This was very thought provoking. I liked going thru the different options :)

This was very sweet, and I actually went back to replay a second time, which I rarely do for Twine games. The use of the theme was very clever, and made me think a lot more about it than a lot of the more literal games.

My one disappointment was that the part about Venice was so much shorter than the other areas. I would have liked to see that expanded a bit, but it does fit the rest of it in a strange way.

Cool concept, it was interesting to try different options! I would have liked a little more visuals, but it’s clear that a huge amount of work was already put into the text.

Enjoyed reading and getting immersed in the story

This was SUCH a clever way to write a letter using Twine, I think that was my favorite part of the adventure was being able to compose a letter by clicking on the options where all the text was there but then became part of the letter permanently as I got to choose the next paragraph. That was so effective and really made me feel like I was writing a letter.

"I really like the mechanic of reading and clicking on the keywords. It makes the reading more immersive and keeps you engaged in the story. Good job!

Thanks for all the comments and kindness so far, it means a lot! Last time I tried to do the polite Ludum Dare thing of thanking people and responding to comments, but I've been super wiped out this time around.

@september-xyzx I wish I could have spent more time developing Venice. The way my workflow went, it ended up being one of the first things I made outline notes for, but the last thing I wrote (on Sunday afternoon). By then I'd had to slim down the scope quite a bit and was in the final crunch, so I agree completely and wish I could have written more on it (as fitting as the lack of writing may be).

@owc Yeah, I'd originally wanted separate backgrounds for each section of the story and a different image for each postcard, and spent some time sketching them Friday night. But I was more focused on the writing, so in the end I had settle on the one static background, and forgot to make the title card until ~10 minutes before the deadline. It's a good lesson in scoping, so that I can have time to do a bit of everything in the future rather than just focusing on one aspect.

@plepletier Thanks! I have to shout out Inkle, and in particular their game 80 Days for introducing me to that style, which I tried to add my own spin on with the mouseover text (though I'm not sure how much I liked the mouseover stuff in the end, too easy to happen accidentally).

Thanks again to everyone for the positive comments. I was pretty nervous, as I started learning Twine about a week prior to the jam, and was out of practice with writing. But I'm encouraged to keep learning (I want to pick up the more customizable version of Twine, Snowman, which means learning JS and CSS), and hope to go back and polish up the game after the jam ends.

My thoughts are provoked! I’m not much of a text-adventure person but this was a really pleasant, meditative experience. Your descriptions made me want to see these places for myself. Thanks for the read.

I chose not to rate this because i definitely am not the target audience. I will be honest and got to the first choice and was already exhausted from reading. Mind you, i am an avid reader and read multiple books so that wasn't the issue. I think the first initial hook for choices needs to be earlier if this is meant to be a sort of "choose your own adventure/visual novel" like game. Visual Novels can get away with lots of text because at any one moment there is at most 2 or 3 sentences on the screen, paced with visuals and music which this is lacking. I would love to try this again if that gets added in the future because Visual novels and stories are so great. Even better, I would probably read just the text version of the story by itself, but in it's current form I couldn't get to the end sadly.

@mahalis Thanks for the feedback! It's great to hear people like it who aren't normally into this kind of thing.

@penguindustin Thanks for that very insightful bit of feedback, even if you couldn't finish and rate it, a deep dive into some reasons why may be more valuable at this stage. I never intended this to be a VN style game, wanting only a few supporting images (after all Twine seems to have trouble with lots of images and audio, at least the default Harlowe version, whereas something like Ren'Py is made to do just that). I had been aiming for a series of more meditative/immersive passages with fewer choices, which culminate in choice heavy passages (the postcards) that steer the story, so it is interesting that this style didn't work for you. It may be a polish issue, as I had wanted to make the pacing/flow more consistent so the reader would never get hit in the face with a big block of noninteractive text (plus other aspects of proofing and polish), but ran out of time. I'll definitely keep your feedback in mind as I keep working on this.

This was very wholesome, I had a good time reading and the totally different interpretation of the theme with the letters is interesting!

An outstanding 'Choose your own adventure'! Honestly, while the mechanics are simple, the writing work and story development for just 48 hours seem fantastic! Great game!

I felt disconnected from the story from time to time because there was too much text in some slides. Either I couldn't remember what everything was about or I couldn't find the text you have to click easily. Even so, the concept is interesting and I like the story.

