itch.io

Spore mother is just very unfinished content! Anything past ground floor is a bit jank.

yeah, saving will be more restricted in the full release, I'm only keeping it available like this while it's in development and prone to bugs.

thank you! I'll check that out today. Is it a crash or just an invalid crafting result?

Darn, I'm sorry, I thought that would fix it! Let me try something again for the next version, maybe that will do it.

The music is by cboyardee! There arent many tracks yet if you don't count all the atmospheric hums, but maybe later.

Thank you! That will probably happen at some point!

Thank you! Im planning to put it on Steam once I have something more complete on my hands

Thank you! Yes, the vibe im going for is very bleak but with many little moments of relief if you take chances and trust people despite it.

Thank you for playing! Sorry about the bugs, I think these should be fixed by the next version.

Thank you! I hope the game is fun to watch being played! I feel like some parts of the game make it an entertaining watch - the exploration and interacting with monsters and weird npcs - but the management parts when you stay home probably doesn't make the best videos. Maybe I should think about a alt game mode that tones down the management, specifically to reduce the repetitive parts for people streaming/LPing.

Thank you, Im glad you like it! Do check the update changelog before getting a new version and starting over though, sometimes its just some bugfixes without much new content at all, don't want to burn out replaying again and again where there is barely anything new!

Thanks for making it, its very useful!

Weird, it doesnt save at all? Can you check if it created anything in the games' save folder?

Sorry about that, its an incompatibility with some recent changes. I'll fix that on the next build, should be out tomorrow!

Hello! Yeah, I think it should be fixed now - I overwrote the build just an hour and a half after putting it up.

if you downloaded the game very early after the upload, might want to re-download, there was a crash from a missing audio asset!

thanks, got it! should be fixed next build

Thank you, ill look into it now!

it should be possible, but it will sometimes break, when bigger changes happen. Just copy the file over and it should load, at least!

Do you remember which room this happened in? Its a room-specific issue, it depends which room you met him in! I fixed a bunch of em but missed a few.

Hello! Im implementing this plugin in my latest game Look Outside - and in working on it I found a few issues you might want to fix on your end- 

• in addShopStock, line 1262 - misnamed variable, it should be defaultStockMax, not defaultRestockMax
• in the resetStock function, add a check to see if _shopstock is undefined, and if it is, initialize the 3 variables of the plugin - that way, old saves from before the plugin was implementing should work with the post-plugin version

will add to this in replies if I find more stuff!

Also - im not sure Im setting up the shops properly - it seems like, in order for the stocks to not reset every time the shop is launched, and to not break after loading the game, I need to use two Set Stock calls for each shop:

The first one is only called once per game and sets up the initial shop inventory

The second one just before the shop processing call, that doesnt have any inventory set up in it.

If I only do the first call, the shop works fine initially, but it breaks if I load the game.

if I only have that second call just before the shop processing event, and put the full shop inventory in that one call, the shop works but it resets the shop stock inventory every time the shop is called.

If that is the intended usage, I think it needs to be explained better in the plugin files - if its not the intended usage, I think I'm either doing something wrong, or it might not be working properly.

Thank you!

Hello! Thanks so much for playing! Which spooky meeting do you mean? Theres a lot of spooky meetings in the game, the game is basically a delivery mechanism for spooky meetings!

Thanks for playing!Tthe rat baby and that whole section is a work in progress - for now feeding the wall is its only purpose, the other stuff is unfinished. As for the cloaked guy, its a known issue, its fixed in the upcoming update.

Yeah! In the latest version it prompts a save when you go to bed, actually! But I feel that as long as the game isn't stable and relatively bug free, its best to let people save anywhere and have autosave for the time being, if only to help them keep their sanity a little bit as the game falls apart in their hands. But yeah, once this is closer to being all finished, I will probably shift to saving only upon sleeping, that would be the most appropriate to the games overall pacing I think.

