an EXPERIENCE (such a powerful word!). Your comparison is a huge honour for me. My work become accidental creepy, as I somehow can't resist it (probably has to do that I love horror movies including the ones from the 80s). Like when I brainstormed for the title screen I had to set the identity and genre of the main story, which helps to steer the project direction. Went for cyberpunk because I like the synthwave/retrowave colour palette and it looks so stylish in the art I see, except when I attempt it... the TV gives me shivers! XD

This really touches me because it means a lot to me that the work has a lingering effect, but I hope it's the positive kind of questioning, and not the depressing variant.

Thanks again for the compliment on the assets use!

Thank you for playing and leaving a comment! I'm glad you enjoyed the hidden object section, and that you even managed it while doing it late at night! That's amazing! :)

I was a little bit worried about game balancing, since I hadn't had the chance to let playtesters try it out. My gut feeling is that level 2 is the hardest while level 3 should be easier with the good field overview. Ah, that's super interesting about the medal. I almost want to make it even more hidden! :D (EDIT: Since another player brought up the same issue, I will change up the medal graphic in the next build which I want to target for next week)

All the objects are quite literal, because cryptical wording or riddles might make it inaccessible. Although the 'Dog' is drawn silly on purpose. Perhaps I will add a DevLog guide soon with spoilerless hints.

Actually I also want the player to see the fail-state once. Otherwise you won't hear the different stages of music speed-up... too bad I messed up the implementation which I want to fix in a future build. The timer is only for narrative reasons, that you can feel the same stress as the story characters, not so much to hinder the player from never completing. Story-wise, I don't think that the Mindreader achieves everything in one session. I figured that despite the story is short, it can be a little bit heavy to finish the game in one sitting, so I strongly encourage the breaks.