This was pretty sweet. I liked the ending, it was also a very interesting and interactive way to do a little story with some personality. I enjoyed the story. It was hard to pick up at first since I'm binging LD games and not necessarily prepping my mind to read, but I decided to bear through it and I'm glad I did.

Good entry!

Huge amount of text for a compo!

I would have liked some more options per text, but it felt pretty completed.

Good take on the theme.

First of all, as you asked for my opinion as a fellow Twine dev, I have to note that I used an older version of Twine, 1.4.2, and yours is clearly Twine 2. It has its perks, but I chose the older one after playing around with Twine 2 exactly because of the graphics. With Twine 2, you have to host your pictures and music somewhere in the internet, and it's not easy to actually implement them in the game. With Twine 1.4.2, it is very easy and pictures just have to be stored on your computer in the same folder as the game. As the game builds, it will incorporate the pictures. It didn't build in the music for me, however, but it might be because I wrote "calming.mp3" and the file was "Calming.mp3"; in any case, it was solved by including the music file in the ZIP archive.
So, as you can see, Twine 1.4.2 makes adding graphics&sound easier. However, you definitely had more ways to play with *text* itself in Twine 2.

About your game itself:
+ It made me think about my time in Netherlands several years ago :')

- I think it's better to break up long pages into smaller ones; don't show me a wall of text right away - show it in parts. Make me work for it and click on the words to get another paragraph. It makes it easier to digest the same mount of information and makes the game more interactive.

+ I liked writing the postcard, was tempted to choose the most formal lines XD But I decided to make it look normal so here is mine:

Hey Pal, glad you could be my pen friend during my backpack trip :)
Holland has been amazing.
I sent you a tulip. They said it'd reach you in 48 hours, hope it reached you and you liked it.
Maybe make a Jam Game about it?
Your Friend.

? I wonder if there is truly a limited space here and I shouldn't choose long options ?

Overall, a cute premise, and takes you to the tulip fields for a bit, which feels nice :)

Lovely story. I liked the letter-writing mechanic and hovering to reveal details. Nice job :)

@kanity Thanks so much for your feedback. I'll have to look into 1.4.2 more. I just did the basic thing of assuming the latest version must be the most feature complete, but if that version is better for graphics and sound, I might make the switch. I had been planning on swapping to the Snowman story format to give myself the most flexibility in presentation (the end goal being that I can make a Twine game that isn't immediately recognizable as such), but I'll check it out and maybe just use the older version instead. And as a side note, I had been considering asking you how you got your audio working because it seems pretty hard to get background music in Twine 2 Harlowe, so thanks for mentioning that part specifically :smile:

And thanks for the comments about the game, glad it could remind you of your trip. The initial postcard from Holland was a bit more lax about space (because I was still figuring out the mechanic) but the second postcard is more strict about longer options limiting future choices. The code ended up being quite rudimentary (a series of if statements), and in the future I might make it more sophisticated to only present an option if it has a choice path that adheres to the character limit. Sounds like a fun challenge honestly.

@kyle-farwell Thanks for the kind feedback :thumbsup:

And a big thank you to everyone who's played, rated, and commented so far. I was thrilled to see I passed 20 ratings today. I'll update the Itch page soon(tm) with my plans for future development!

Very engaging, well-written interactive fiction. I'll echo the thought that some images to set the mood/reflect the settings (even just different backdrops) would go a long way. Glad to hear you're developing it further.

Very nice narrative adventure! Don't see many of these and they always make a refreshing change of pace. It's lengthy enough, and very engaging. I love the descriptions.

Couple of minor things: there's a test note left in somewhere around Luxembourg, and when you compose the first postcard you get a message reading `(click-append: ?17,` at the bottom of the page. I understand perfectly if you didn't have time to fix those, and I hear you're going to be working on it some more, so I'm looking forward to seeing the improved version.

@F1Krazy Thanks for the feedback! I was worried when making it that people wouldn't like a game like this (I've read a comment or two to that effect in previous jams) so it's been great to see that people are actually OK with this sort of thing. And thanks for the notes on stuff I'd missed in my brief playtesting at the end of the compo period. I did manage to catch these when I sat down to start polishing the game yesterday, but it's still super helpful to have them pointed out. Hopefully you could keep moving past the click-append error, I know on my screen it just looked like it had bugged out and blocked progress, but I could scroll down and keep going rather than backing up and trying something else.

@oter Yeah, I was able to keep playing after that, it looked like just a display issue rather than anything game-breaking. Glad to hear you're already on top of it!