itch.io

Thank you! I’d love to see more VNs adopt that kind of design!

Thank you! I could write lots more about other things people commonly compare things to (Yume Nikki, LSD, “surreal” as a catchall term) but I hope people get the general idea

A game can just be :) Really loved this

Thank you Millie, a lot of people are saying it but your Decker stuff specifically has inspired me to shorten that gap between thinking and doing especially. Great manifesto

The one about premises being the only part that really matters in a story spoke to me. I like good execution in writing but at the end of the day it really is what you take away from it that matters. I think it’s a spectrum but I was always annoyed at the types of people who would say the ending of Titanic sucks because the door was big enough for both Rose and Jack, and every day I feel that bar for being annoyed getting lowered

I share pretty much everything I make on impulse so this might be the most valuable manifesto in the jam so far in how opposed it is to me. Gonna consider the dragon thing. Really good writing

Aw sorry. I said I wanted to test out some of my proposals, plus I’ve never hosted a game jam before, so I decided to just test long game durations and the community-gathering thing initially. I’ll probably make a vaguely themed jam somewhere down the line.

But then again this is an open proposal! If anyone wants to make a vaguely themed jam and send it to me I’ll take a look at it and try to join it if I have time!! Love your games by the way.

It’s not lame, that was one of the examples I was thinking of when I came up with this. Thanks for reading!

Thanks, I hope people try more things with VNs. I’m not against people being influenced by anime or doing dating/NSFW visual novels to be clear, but when it’s especially reductive (e.g. like desperate Lynchian stuff) it gets really sad. Thanks for reading!

Yes!! That’s my other big insincere influence I keep noticing with David Lynch. It just comes off so annoying and terrified. I hope people realize they can be less guarded in the future.

Thanks for reading! It’s funny that you link candle’s Manifesto Megamix because it’s one of my favorite submissions of anything on itch.io and influenced a lot of my thinking about how itch infrastructure should be when I first joined it years ago (read: I plagiarized large parts of it lol)

Thank you for reading!

REAL AND TRUE. It’s so easy for people to wrangle rules and guidelines for art into giving up, and we should always be aware of that. “Be pompous for the right reasons” is a good way to describe indie/solodev auteurism in words that I’ve trying so hard to come up with, I’m stealing that

Excellent and correct

Looking into this…

I haven’t heard of Set Yourself on Fire, I’ll check it out. Thanks for reading and for the recommendation!

The Cozy Game Military-Industrial Complex is gonna try to kill you for this but I completely agree. There’s a fine line between earnestly trying to comfort people in the face of the real world and babying people in toxic oversaturated sugar gruel and way too much of what I see bends towards the latter. I’ll die on this hill too.

Thanks for reading! I’m realizing now how it might look so I want to make it clear that your jam didn’t have anything to do with me writing the jam manifesto, I’ve been thinking about it for a while. And in general, I don’t think every jam should be like what I’m suggesting, I just want more examples of what I’m suggesting.

Many people are saying this!! This has such good visual design, even the itch page

Thank you for reading!!

Counter-counter-manifesto: That’s bad phrasing on my part! The French New Wave as a movement formed to fight against the decadent pedestrian films the commercial French film industry was pumping out, so one of their main engines was subversion, meaning that many of their own films were subverting OTHER films in the same movement, and this basic attitude of constantly questioning is what I actually want to encourage.

And as for their constant homaging, referencing, etc, you can take that or leave it. At their best the FNW references films to relate them to the real world, statements about spectacle itself, and the state of modern French politics. At its worst it’s lame homage-for-the-sake-of-homage stuff. Very hit and miss for me.

If it helps I’m very wishy-washy on the French New Wave anyways. I’ve seen like 8 Godard films and only liked 1, lol. As you are the only current submission to the Comment Jam, I declare you the winner.

Thanks for reading!

2nd manifesto to present games as dead bodies lol. Loved this.

A lot of filmmakers that make it big say in interviews that they’re simply “making the films they want to see,” and I think that’s a good idea to present, but what I don’t see people point out about that quote is how the filmmaker can never see their own film without thinking about how they made it. They make their films in the hopes that other people see what they saw when they envisioned it, but they can never look at it themselves in the same way. In this way art is both selfish (you’re often trying to present your thoughts as uncompromised as possible) and selfless (the end result is something only other people can experience with “fresh” eyes).

“Gambling: the ultimate way of rent-seeking” goes hard, I might steal that

GREAT MANIFESTO. It feels like you took what I’ve banging the drum on inside my head and put it into tangible words. Especially the part about avoiding lessening a unique idea with irony/novelty/relatability.

I keep realizing when I find new art that I respond to is that my first thought is often “Wow, you can DO that?” and my second thought is “Why did I ever think you COULDN’T do this?” So expanding possibility space is clearly an ongoing process for me, if not all of us. That’s what I like about places like itch, it allows me to be surprised more!

🚢🛤📣🏜…

Thank you!! The thing about limits that I’ve found with myself is that I internalize them a lot without realizing (“Oh, I can’t do this with a game because nobody else has tried it before” being one of the biggest ones) so I hope pointing out how artificial they are will help people recognize them

YES! WE DESERVE BETTER!!

To be honest I think a large amount of people posting in game dev spaces about how they hate making games are just trying to vent temporary frustration with the process with ironic jokes rather than actually despising the craft. Everything you said about the underlying expectation of “industry products” is some real fucking shit though. “You will always be the exception” hits so good

Thank you!!

Thank you! Just be sure to give our magazine credit when you win The Game Awards

This is really nice! The peekaboo card is the closest someone’s gotten to accurately portraying what the inside of my brain looks like

Really, I just want to see some kind of game or something called that, I don’t care what it is. Thank you for reading!

Wow. Illumination, are you listening? Thanks for taking the time to read it!

Thank you! And good to know some people have thought of the same thing lol.

Your zine was so good that I effectively stole the idea for it to make my zine, sorry lol. I like your attitude towards projects for giving you stuff to do without necessarily having to be “completed,” I should try and be more like that. And your artstyle is amazing! Myrtle is my favorite.

Your artstyle looks so nice! My favorite is the Mermaid. Silly freaking creature

Some of these poem forms I’d never heard of but Doubling dactyls seems Pretty dang fun

I’m always doing stuff like this (things)

Honestly it sounds weird to say/write outside my brain but I keep forgetting that I’m not as restricted as I think I am when it comes to what I can/can’t do, so thank you for this. It helps, seriously

Had an AWESOME time playing this game before work. Now it’s time for me to go to work. I love you!

Thank you!

I’m nowhere near good enough at Pokemon to do what this game wants from me, even with easy mode on. I like how you incorporated the song into the writing though!