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Thank you. That's kind of you to say!

Oh, that's awesome! I'm glad you had fun. Thank you so much for leaving a comment. It's always great to hear about someone's experience.

I love the name you chose. I think that's a good score, too, if I look at the scores I got when I was testing the game.

The art in this game is great! You've given me ideas for some projects I'm working on. I love the story too.

Some cool art in there. I like how you designed the way you move through the character's memories with the scene at the top and the thoughts activated  at the bottom.

Interesting first Bitsy game! I managed to escape but it took me quite a long time, partly because when I first started playing I thought you had to visit each room in order. Then I realised maybe I just need to know which doorway to go through in whatever room I'm in that gets me closer to the end. so I eventually figured it out.

I really liked the music.

Hello. I'm Mandy. I'm from Cape Town, South Africa, and I've been making games in Twine and Bitsy for a few years now. I've also designed a few one page RPGs and TTRPG fragments, and I make physical zines.

Please post about your new games on the forums here so I can play them. New games get buried so quickly on itch that it's easy to miss them unless they're part of a jam.

The art for this entire pack is so good but that skeleton is particularly fantastic!

This is so well done. I really enjoyed the writing and the humour. Some of the clues still have me stumped but I did win one time. Fantastic use of public domain art and music!

Horror games are not for me but I played anyway. I don't want to say much else because I don't want to spoil anything for anyone else but I experienced a moment that will stay with me for a while.

I thought the whole atmosphere was very well crafted. I love the sound design, plus the art (and general palette) is great!

(Edit to add: please consider arrow key controls in your games as well as WASD.)

Me too. I've played and enjoyed so many games like that and so this time I thought I should finally try to do it myself and fight back all urges to explain anything. I think it worked well and I'm going to add the technique to my narrative toolbox.

Thank you! I did my best to be accurate with the sprites, which was incredibly difficult at 8x8, and I even have some that I sadly didn't get to use due to jam time constraints, but I also saved everyone from having to step and lunge backwards and forwards for half an hour or so!

That ending was cool! A well done first Bitsy game!

This is a great pack! I love the art and the water animations look so good. Well done!

Thanks. That's great to hear that you enjoyed it. I haven't read the graphic novel so I will look out for it.

Yeah, it was a jam game so I didn't have enough time to do everything that I wanted to do and balance it better and add more content (I had much, much more in mind). I lost a lot of time in the beginning because I had wanted to make a Bitsy game but because the jam theme was a mechanic rather than a theme I couldn't figure out what to do and had to switch to Twine and come up with something suitable there. Then it turned out to be more of an ambitious concept than I realised.

I enjoyed making the art, though, and learnt a few things, which is always something I hope happens in a jam so it wasn't a bad experience but sometimes a game just doesn't work out the way you'd like.

Sorry about that oxygen. Space capitalism is unforgiving!

Oh, that's awesome! Thank you! That supports me and them. That's so great!

I hope you enjoy it.

Cool, cool.

It is a nice font, yeah. I was so sad to see there's no zero (or any punctuation characters) because I would have liked to use it for a few (non game) projects,

Because from what little I've seen of Eurovision it's the most absurd and outlandish stuff (well, a lot of it), with questionable music, fashion, and visuals that's somehow amazing to look at and often fun and that's how this game feels too.

Oh, I see the font doesn't have a zero. That's odd. It looks like he designed one (https://fontm.com/theend-font/) but it's not in the TrueType file.

This is so absurdist. I love it! It feels like if Eurovision was a game, it would be this game.

I don't think I've ever played an endless runner before where you're in front of the runner looking back. That was interesting. I really like the animation of the things flying towards the existential head, especially the way they start spinning completely out of control as they get very close. I like the collection of objects too.

I know it's just a training project but if you ever do an update there are those of us who prefer arrow keys for controls. Also, you spelt "design" wrong on the credits screen. The "0" (zero) of the counter font also doesn't seem to be displaying properly.

If you're open to feature requests, I'd really like the ability to  (try to) ninja smack the things flying at me with a key press. You pretty much have the animations you would need there already.

I enjoyed this. I actually found it quite relaxing.

I'm sorry to hear that you're finding it makes it too lengthy for you doing the development because as a player it really makes it even more interesting!

I really appreciate these activism games that you make about Ukraine. I think they tell a story in a way that traditional journalism can't, perhaps because as the player you become an active participant.

You did some interesting things in Bitsy here too - as always - which is another reason why I love your games. I particularly liked the "close-up" bits where you get into the truck and drive.

Congratulations to all the entrants and well done to the winners. This was an amazing jam this year with so many great entries and I'm always blown away by what people are able to do in a weekend and how different everything is. I'm still going through all the games but I've enjoyed everything I've played so far.