Sure! I do the same thing! I think you can follow this project to see when I update it somehow on itch? - you can also follow me on twitter (@FrancisCoulombe) or bluesky (frankiepixel.bsky.social) , or join my discord (link in the game description).

Hello! Yes, the way shops work right now is just not balanced very well yet. I want to build a shop system that has a finite inventory, so you can only buy a limited amount of each item, but until then, the shops will be a bit broken.

Theres actually a mascot head, but I didnt place it anywhere yet, hah!

Yeah! Tenement hell was a jam game that didnt really come together, so this was an attempt at making a very different kind of game that captures a similar vibe.

Thanks for playing! Yeah, theres no endings yet, working on that!

Thanks for playing! I noticed while watching the video, a lot of the object interactions seem to be unreliable with the mouse/touch controls. Im wondering if I should turn these off, or if too many people prefer playing with the mouse despite that problem...

There should only be minor issues if you move over the saved game, it should be largely compatible!

Awesome! Good, fun idea with a good execution!

The one small critique I have is the hall closet - didnt notice it at all at first, had to look in the manual! I was really stuck when I needed those towels. I would just make it another door at the end of the hall instead of a different floor tile I think.

Nice! Love the use of 3d sound here.

The only criticism I would give, is that there should be an introductory command telling you that you need to do *something* - don't say exactly what to do, just give a vague first goal - when I first played and followed the voice, and got killed at the tree, I actually had the impression this was the whole game! Only the title being so specific hinted that there was more to see - I then looked at the games page and saw there were spoilers instructions, so I launched the game again and looked around more. Just a vague starting text like "Perform The Ritual" or smth would work I think.

Or maybe no text at the start, but a hint like this on the death screen if you are killed without finding any other object of interest, so your first experience is kept the same as now, but it makes sure people know to try again.

Thank you! As for that one choice option, hey... you had other options.... don't blame me... :)

As for bug reports, I havent set up a public place for it, but I probably should. Maybe ill use the github issues system for it? For now, I have a discord with a channel dedicated to the game, people have been posting bug reports there - https://discord.gg/xg9wtQcfZk  - or alternatively, you could post bugs in this thread here.

(I could also switch the comment section to a discussion board? but idk feels a bit early for that)

Thank you!

Thanks for playing!

For the games' length - yeah, I have a habit of making jam games generally too ambitious, that's just part of what makes a jam exciting to me! Its a bad habit and often results in janky unpolished jam games, but every once in a while it really pays off.

There's no quick way to check specific status numbers, but you can check if you're hungry, tired etc by looking at yourself in the mirror. I didnt want to have too many specific numbers there, just wanted the players to have to generally "take care of themselves" at home, but not necessarily have to fine tune themselves to numbers, if they're not critical like life and stamina. I felt that would make the life stats too prominent and take away from exploring. The way I see it, the more of this info is shown, the more it implies that its important to constantly worry about, so keeping it abstract would help the player only worry about it if one of the stats is low. Of course, because of the hunger glitch, hunger IS something to constantly worry about right now, but obviously thats a glitch, not really something the design is meant to deal with! The hunger glitch really comes from not testing the game myself extensively enough in the last few days of the jam, I focused way more on adding exploration content, and of course tested that stuff by warping to it, not by playing the game at length - thats when stuff like that can arise. Unfortunate, but it happens!

Im considering to add small icons in the menu screen (if I can figure out how to do that in mz) that appear if you are below 50% of a stat, like a warning before the real status effects hit you. That way you get a bit more of a warning you can check back on, but still without giving you too many numbers to look at.

