itch.io

This was fascinating! You picked great assets to use, and you work with them very efficiently. The elements that you created directly (I imagine?) do a lot, too: the 'halo' behind Haydee immediately intrigued me, for instance, and it was very cool to see the script offer a couple of lines to contextualise it, and then see it used later to tell us about Haydee's state of mind. (If mind is even the right word for talking about angels, &c &c.)

I wasn't quite sure about the phrase 'twain ropes' (definitely not 'twin ropes'?); I suspect 'a shit pay' would be better as either 'a shit salary', or 'a shit paycheck' (in NA spelling), or just 'shit pay'; and in one line, 'It's shell' probably ought to read 'Its shell'. But those are the most minor of nitpicks, and I am mentioning them because there weren't any larger issues. Overall I thought this read very well, with some lovely uses of language that sketched in an engaging, unsettling background to the story.

Narratively, it was also neat to read a VN in this game jam that gives us a third person's glimpse of a relationship rather than placing the point-of-view character's own romantic relationship(s) at the front of our attention. That aspect also makes this function powerfully as a self-contained short story, which is sensible scoping for a time-limited jam, as well…

Haha, I’m glad that that was worth mentioning! I think these seemingly small things like character motion add a lot to the texture of the story and the characters. I never complain about a VN missing them, because I know many projects have very small teams or just one person behind them. But when a VN does do this I always notice!

If I could, I would give this a sixth star, because it's the only visual novel I've read that mentions Wotsits.

This feels very wisely scoped so that it wouldn't be too long, and could therefore be extremely polished. And it certainly is polished. Lots of little touches that impressed me here, including playing with the interface and fitting in small motions for the characters.

I enjoyed the slice of the VN that you have in the demo! There's some very confident and effective use of varied typesetting here, and the whole has such coherent presentation. The committed choice of just a few colours works very nicely. I can't comment on the Spanish text, but I thought the English read well, with a good grip on register and dialect and some well-chosen idioms. (I think there was one line where I might have found toast more natural than toasts, but if that is the level of detail one has to zoom in to to try to give feedback, things are going well!)

If you do take this project forward in future, I'll be interested to see where it goes.

This demo was a good time! I really liked the style and execution of quite a lot of the art. The dialogue worked for me and often felt quietly funny. I also like how you've summoned up some of the atmosphere of late teens spent somewhere that's not the most inherently exciting place in the world—very efficiently, without that many assets used. I'm afraid I can't comment on the voice acting because I'm a boring turns-the-voices-off person, but it's impressive that you're including it, and also good from an accessibility point of view.

I wondered in a few places whether the narration, distinct from the dialogue, might be dialled back, to avoid the risk of saying things we can infer already. Perhaps that's just a matter of taste! One or two lines included vocabulary which I'm not sure was in circulation in 1997, but (1) I might just be wrong, and (2) even if that is happening, that's a legitimate stylistic choice (no one writes historical fiction about the fourteenth century in Middle English, and nor should they). Also, the drawing of Nat with her tongue out is funny, but I thought perhaps it appeared too often, diluting its force—in my opinion, and it's only an opinion, that sort of image works best when used most sparingly.

None of those things were a big deal. Overall, I thought this was a very likeable snapshot. Good luck working on the rest of it!

That's great, thank you! (And pass on my thanks to your girlfriend also!) I'll put a link to that in the main post.

Yes, I think if you link a zip here in a comment that'd be great. I can edit the post to point readers down to it if they do want it. Having a portable version (however rough and ready) would be really good for people with long commutes / intermittent internet access / &c &c. Thank you for offering!

I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it, thank you! I think (hope) that one of the good things about the project has been that lots of readers who aren't necessarily hugely into reading poetry have still found things to like in CWKB. It's good to know that you found the recordings of performance added something, too.

Thank you!!

Provisionally  yes—I'd certainly like to have some kind of audio form of it available in the longer term, and the live readings should be a workable if rough form of that unless or until I ever get round to recording and editing a proper run-through.

Chariots may or may not have ever been a brilliant idea on the battlefield, but they've proved amazing at baffling scholars…

This is lovely. Geography and career have kept me from cons, but I'm ageing, I have too many degrees, and I have a cel collection, so I certainly felt aspects of this. Plus it has yellow text, over images in 4:3, the most virtuous aspect ratio!

Also the detailed written texture in VNs doesn't always get enough notice, so I want to say that I liked how crisp and tuned much of the dialogue (spoken and internal) felt. Nice variation in syntactic complexity, and a sense of two different register-sets for the two characters.

