This was really cool. The games worked together nicely and it was fun to go through a text game like that. Great job!

Wow, great story, a lot to read and multiple endings. Great combination of genres. Game ended with a wife and a score of 15402.

A small spelling mistake: you wrote "would be theif" instead of thief ;).

This is a very nice idea

@KayZ Thanks for the spot and glad you enjoyed it. If there's just the one typo I'll be shocked, there's somewhere between 8000 and 9000 words of story text!

That was great. I liked the writing and the mechanic worked really well. I ended up getting stabbed in a church. :P

Nice story. Beginning reminds me of Bukowski's "Pulp". I went for dynamite ending and finished with 5831 score.

Did you write the story in 48 hours or wrote it earler?

@ryzy27 The story was all written in the 48 hours. The dynamite ending was finished about 47:50...

I might write a blog about it actually. It was fun but as you could probably tell the quality was suuuper variable.

Right now though, brain is low on words. Will do a proper word count at some point... Kind of want to know. I'm pretty sure I beat my record for words in a weekend ( I do nanowrimo sometimes too)

@hanra Are you a professional writer of some kind? Your game makes me want to make more story focused game next time, not just bunch of badly written code and I was wondering if I could even manage to acomplish that.

I just checked and only a few famous writers break 3000 words per day barrier. Your 9000 seems very impressive and it's also very good writing, the kind I enjoy.
And im here glad that I wrote (well, mostly copy-pasted) 1700 lines of code...

@ryzy27, I'm nothing like a pro writer no :smile:, but again I'm very glad you enjoyed it. I think I lucked out in a few ways this time round: the core "game" bit of this game was simple, I happened to write the engine first, had the foresight to plot out the narrative and had a few good ideas of how I could safely cut out whole chunks of it without losing much.

If you want writing practice I thoroughly recommend NaNoWriMo in November, it's a great excuse to let the creative juices flow free. It helped knowing roughly how much I could write before committing to a narrative-heavy game idea, so I'd say it's worth getting some writing in between jams to feel out your limits and learn how much plotting you need to do in advance vs. how much you can comfortably make up on the fly.

This was one such excuse for me to experiment a bit more. I liked the fact that with multiple different outcomes I didn't have to commit to just one timeline, that's usually something that can cause writers block for me.

For me, next time I think I'd like to know my framework a bit better and maybe have a few more under my belt.

I also keep meaning to get better at pixel art. Ho hum.

KWEL!

Interesting concept.

Did I just... die? http://puu.sh/A9FUx/e6e587bf7e.png

I was not expecting this

Perhaps you could have made the player wake up in a hospital, or something, instead of ending the game? I'm not invested enough in the story to do everything over again...

@sophie I think that's a really good idea. Thanks for even giving it one play through!

This really mixes two incompatible genres! I'm impressed by the story being written in so little time :)

Hey @Hanra!

Your game was interesting to say the least. I feel like combining CYOA with any other genre in a good way is generally quite hard. You however managed to do it quite well, because you did it in a way where what I do in the other genre actually has an effect on the adventure. I wish you would have played with the concept a bit more, like for example using different items for the match-3 game. For example a speech bubble which would stand for conversation actions, a fist for violence, etc. Something like that.

Anyway, I feel like you did a good job. The graphics and sound effect were cool, but I really thought some ambient music or relevant sound effects (like a knock on the door) would have spiced up the experience. Maybe that's something you could consider adding in your next game or maybe even a post-LD version!

I wasn't quite in the mood for a story, so I let my girlfriend play it in order to get some feel for it. I had to stop her after her second playthrough so I would be able to write this comment. :P I am for sure gonna send her the link, because she really wants to have another go.
She said the story was quite good, and really liked the possibility for different endings. (She really wants to get a satisfying, "good", ending). However, she felt there were some passages with too much text and too little options, for example the diary of the professor.

Overall, a really nice game which is quite enjoyable for those who love a good story. :)

Don't really like to read a lot of text (TL;DR team). I focused on the 3-match game... and somehow I managed to have a good ending!
Clever concept anyway, and well done executed.

Good job :)

@Apace sound effects + ambient music on different scenes is a great idea!

With regards to making the "candy" line up with the type of action being performed, I agree.

Initially I tried to make red anger/violence, blue analytical, green "go-with-the-flow" and yellow money but found it forced me to take narrative paths that didn't feel right in some cases and in others two or more actions I wanted to take fell under the remit of the same item.

I do want to give that another go at some point because the match 3 mechanic means that it's harder over time to keep matching the same colour and this players may be forced to balance their use of various options. The categories you suggest may make more sense.

As for the diary, yeah it's long. I hope your girlfriend finds an ending she's satisfied by. It makes me happy to know someone found something I wrote so engaging!

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to give such detailed feedback.

@cowa, glad the match 3 appealed at least.

I wonder how many points you can get before the story accidentally ends :smiley:

Such an interesting use of a Match-3 mechanic! And whoa, you've got some nice writing skills. :) A creative take on text-adventures or interactive fiction? Sign me in.

Damn, I got stabbed up!

Interesting take. Very well written!

Wow, I really love this idea! It's amazing how well the two genres work together - it's a little strange to play a match-three game with breaks between each match, but I'm still surprised by how well you pulled it off. I have to congratulate you on coming up with an engaging and detailed story to explore, too, especially with all the branching paths... It takes a lot of work!

I really hope you'll find time to develop/refine this idea in the future: it's too unique to pass up. It'd be fantastic if there were accompanying music/sound effects, like other people have said, or even timed events (make a certain number of matches within a limit to succeed at running from an attacker, or something). You could even combine it with RPG elements like hit points and collectible items, although it all depends on how complex you'd want to make it.

All in all, great work!

I've never seen anything like it, good job!

Very well written, and the back and forth between the games worked very well. This made me happy - good work!

That's pretty clever! I enjoy how my mistakes in the match-3 can prevent me from taking certain story paths. Very nice!

I was captured and stabbed to death by - presumably - cultists.

Very nice compo entry, both in concept and execution.

FYI wouldn't run in Firefox, but ran fine in chrome.

Thanks for the bug report @mrnyarlathotep , I can't seem to reproduce it on windows or linux versions of firefox at the mo, will tweak settings and see if I can reproduce later.

_Very_ interesting story you've written, here! The candy crush gameplay is pretty meh, I guess- but it's more than made up for by the story.
Nice work!

Thanks everyone for giving my game a go :)

Now comes the reflecting and unpicking of what these stars truly mean!