For weapon durability, the idea is for weapons to break based on a dice roll, but get to a "half-broken" state first where they are still usable.  This usually makes it a bit weaker, but more importantly, using it becomes risky - if it "breaks" again a second time in combat, you're left without a weapon mid-fight. I felt like this half-broken state was important in  a game where you cant switch weapons mid-battle, to avoid a situation where you are left with no weapons at all just because of a single bad roll, even though you went into a fight with a completely pristine, battle-ready baseball bat - It can still happen of course, but now you need two consecutive bad rolls, so you have way more wiggle room to deal with bad luck.  Maybe a key issue here is the wording, all the half-broken weapons are described in different ways, they should have some kind of more explicit, HALF-BROKEN tag or something that makes this more clear. And maybe the tutorial about weapon breaking should be re-written too, might not be clear enough.

Thanks again for playing, I appreciate the thoughts!

Awesome! That was fun! I loved all of the games' secrets, and I wonder if I found all of them. Also, are there alternate endings?

(ANYONE PLAYING THIS: IF YOU GET THE CUTSCENE FREEZE BECAUSE YOU RECRUITED THE DOG, SCROLL DOWN - I HAVE A SOLUTION AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS COMMENT SO YOU CAN GET PAST IT AND KEEP PLAYING!)

Here are a few thoughts and notes on the game-

• I think you need a bit more starting gold right now - the start of the game puts you in an awkward position because you have zero gold, and if you explore in the wrong direction you can end up taking damage before you have the means to sleep at the inn! I would say, put an easy to find 10-20 gold somewhere in the city, or in the graveyard.
• Small bug: when you leave the tomb, going back to the graveyard, the game does not properly reset the tint of the screen to the darkness of the graveyard, so it looks as though it's now daytime.
• Once you reach the manor, there are books upstairs with a LOT of text, huge walls of text. Were these AI-written? I would recommend to trim these down, it is a lot of reading to put on the player all at once. It comes down to like 12-15 full pages of text all in one go! If you really need to tell all of that story, maybe distribute bits and pieces of those journals elsewhere in the game, and only leave the one journal with the secret code in it whole. Maybe you only find the final pages of each book there or something.
• In the manor, the secret door you can only see with the eldritch eyes active - the eldritch eyes idea is really cool by the way! - I would recommend you do something to make that door more obvious. I was stuck wandering around for a while because I didnt realize I had missed something. I would recommend adding the sparkles of the eldritch gold around that door, framing it with them.
• Finally, the biggest problem: if you recruit the dog, a lot of the games cutscenes can break, because the dog is a follower, and it can block characters from moving, which interrupts the cutscenes and locks up the game. You should disable followers whenever cutscenes begin, or maybe disable followers at all times! The worst of it is at the ending cutscene, since it takes place on a narrow bridge, there is no way to play this cutscene without the dog glitching it and preventing you from reaching the ending. I did figure out a workaround if players are stuck, though-

---CUTSCENE FREEZE FIX---
If you need a workaround to fix the dog cutscene problem without getting an updated build of the game, here is what you can do to fix it in-game right now:

First, open the file WHISPERS OF THE DEEP/s/rmmz_managers.js  using a simple text editing program like notepad.

Then use the search function to find this on line 2017:
if (Utils.isNwjs() && Utils.isOptionValid("test")) {

change this line to say:
if (Utils.isNwjs()) {
this will enable the dev tools in-game.

Then, load the game to where you have the dog with you, before the broken cutscene begins, and press F8. This will bring up the dev console. In the console, paste this line and then press enter:
$gamePlayer.hideFollowers(); $gamePlayer.refresh();

This should remove the dog character following you around as an object, though the dog is still in your party. This should prevent the cutscenes from breaking!

I get an error message trying to run the game - "Failed to open descriptor file ../../../terror/terror.uproject"

Maybe you accidentally uploaded a playtest build that requires the project files to run, instead of a stand-alone executable? I dont know how unreal engine works, sorry! But thats what the error message sounds like to me.

Nice job!

One glitch I found - there is a little jumpscare that happens if you clean the changing room - the lights flicker and the mannequin appears for a moment. If this happens while the power is cut, it glitches, and the lights turn back on, while the game still expects you to switch the power back. Just need to make sure that scare turns the lights back off if the power is still cut!