Hey everyone! Thanks for playing this early version of FLESH/CIRCUIT. This post is just to announce some small tweaks I've done to the jam version, and talk about what subsequent changes will be. 

GUI is now better(?) - The initial GUI was really just me screwing around for the very first time in the RenJS GUI builder. I've figured out how to work it a bit better now and have moved the parts around so it looks better and you can see more of the art which was more covered up by the text box before. adjusting the GUI in RenJS's GUI Builder is actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it, so I'd like to tweak it more and make it more fully featured and graphically consistent with the rest of the game as we go.

Doing this has also made me aware of some slight mistakes in some of the art pieces (It happens, I literally made them all on the last day of the jam) and also ones I'm just kind of dissatisfied with how they read, so I'll also maybe tweak/replace those in the future.

Pacing & Text Sound - These are some cool RenJS features I wanted to add to the first version but didn't have time to implement. Pacing means that the text will slow down slightly on certain types of punctuation. I really like this effect and think it more closely matches the feel of natural speech/thought. Text sound is also, like the clicky in The Silver Case or the bebeish in Animal Crossing, a way of giving the text a bit more weight and attention. I'm just using one tone for now, but this can be changed in the settings to differ between characters, though I feel like this one may have too much internal monologue for separate "voices" to make sense. 

Screenshots! - Apparently this helps a lot with visibility and share-ability of the game. Plus it's an easy way to highlight some of the more ~intriguing~ lines and locales, and give people an idea of what they're in for before they load the game. Do you like the ones i have up now? Too spoilery?

Looking ahead - As I say in the Readme, which you can get through the Download button, this project is basically turning a story I've had in my head forever, and didn't want to work on until I could get absolutely perfect etc, into a live and active project that I can build on over time. To turn something like that into a script in a new engine over the course of a week means a lot had to be cut down, especially in terms of character development and motivation. So as I go back and add more scenes, that will especially be the kind of stuff I prioritize.

(Also a fair bit of the stuff that is kind of implied or fade-to-black here was a bit more explicit at the conceptual stage, but naturally I wanted to be able to take my time writing it to get it right... anyways depending on how that goes there may also be an 18+ warning or option on the game eventually! Just something to be aware of.)

Fotocopiadora, who GENEROUSLY let me use the Ultima 64 album for most of the soundtrack after I told her I'd been listening to it the entire time I was writing and programming has also expressed some interest in letting me use some future original compositions as the game goes along, so I'm excited for that too! I don't feel too fussy about grabbing some other songs for particular scenes, but if this becomes a longer-term project I'd like everything to be fully above-board.

I am also looking for a solution for packaging the game so people can play it as a desktop app, but there's a few issues with this. The packagers I have tried so far do not set the window as a pixel-perfect 800 x 600 window the way I can set the iframe online, so the dithering looks blurry and grey (boo). Also they tend to make huge files that are difficult for me to upload with my slow internet connection. So this may be a while down the road BUT I want to eventually be able to offer it because I think an hour is kind of pushing the maximum amount of time I can expect people to play something in their browser, and I know a lot of people (including myself) definitely prefer fully downloading and playing VNs as an application.

Also hmm idk!! Because I love making zines I've also floated the idea of making supplemental material for the characters and world in zine form? That might be cool. So that may also be a future update or add-on.

Thanks again for playing or even just checking this project out! I've had a blast learning how to make it so far.