Was pleasantly suprised to see a visual novel submission! The gameplay itself is nice and smooth though there isn't really much in terms of dialouge options and interactiveness. The art looks nice but it could be even better if facial expressions changed more often to make it more immersive. Really liked the cutscene in the end and the message behind it, though at times I struggled to see the connection with the theme. Overall really liked it myslef hope to see more in the future!

Whoa! Story driven game! NICE!


I was so immersed in the game, and I was so haooy to see a happy slice-of-life-like visual novel, and then the ending hit and I'm like


WHAT HAVE YOU DONE I'M CRYING :<<<<

10/10 (Although I don't see the connection to the theme)

Visual novel is interesting choice! Good story driven game.

Surprising to see a visual novel here
The story telling was great !

Aww, the story was heartwarming as hell and got me back in the Christmas mood for a bit! Thank you for the experience.
As for the AI art, yeah yeah, we aren't supposed to evaluate that here I guess, but I do agree that it enhances the overall experience, deepens immersion and supports the writing, so I don't mind it one bit.

Oh yeah, a visual novel entry, cool! Props to you for doing that, unexpected but nice! The story itself was solid! The art turned out pretty well, but I'll admit I'm always extremely skeptical about the use of AI art. I'm also not entirely sure how it relates to the theme, aside from the very brief mention of a harvest...but I had a good time, thanks for submitting this!

Well done, I got goosebumps at the end with the music and the images. Very well directed, congrats!

@kenguin @truechips @zacharypinkham

Hi! Thanks for your feedback!

Sometimes we have to take tough decisions when the time for development is so limited.

To be honest, when the theme was announced we outright decided not to make anything related to farming simulator or grim reaper. Somehow we knew that there will be enough of entries like this :)

At first, we wanted to make point-n-click story driven game. Point-n-click would be responsible for the theme conformity, while the story will enhance the experience.

But in the process we learned the hard way, that either we are making finished story or functioning point-n-click gameplay; there's simply not enough time to do, test and debug both.

That's how our novel lost the gameplay part related to "Harvest", though you can still see some hints to the theme in the text itself. In the greenhouse scene, for example.

Unfortunately, of course, but that's the nature of gamejams.

Anyway, we are happy that we were able to create a proper finished story.

Thanks for playing!

I love playing visual novels when they get submitted. There was a lot of dialogue in this game, which gave the characters much more depth than I'm used to from LD submissions; the twist at the end hit a lot harder given how well you come to know the characters. The AI art looked pretty good, but I would rather you had opted out of the graphics category, as it doesn't seem fair to put it against games with human-produced art.

It's rare to see a story-driven game, especially in such a time restrictive game jam- very refreshing! The dialogue is adorable and I loved the atmosphere! Great work!

You know, as an illustrator, it is pretty scary to see how quickly Ai could make beautiful art, but I can also see this opening up the the industry for new aspiring game-devs, which I'm happy about! ^~^

You don't see many graphical novels this jam, so this is a nice change. Great story and writing! And I welcome our new AI overlords. It's scary how good loking art AI is able to generate. However, more facial expressions would make the characters feel more engaging.
And, and I have this issue with almost all visual novels - I am a pretty fast reader, so the text appearing felt kind of slow, I would prefer to have it a little bit faster. This way, I revealed the whole dialogs right away. But that's no biggie. Great job here!

@boxedmeatrevolution @pazzi @dzejpi Thank you for your kind words and feedback.

It is our first attempt at creating a complete and rounded up story, of course, upon re-reading it for dozen times it is obvious where we could've improve the writing or storytelling, but gamejam is gamejam.

Regarding the AI art. We are openly stating that we have used AI image generation and not trying to fool anyone. Personally, we see stable diffusion as a tool in the hands of an artist, not the replacement of an artist himself.

And we have been working tirelessly every day for the last three months, spent more than a thousand hours to "git gud" with this tool. You can check our telegram channel with the results of our work to see what I'm talking about: https://t.me/s/alpha2049

So in our eyes it wouldn't be fair to opt out from the art category and discredit all the hard work and practice we did to achieve this level of quality.

I was not able to play yet, since I got this message: "Failed to read the 'serviceWorker' property from 'Navigator': Service worker is disabled because the context is sandboxed and lacks the 'allow-same-origin' flag."

@jaj Was is on ldjam or itch.io? In which browser, OS? I may suggest trying another browser, trying it on itch.io, downloading game as standalone program or trying this way:

https://files.jam.host/embed/$315015/10724/index.html

It's a direct link to uploaded web version from ldjam, you can press right-click on this page, inspect and get that URL from iframe element.

That way it wouldn't run in iframe so error may go away.

@t90 I'll try those. It was in chrome directly in the ludum dare page that I got the error.

Good job on bringing Tchaikovsky in your team!

I never "played"? any of the anime type games of which there are so many on steam etc. I kinda thought there would be some decisions to make in the game? Like "X took the katana out of the box and showed it to Y. Give Katana to Y? "Yes" or "No". I guess maybe a visual novel is different from those types of games? Definitely interesting to experience and nice to see some variety in the Ludum Dare submissions.