Really smart use of textual and aural implication—starting with the title!—and I admire the fruitful gap between some of what's happening, and the confidently-chosen conventions for presenting text. Magnificent concision, too: something that gets in, says its thing, and drops the mic.

Comments here already cover various praiseworthy things, so I'll say that I like the attention to detail, with a bunch of the background elements being a little more sophisticated than they might at first seem—occasional passing asteroids visible through portholes on the spaceship, and so forth. Nice spaceship design, too!

Smashing. I thought this was really poised and assured. You muster some standout short, clipped sentences. (As a bonus, I'm not very familiar with most of the USA, but now I've heard of and have looked up Fishkill.)

Thank you!

Bravo! This rules, and is my favourite thing I've seen from this game jam so far. You use the legend very smartly, you wield the second person like a pro, and there're some lovely choices about exactly what text readers must click here—one of the things I look for most in Twine projects. I am one of nature's quibblers, and a handful of times I felt tempted to quibble about this or that word-choice or syntactic path. But overall, this is great: thank you for writing it!

I love how this game does a lot with little. And, in a similar vein, I like the clipped concision and simplicity in the writing, especially in the fairy tale itself!

Scientists are saying it might just be.

Rare is the game both set in the morally correct time period (the 1980s) and using the morally correct aspect ratio (4:3). But also the script made me grin several times, and I was delighted by the art, especially the expressive dialogue character portraits. And through luck or judgement—I'll claim the latter—in my first play-through, Beans avoided the bear trap.

This is a spiky, forthright, worthwhile piece of writing. Horror in which the ghost stands as substantially less horrifying than some of the humans is a well-ploughed field, but this still feels fresh—urgent, even. 

In good interactive fiction tradition, HWGS also shows off some lovely thought about what IF might do with the seemingly simple act of clicking on text.

No need to feel silly about American English, it’s the most common first-language variety and one with many beauties of its own! Yes, I’d be very happy to talk—I see you followed me on Twitter, so I’ll DM you my Discord ID (how roundabout!) there.

This is neat! A very promising demo. There're rough edges as I'd expect in anything in alpha, but I already really like the smart, skilled use of layering, colour motifs, silhouettes, insets, and (in some scenes) sound. Narratively, there were transitions and conversations here which felt somewhat oblique, and a few points in the prose felt like they needed contractions or a helping comma to feel natural, but I'm guessing that these foibles too can be chalked up to the project's relatively early state. The thorough research into early archery is very pleasing, and I was delighted to see an anchoress. Or rather—more correctly—to hear and not see an anchoress.

I love the choice of a fifteenth-century setting that already regards Robin Hood tales as part of its own cultural fabric. Quite rightly, you borrow from and play with history and legend rather than feeling beholden to them, which I applaud. The setting in the 1450s prompted me to jot down some stray thoughts as I read, which I offer in case they're helpful; please feel free to ignore them!

The lexis sometimes seems slightly chronologically unstable. I couldn't quite tell, as a reader, whether I was invited to enjoy this as a deliberately archaising work or as a work in a historical setting with natural present-day language. Both approaches are good, but now and then it felt like we were oscillating between them. For instance, if we're going to go back to the Middle English etymons of present-day brag/bragging and yeah, why not do that for other words? Thee is an intimate second-person pronoun in later Middle English (later ME had T–V distinction); at least one character uses it to Robin, but (if my short-term memory serves) Robin and Red don't use it for each other as one might perhaps expect of co-conspirators—or if Robin is in some sense in Red's service, Red could address Robin as thee and Robin could address Red as you (or ye). Gramerci was certainly a widely understood way to express gratitude, but it was also a slightly elevated and formal way given its French origins: does that fit with all its uses here? Red and the grandmother quoting Sun Tzu amused me, but using disposition in the fifteenth century makes Red sound like an ecclesiastic with a university degree. Working in the other direction, spooked stuck out to me because it only enters English in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and local only expands beyond use in medical contexts some time after the fifteenth century. &c &c.

No doubt some of these things are small, pedantic details, ones only a small-minded pedant would think of! I wonder whether even for the general reader, though, either more studied, systematic archaism, or more natural modern language might prove smoother; either option would carry less risk of falling between two stools. While I'm talking small pedantic details, I suspect someone in the 1450s would possibly have called the civic authorities in Nottingham not a local council but (confusingly for us) the 'corporation': Nottingham had become a county corporate in the 1440s. (Nottingham, not Nottinghamshire, despite 'county corporate' involving the word 'county'.) You don't have to care about this, though, because as noted above you have a licence to borrow from history but no obligation to follow it…

Small details like these are one thing; the overall project another. As I said, this seems lovely, and I wish you every success with it! I will be watching with interest for updates.