Dress Up Mini Game Released

As promised I've released just the dress up segment from Let's Go Thrifting. I figured that sometimes people would just wanna dress up with no restrictions rather than be limited to what you manage to thrift. As a bonus I've included the micro skirts that you usually couldn't buy in the game. Saya might not buy it for herself but playing dress up with them is fine!

Anyway, enjoy! If you decide to post your outfit anywhere on social media you can tag me @lonestation! (Though, I only have Instagram at the moment lol)

Tips For Let's Go Thrifting!

 Here are more detailed tips on how to score better in this game.

CRITERIA:

There are 3 categories: Glam, Cute, and Grunge. If it's not immediately obvious what category the skirt is in, it's likely to be of two categories. They will score a little less than something that's purely one category. For example, an emo style skirt is Cute and Grunge. You can increase your score in either category if you buy it, but not as high of a score than let's say a purely Cute or Grunge skirt. If you can't find anything else, buying it is a good way to increase your score.

PRICE:

The cheapest price you can get is $5 and the most expensive $15. You only have $30, so for the most bang for your buck you oughta aim for items below $10. Generally, getting three items would get you a decent score. If an item is around 10 bucks but is otherwise perfect in other aspects, you can still buy it and get a good score. Due to the implementation of RNG it's unlikely you will get six items costing $5 each (making it a perfect haul), but wouldn't that be great?!

LENGTH:

Skirts that are too short will get you a negative score regardless of price and size. On the other hand, skirts that are longer will actually net you bonus points and can boost your score. Why? Because genuinely, longer denim skirts are hard to find. I guess it's because micro skirts were all the rage back in the day so you'll see what's left of those days while thrifting. I guess you're supposed to layer them with something but for this game Saya just wants a skirt she can wear as is so we're going with that requirement.

SIZE:

Obviously skirts that are too small will also get you a negative score regardless of price and length. Skirts that are slightly loose are still acceptable but will get you a slightly lower score than one in the perfect size. In real life, it's better to buy something that's slightly bigger than too small so I went with this principle for the game. 

Hopefully this helped and my scoring criteria is fair and reasonable. Well, sometimes you can get unlucky but just try again! There's no penalty. Randomness is the spice of life, as they say.

Let's Go Thrifting! Commentary

This game is a total departure from my previous games and I acknowledge it. Funnily enough, I made this game to take a break from making another game. LOL. Anyway, I got the idea when thrifting myself. Sometimes, you walk into a thrift store without a specific goal and just see what you find but when you're looking for something in particular it's best to have stricter requirements to avoid overspending and buying something you don't really need. This principle helped gamify the thrifting process. I made the goal denim skirts since I got inspired by so many nice designs and wanted to implement them somewhere. Of course, whether you get a good haul is entirely dependent on RNGesus but that's just like real life. Sometimes you see a nice item but it's too small, too expensive, too short, etc, etc... If you possess sewing skills you can modify it but that's not the case in this game.
Saya, the character you're helping, is Ray(the main character in my previous game Chain Letter)'s friend. When I made Chain Letter I actually had no idea how she looked like (which is why I just made her profile picture a flower lol) but since then I've come up with her look so might as well let her make an appearance. I think it's a good idea to link the games together instead of making a whole new unrelated character.
I've also thought about making a sequel but with jeans and making Anaya the character you're helping next. Saya's more of a denim skirt girl and Anaya's more of a jeans girl lol. But I'm tired of designing and drawing skirts for a month straight so that'll be something for the future. There's a lot of items that can be thrifted so this format has a lot of potential!
I'm also considering putting up the dress-up segment as a standalone game but I think I'll do that once I reach a certain amount of downloads as a milestone celebration. For now, enjoy!

Games Now Playable On MacOs?!

In a bid to help my games get more exposure, I've decided to upload MacOs builds of my games. However, I don't own a Mac and have no way of properly playtesting it, unless I do a virtual PC setup or something, which is more trouble than it's worth. A bit irresponsible of me to release something I haven't fully playtested, but it's not like I'm a AAA company selling it for $$$. Encounter any problems? Just comment, email, or DM me! I will try my best to fix it! But fingers crossed it's all gravy, since the games should function the same way. I mean... In the end you just use your mouse and keyboard. That can't go wrong, right?
I'm thinking of rolling out Mac versions of the Flash projector files but the export process is different so I'm only testing with one game (Classroom Blitz) for now. Well, they're on Newgrounds in their original flash format which I believe can be played with any system so check it out if you don't wanna use exe!
I have the option to export for Linux too but I know about it even less. I don't know anybody that uses Linux! Do people play games on it? Whoops! I'm just exposing myself for not having human contact for years!

Ko-Fi Update

My sister said that I could upload my games on Google Play/App Store and put some ads for some revenue. While that sounded reasonable I just abhor ads and can't find myself integrating it in any part of my games. I mean, yeah, it's a good suggestion and many are doing it but it just doesn't feel right. Well, it would also be hypocritical since I use adblockers. LOL.
Anyway, I decided to open a Ko-fi and let people donate if they wanna support me instead of subjecting themselves to potentially repulsive ads. People can also donate through itch.io if they prefer to. Of course, all my games will be always be free to play and all of this is optional. No paywalls for anything, I can promise you that!

Agency Blues 1 & 2: Commentary

I graduated high school and so did the flash games with its final arc, "Prom". Well, that was what I thought, but the game-making itch creeped in so I decided to do a lil spin-off with new and recurring characters. At that time I was starting college, so I decided to add in characters based on weirdoes I encountered. SPOILERS ALERT!