Although I have to agree with some of the other commenters that I would have liked to have seen an opt out of the graphics category if you have used AI generators. At least you clearly mentioned it in the description, but I don't think it's fair to compete against human artists. I don't mind anyone using AI generators and you have certainly shown a great usecase for them, but in my opinion, it shouldn't be rated.

This was a nice change. Great writing and beautiful artwork!

I don't really have anything to say that hasn't already been said, but I do want to voice it again, it's awesome you/y'all made a visual novel in three days. The art is beautiful, although I'm not sure how I feel about AI art still lol. I like the choice of music, but let's be honest, it's Tchaikovsky, how could I not XD

Very touching! I love story narratives, end the ending, oh god... That plucked the strings of my heart. Keep it coming.

Great game!

I am surprised how much you were able to write in only a couple of days. The dialogue was well rounded and well executed.

It was lacking in gameplay for my taste. More options or more branching would improve it for me.

Good job on finishing a story driven game on time!

Interesting story! I like the art that you got out of the ai, what kind of post processing did you do?

@khaotom

Thanks for kind words!

Typical pipeline for background looks like this:

1. modify prompt and run txt2img until I get something close to thing I had in mind (usually 4 or 12 images per attempt)
2. when I'm mostly fine with result, adjust lighting and style
3. run for 50-100 images (time for tea or snack!)
4. select 2-3 best looking and manually fix them, adjusting stuff here and there, like paint over some illogical stuff, add crate
5. img2img/inpaint img2img on it with same query until it looks good
6. SD upscale 2x or 4x, select best one
7. downscale back


For "ruined" background I took result from step 5, took in into img2img with really high noise values (up to 0.75) and manually draw over them. A lot.


For portraits pipeline looked mostly same:

1. txt2img, select best pic
2. fix, inpaint, add details
3. upscale to 8k resolution using some method (sd upscale if it looks good, then gfgan or how it called)
4. cut background and downscale back (saves time on cutting background as it takes like 1-2 minutes using magic wand)


Overall, it took around ~4000 generated images to get 8 backgrounds and 5 portaits.

Interesting to see a visual novel submission. Beautifully presented. Well done.

I'm not very much of a visual novel person, so take my review with a grain of salt lol

I appreciate all the effort you guys put into the story, it's very detailed for a 3 day game and the presentation is pretty polished. The AI art turned out pretty well, the final product looks good. I don't know if the game should be rated for art, since it's not really the same playing field as making it all from scratch. I feel like there's a little bit of a disconnect of the styles of the different characters and backgrounds sometimes, but I'm not sure if there's a good way to tune that with the AI. For the story, I would have liked to see some more background on who the characters are, where they live, or that sort of information. There's a lot of small talk and characters bringing up events that happened in the past, but I think trying to follow "less is more" and "show don't tell" a little more would have helped me appreciate the characters more. I think the parallel between the characters in the story and the life lost in the Ukrainian conflict is an interesting idea, even if I don't agree with the way you framed the war. I think it is a little jarring to have it be slice of life stuff and then have such a serious topic come though. There were some moments where I can see the parallel coming through a bit more in the story, but I think it could have been developed a bit more. Anyway, thanks for the game!

Very surprised to see a visual novel entry. I enjoyed it though. I'm surprised at how well the art came out, i've never been able to get great results from stable diffusion so i'd love to know how you guys did it. The story was nice and pulled at my heart strings a bit. The only thing i'd complain about is that it doesn't really fit the theme, but honestly given how awful of a theme harvest was I completely understand your decision to just make the game you wanted to instead. Well done!

I absolutely love visual novels, great idea!

A very cute visual novel with a good twist at the end! Whilst not necessarily on-theme, the Christmas theming was really nice, and the overall experience was solid! Great work!

The story is very cool, I got goosebumps at the end, too bad it doesn't have any relation to the theme.

Girls are SO cute!

Impressive mixing the art to a full game ! Ai generation is harder then most people think. Story “telling” super well executed.

Felt very slice of life ish, until the twist at the end. O.o
Not sure what to think.

Ah, another visual novel for LD 52. As an experienced visual novel creator who also made one for this jam, there needs to be more polish, but I still commend your efforts; and I really like the twist you did at the end.

Nice visual novel. Its a lot of work and a lot to read. good work :D

Wow. Interesting ending. Very dramatic. I wish there was a little bit of interactive stuff, but the story was cool enough and the use of Stable Diffusion was cool too, making the rooms change at the end really gives a sense of drama. Great submission!

Wow, gave me chills. I don't really like Tchaikovsky much, but the nutcracker suited this piece to a T. Perfectly matched the songs to the scenes--especially entering the greenhouse, and the perfect timing for that sobering crescendo of an ending. A great accomplishment, thank you for sharing this story with us!!!

only gripe is for ai art, its extremely bland. but not bad at all.

The game overall is a bit lacking in interactivity, just reading and clicking can get a bit boring, but nice job!