Small Town by Emiliabea

About
You're a hardworking employee and student who forgot to go Christmas shopping, problem is: it's Christmas eve and you have * nothing *. Pick a place to buy the perfect present for your significant other, they deserve the best!
Gameplay: Short(1-3 Minutes), Interactive Narrative
Controls
Press space to continue story, click to interact
Credit
Programming + Art: Emiliabeaexe, Instagram: Emiliabhernandez
Music: Owen Smith
Known Issues
Try not to spam click or things might not be activated in time
Use only the spacebar to continue dialogue, don't click the screen pls
Finally
I had a great time in my first ludum dare. I had to cut a bunch out, as I'm sure most people did, but I will do better next time at limiting my scope!
| Youtube | https://emiliabh.itch.io/small-town |
| Youtube | https://emiliabh.itch.io/small-town |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/small-town-1 |
Ratings
| Overall | 463th | 3.547⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 637th | 3.164⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 774th | 2.905⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 645th | 3.203⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 172th | 4.156⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 306th | 3.492⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 232th | 3.44⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 173th | 3.867⭐ | 66🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 79🗳️ | 60🗨️ |
I'm gonna have to see the other gift options later but I think I saw enough to love this game!
Realy liked the art , and yah totes extra points for cats

Dont worry Moto Moto i like you too buddy
2. I want to pick all the cats :crying_cat_face:
3. Great work on this game! I really liked it! :smiley_cat:
RIP Tabitha.
Cool idea otherwise!
I'd love to see this polished a bit with a fuller story. Could well be a nice interactive novel peeps would like.
Good job !
It seemed to me, though, that no matter what option I picked, he loved the gift anyways? (Like, I bought him a dress???) Which was a shame, and felt like it put the memory sequences to waste. I would have loved to see a flow that required the reader to pay attention and remember, something like phone wishlist -> memories -> choose what type of store -> pick an item correctly based on what was said in the memory.
There was also a clear difficulty curve when it came to the bookstore- other users have said that some feedback regarding what we can click would help a lot (and I agree). If the above system was implemented, I think the flow would be nice in progressive stages, i.e. 3 consecutive years, so that way users experience all the paths, (and the bookstore could potentially be last, being the most difficult since all items look the same and none are labeled in the ending inventory)
I also encountered a bug in the game store where I got all the items, but there was a slot unfilled and it wouldn't proceed? It progressed when I reclicked on one of the items though.
Also the space bar was a bit awkward, considering the entirety of the game uses the mouse, and the dialogue continues sentence by sentence just fine with clicking. I'd look into a way to make the entire experience click-based.
You said you overscoped, so if anything I said was already on your mind, sorry for rehashing! I think you did an amazing job in spite of that! You did a lot of full art on top of the coding in such a short period of time, it's very impressive, and the result came out sweet!
Moto moto was a good one! :smile:
At points, it was difficult to tell what to click to progress the story. I've had difficulties during the mobile phone screen, for example, to make the game progress to the selection of which store to visit. I thought the point-and-click portion with the cat store was pretty cool, but I didn't share the same opinion with the game and book store. The game store felt a bit like a guessing game, as we tried to click nearly every single element in the game, as there were no visual language to tell us what can and cannot be clicked. This was worse with the book store, where every book's silhouette looks exactly the same, and their colors don't stand out from the rest. I felt like I was pixel-hunting on the latter screen.
From our short playthrough below, we couldn't see which items would result in a different ending, so we ended up assuming the player will always get a good ending. Given the low-stakes of the story, that felt...unfulfilling.
https://youtu.be/No9PjQTpi0s
This game is about finding the perfect present for a significant other. Through our play-through, we didn't find and ending that went poorly. To be fair, we did not play the game exhaustively, but I do wonder whether failing is even possible.
I think I would have liked to see more development of the player character's relationship and some more discussion of each potential gift.
A smaller number of more fleshed-out gift options might have made a more compelling experience.
Finally, while the art is good, I think the game would have benefited from more clearly indicating what parts of the screen were clickable a any time.
Overall, for a first game jam game, this is still excellent. It has a number of implemented features, a fair bit of art, and a complete experience.