I just finished the first update to Postcards, with a LOT of polish, typo fixes, some slight graphical improvements, and a few relatively minor bug fixes.

One of the biggest features of this update is that dense walls of text were massaged into a more readable state, and many passages were pulled apart to increase both interactivity and readability. This was the biggest point of critical feedback on the game, so if it deterred you before, come give it a second look!

If you haven't heard of Postcards before... it is a sweet, meditative interactive fiction game where you take a backpack tour of Europe and write postcards to your co-game developer and Ludum Dare buddy, Paul (so named because "Paul" rhymes with "pen pal", in case you were wondering).

The game had a lot of newness, being my first Twine game and first Compo, but I was very pleased with it, and other people were too so I kept working on it. Now I'm even more pleased with it, and I hope you will be too.

Here's a little comparison of the original and the newly polished first letter that you receive very early in the game:

As you can see, a big difference. Letters are the most text-heavy and least interactive passages, so I tried to help readability and to make them stick out a bit more from the rest of the game.

If you want to be immersed in a backpack trip of Europe for a little while (~25 minutes), please consider playing the new and updated game. Then, if you want, compare it to the original, which you can still download from the Itch page and play by clicking on the "index" file. A few more ratings of the original game - which conveyed the story fine, just in a less polished manner - would be awesome, but as this is only Update 1 of 4 (check out the roadmap on the Itch page), I would greatly appreciate comments over on Itch.io to help the game long term as Ludum Dare winds down.

Play: https://otergen.itch.io/postcards

Rate: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/postcards

Whew! This has been a really great Ludum Dare :smile: Sending you all positive vibes in the final stretch of rating games!