Thank you to the judges and especially to Free Lives for hosting. I really appreciate that you do this jam for us every year.

I know! For "research purposes" I tried to stomp a few people and saw they were safe, which I thought was a nice touch. What I meant in terms of sorry was that I'm stomping their town to bits and I'm enjoying it and this is right after I've just played a few times as a pacifist and discovered it's possible! (Guess that made me the monster....)

But I wanted to make a great piece of gothic art - just because! It had no function in the story, it was just going to be there to look pretty!

I'm glad you enjoyed the humour though.

I'm also glad to see you're around. I've been wondering if you're ok so I was glad to get a notification the other day about your new game, which I need to download (plus I like endless runners, which is even better), and then I saw there's a Bitsy game that's a little older that I didn't see when it was released so I'm looking forward to playing both when I have a moment.

I played this (a few times) a few days ago and managed to find an almost pacifist path to the keys if you walk along right at the bottom of the screen and I really liked that it could be possible to play this in this way so if you ever intend to work further on the game then a pacifist challenge would be quite fun. However, the sound design is so good that stomping around the city ended up feeling incredibly satisfying (sorry pixel people!) and I enjoyed doing that too, as well as all the little comments your kaiju makes while trying to tiptoe around. Really, really great game for such a simple premise and the lack of time you had to devote to it. Well done! (I love the art and animation too, of course!)

Ha ha! Yeah, ok, I missed that.

I have an old computer, which is the main problem, but Unity in general is just awful (besides all the spyware and analytics, plus how it leaves junk files all over a player's computer) because it ramps up the GPU on even the most innocuous stuff and that's been a problem since before my computer became "old".

I'll check the game out again once you publish the next update!

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it! I feel as if I told the story that I had intended to tell, albeit in a very concentrated jam way. What would you want to see expanded?

Thanks! Bitsy is designed for a kind of cozy/handcrafted feel, as you note, although most games people make tend to be happier. (There are some other heavy or dark/horroresque ones, though, since you really can make any kind of game in it.)

One thing I would do is make each day a bit longer (more goats that meet and don't meeting the requirements) and randomise the goats (except for the first day, of course). Still fun though as is.

Thank you! Some people do not appreciate the aesthetic (and the limitations it and Bitsy, specifically, create, which can be very difficult to work with) it but it's always great to hear from the people who do.

Ah, damn. If you can get it up after the jam or, alternatively, see about making a new downloadable build with some small tweak because maybe there's just something in that original zip file configuration that's a false positive?

Cool idea. Plays a bit janky on my computer, as all Unity games do (if they aren't already actively trying to overheat my computer and blow it up), so I couldn't get a very good score. I have to be that guy and say that the sound of (musical) whistling really irritates me so be aware that it's something some people would prefer to be able to switch off. I also realised the scroll wheel was selecting things that weren't there, and then I got a fifth tentacle in one game but it sill didn't help (how many can you get?) and most of the time nothing was selected, so I switched to the right click in the game after that. It still felt a bit cumbersome though but I was able to play a bit better.

The water effect is really great.

Question, though: you might be the beast but are you the monster? If some aggressive whistling boats came into my sea house I'd also slap 'em.

I've played both versions. You've made some good improvements to the post jam version. However I still get confused about the mandates, I think because you just get used to a new day and the new rules and then it ends and then you have the next day and a bunch of new rules so your brain never gets enough time just to rest a little with one scenario. Also I find that the instructions for the first day are not clear as to what you are supposed to do about the third brother. I did appreciate, however, that you could read the current day's fax at any time.

I didn't like the South Africanness of it because it's only used in the dialogue; there's nothing else about the game that is in any way South African, so to me it doesn't feel as if it fits. However I recognise that this is a personal preference and others may feel differently.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this very much and I really liked the art.

I didn't quite have the hang of the controls in the beginning due to the lack of directions and subtlety of the highlight around the controllable objects (plus, your cursor is often on an object when a scene loads so you don't realise it's highlighted) but I guess one could argue that it suits the theme of the game! I played through twice and didn't quite understand the driving bit either time, although the second time I got through it more easily knowing by then how to control the game.

I like pineapple on pizza but I did laugh both times I had to put the tomato sauce on the burnt steak.

In all, really good job for 48 hours and excellent work on the art, plus coming up with the collection of "mundane" offensive ideas you incorporated into the game. I would enjoy playing a longer version of this.

Thank you!

Yeah. It's easy (and fun) to write stories about beasts that you can other but if you look around at the real world right now it's full of monsters - they're in the headlines every day - who selfishly wield their privilege on purpose to make life horrible for everyone else. Thank you for playing and the kind comment.

Thanks!

I'm so glad you were! Thank you.

Thank you!