To Make a Game

I get it. 2meirl4meirl and all that but this is a glorified blog post. Reading someone complain about procrastination and fantasize about nonexistent games just isn't interesting here. 100% Completion time: 21 minutes 3/10

[h3]Let me begin with a slight tangent.[/h3] [h3]Feel free to skip.[/h3] If you're a "let's sift through the mud to find the hidden gems" gamer like me, you may occasionally end up buying dirt cheap (either full price or discounted) games which show [i]some[/i] promise, telling yourself that at worst it'll just have been a minor financial setback and that the developer will appreciate even that minuscule financial bump. Hey, even your friends [i]might[/i] get inspired to check it out, though realistically your best shot at maybe influencing people is to post in relevant genre spaces elsewhere. There's a bit of an implicit "pity buy" in many of those cases, especially for rather small games (hell, I've bought even a few ones which don't meet the basic threshold for review consensus). But in this case it was a particularly explicit case of that, partially because of the description itself inspiring it, partially because I could relate to the feeling. It's probably not the most encouraging note to start on and that feeling might somewhat colour my impressions and desire to have a positive impression, but I feel this sort of confession is necessary if you care about reviews on a more meta reviewer-driven level (as opposed to just "was it fun?"). [h2]The review proper[/h2] It's a rather short visual novel, with only one tiny "minigame" section. Plenty of the choices just give you slightly different text, and as you can tell by the game's title, there's (seemingly, didn't clear all possible choices) only one "correct" ultimate route (some slight detours allowed, though without major consequences) to go down from an early point where it would seem you could fork a bit more. As for the story, a good chunk of it is "predictable" in the sense that it's basically the general path you've either experienced yourself or seen others experience in terms of procrastinating on creative projects paired with one of the usual personalities which accompany that. While the protagonist has some own interests displayed that do make them not completely non-descript, they're not exactly someone who'll be inspiring fanfiction. Oh, and if you read the game's store page or guessed from the description you will also get a good idea of what actions are expected from you, as the unseen interacting character, to end up with, well, [spoiler]this game[/spoiler]. The store page advertises alternate endings, but unfortunately these aren't particularly varied. Some very minor vague spoilers ahead: [spoiler]There's basically two fail states which you can get to in various ways, and depending on which one you get you get the respective failure sequence.[/spoiler] The ways you get to them are satisfying enough, even if you do wish there was a bit more to them. Though, again, there may be some hidden paths I just failed to go down. Best of luck to TheBluePenguin. I do think I was at least partially interested in the potential of what they may do.

Well, it's a very relatable story, to me at least, and it kinda helped me to see some of my shortcomings from a different viewpoint. I don't know if it's a great game, but at least it's a very good story, the french translation is on point too ;) I definitely recomend it to those who feel like they can't do anything, it helps. Whatever you are trying to do, don't give it up !

i love this game and showing it to my friends.

The game was actually quite nice, I wasn't expecting much out of a game so cheap, but it was well made. One issue often found in games of lower price is they focus so much on graphics that they lose their story. But this felt like talking to a real person and understanding that, yes sometimes it is hard to do something, but you can do it if you really want to. In conclusion, 'To Make A Game' was a nice comforting game to spend some time on.

他妈的世另我。。连用的视觉小说引擎都一样是Renpy。。。。。备忘录里写了很多自认精妙的点子但总因为难以取舍而停滞不前。。。这个游戏很巧妙的一点是它通过取“To Make a Game"这名儿将可能购买游戏的受众限制在了“对游戏开发感兴趣动过心思或者正在making a game” 的人里，而这群人很大概率就会和作者“空有想法，未曾实践”的经历起共鸣。我常在想，以文字记录的想法本身是否具有价值，但最后发现这是有点自我欺骗的成分在的。或许从构思一个想法到用文字或语言将这个想法完全地描述下来对于创作者本身而言的价值无与伦比，但如果没有观忠，听众，读者，除了创作者自己，又有谁能证明你的这些想法存在呢...?虽然这个游戏确如所言之”精简“，读完全部线路也只需要不到半小时，但的的确确有效地激励了这部分经常拖延或是无力将想法转换为某种媒介的创作者们。。骂作者懒的时候我感觉就是在骂自己。。。btw，瞪眼jump scare好评。。