Message to the End by edenic666
Message to the End is a short visual novel about a postman who changes lives with his letters! (A content warning for a bit suicidal implications)

Anyways.. first Ludum Dare ever @_@ very proud of myself for making the deadline!! I was so busy this weekend I didn't think I'd actually have time to.
I wish I could've added sound, I just really didn't have to time to do it, but that's ok! Definitely will try to do that for the next one I participate in. I also definitely wanna work in a team next time, that was way too much for just me to do auughh.. But I am still very proud of all that I did!
Also my first real project in renpy so I'm actually really proud of that too! And of course it's always nice to have a finished product.
I also uploaded the game to my itch.io if you want more preview images or to play my other silly projects! https://fallengarden.itch.io
Thank you to anyone who takes a look at this and spends their time playing my game! I really enjoyed making it <3
Ratings
| Overall | 773th | 3.405⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 924th | 3.045⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 657th | 3.262⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 532th | 3.957⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 237th | 4.208⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 956th | 2.382⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 485th | 3.646⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 22🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
When she looked at the letter and where it was addressed to I literally got chills :) Such a sick way to start a VN. Keep it up!!

anyway looks good! :)
It's not a genre of VN that I usually read, so the amount of interesting food for thought that this VN provided me came as a (very welcome) surprise. Maybe it's because, with the introduction of Hermes, the game communicated early on that my brain should get ready to suspend its disbelief. Whatever the reason, it made it feel like most of the many unanswered questions I had were deliberately left that way as to not distract from the overall message of the VN (rather than being a consequence of the game jam's time limit - which I'm sure was part of the equation here). It made me want to speculate about the answers rather than question the narrative, which is rather unusual for me.
For example, I was wondering why the postman doesn't have a name when their companion, Hermes, does. One obvious reason might be that finding a name would've taken too much time (in which case I can recommend behindthename.org for inspriation - that's what I usually use), but after the game answered another question of mine about whether the postman is actually human (my interpretation of "My whole life i've just been making people so sad." is that they aren't), it kind of made sense to refer to them by what they do rather than by a name.
Some questions that I haven't found a clear answer to are:
- I'm assuming that most if not all letters are created by humans since they seem to involve interpersonal relationships. But then why does the postman treat the letters as something personal to themself?
- Why would there need to be a specific entity for postman's job? (Ig people have created deities for specific purposes like this in the past - take Hermes for instance - so that might be enough of an explanation.)
I do also have some constructive criticism:
- I really enjoyed the idea of having lined paper for the textboxes! However, it bugged me that the second line of text didn't line up with the second line of the paper ^^;;
- A pet peeve of mine: please, don't write ellipses (...) with only two periods. I do think that there are situations and settings in which they make sense, but this is not one of them imho. Since the textbox is framed as a letter head, and the letters of this story are considered life-changing, I find it unlikely that they would contain time-saving abbreviations like these. If the game was about text messages or forum posts, I wouldn't mind them, but in this kind of situation they feel... maybe not unprofessional, but definitely messy.
- When the postman speaks to Space, they make a valid argument in asking whether the sadness that their letters may bring is desirable, to which Space only replies that the postman did save the Lost Girl so it doesn't matter. But that was just a coincidence, so postman's argument still stands. It makes me think that Space was gaslighting the postman with that answer, which... I don't think that's what I should've taken away from that conversation(?) It also made the overall message of the VN a little less clear. (I'm assuming the message is either "Life is beautiful - that doesn't mean it's always easy, though." or "Trying times ask for caring friends." or both - I hope I'm not too far off the mark here.)
@luxiffre Thank you for all the feedback especially, it genuinely does mean a lot to me!
I also wish I could've lined up the paper a bit better >.> but that's definitely a work on this in the future thing... And yeah! That final conversation was very... tough for me to write, mostly just because I'm not a writer hehe. But yeah, I had an idea of how I wanted it to go but couldn't pinpoint the exact words I wanted and looking back it does seem very gaslighty >.>
And actually fun fact about the postman's name! I was initially planning on giving them one, however once I got to the end with the thank you note I thought that it might be i don't know.. better if they just didn't have one? Yeah they're definitely not human (who knows what they are because I surely don't) so I figured to them a name wouldn't matter TOO too much as long as they can be referred to as something.
Honestly I didn't think much of it at the time but this is surely a character/concept I'd love to expand on! Definitely give backstory to the lost girl and her letter and maybe on other letters the postman delivered- and our postman's beginnings!
Once again, thank you everyone for the feedback and sweet sweet words, you're all the best!! And you're all very much inspiring me to continue making games hehe