Agency Blues 1:

1. Telly was originally based on a friend I had at the time but we're not friends anymore so she's more of an original character now. Her real identity is most likely a popular fashion magazine/website writer.
2. Dick is based on CJ, obviously. Despite being a pervert his potential for comedy is great! It's also a good excuse to use him as a punching bag. Just for the lolz though!
3. The Paint Killer is based on some dude I encountered in a club (not the partying kind, the extracurricular kind). He's one of those socially inept nice guy incel types and he got on my bad side so I looked him up on social media and found a trove of emo literature. I had a good laugh reading his tryhard edgy fiction. He's been writing since middle school and he STILL hasn't improved to this day. We're talking over a decade of writing here! Anyway, I nicknamed him Emo Kid, or EK for short. He loved writing stories about badass Gary Stus killing hoards of people or monsters with various swords and guns in gory explicit detail, and they all had some tragic manpain story of having their girlfriend or wife or crush dying some way or another. Of course, they had new love interests who eased their manpain (unfortunately their personalities are as exciting as tissue paper). The most notable thing he wrote is "katana-shaped blade". LOL. In the game he's a raven/crow head wearing dude who does gory killings because he feels personally vindicated from other people having relationships. Just typical incel stuff! He's short IRL (yet another reason he acts this way) so he has a hard time finding suits that fit perfectly without tailoring so I made him wear an ill-sized suit in the game too. I would love to showcase his stories somewhere but I haven't figured out the logistics yet.

Agency Blues 2:
1. Yes, I just had to have Ashrav be some debonair 007 parody. It just fits! Though rather than him being a suave spy he's more of an ingenue and attracts all sorts of dangerous women. Like Dick/CJ his character had potential for comedy so I kept him around.
2. Anderson/Ed Gainz. Honestly, I'm chuffed I came up with that name. A bodybuilder combined with Ed Gein? I don't know how I come up with this stuff but I'm glad I did! Anyway, the Ed Gainz character is inspired by him being bitter about girls rejecting him. As I mentioned in his dedicated post he's always saying stuff like "make her regret" and whatnot. In the game it's through murder but luckily in real life it just entails him getting swole. Flawed logic but whatever mains his gains I guess. It's fun bringing back a low IQ musclehead like Anderson but I had to get rid of him just as quick because he's a strictly no-dialogue character and will have no interesting development. LOL!

Maybe these inside jokes fall flat outside of my circle but I also think it's a waste not to share 'em. I mean, I spent time on these games you know. Yeah, the art is half-assed but still! I made them and I'm semi proud of them!

Chain Letter Postmortem

Finally, I've made a game outside of Flash. It's my first time using a proper game engine so I had to learn a lot of new things to use it properly. I'm a code noob and only know simple stuff, so the event system in GDevelop was perfect for me. I'm thankful it exists! Hooray!
I think the game turned out OK, but there were definitely things I should've improved in retrospect.

Premise:
I'm not sure if chain letters still get passed around by email. They're probably posted on social media nowadays-- if they still even get posted. Hopefully people still understand the concept of chain letters, because then the premise wouldn't make that much sense. 
Honestly, the idea of pitting a whole bunch of chain letter monsters against each other was the driving reason I made this game. LOL. I thought up of the other endings afterwards.

Graphics:
Honestly this was the part I spent the most time on. I'm also not an artist so making so many graphics was a huge undertaking since I was used to simple low-effort doodling in Flash. Since standard games these days were wide screen and such I wasn't sure what screen dimensions to use so I went with 1920x1080, but now that I think about it I didn't need to restrict myself with that. Since it's a PC game technically any dimension would do, so long it fit the game. Making it too big would make the game file big as well and the more compact the game, the better. I was just too used to not thinking about the size of image files due to the vector graphics in Flash that retained its definition no matter what size you put it. Too bad there aren't any game engines that utilize a vector system like Flash! (But it's probably not done for a reason) I suppose this is also why many people utilize pixel art since it looks good no matter the screen size and it's lightweight ...I don't have experience with pixel art though. Oh well, I'll just stick to hand-drawn stuff.

Coding:
As I already said, I'm no good at coding. While GDevelop's event system was easy to use there were definitely better ways to implement a game element. Don't tell anyone but if you leave the desk at certain points while talking to Adrian, the previous chat bubbles disappear until you click again to continue. If I used a different method I think I could've prevented that, but it works regardless so I just went with it. I thought it would be better to finish the game rather than trying too hard to perfect it, since it's not something people would do in usual gameplay anyway. That's the mentality I'm going with - try my best to complete a good project and not try too hard for perfection. Well... that sounds kinda sloppy and unprofessional, but I'm not getting paid for this and I want to move on to the next project!

Characters:
It was very easy to create Ray since I just based him loosely off myself. You can see Ray's friends in his FaceSpace page and I'm planning to make a game with all them included. It's still in very early development but it's definitely Halloween themed.
Most of the chain letter monsters are based off actual chain letters I found online. I didn't make them scary though - they're more cartoony and silly. I wouldn't know how to make them scary anyway, I'm not really a horror aficionado.
I'm happy with Satan's design. I didn't want to do a generic muscly demon or satyr, so I went with a feline design. Makes sense that a cat would rule over hell, doesn't it? He used to be a pet of God's but pushed off one too many cups and got banished to hell. Well, not that Satan minds; he enjoys the work. Reigning over souls is all too natural for him!

Publishing:
I don't know if tagging the game horror is accurate but I'm not sure what else would fit. It's more like Scooby-Doo's level of scary - the whole thing's more comedy than anything.
Itch.io is an obvious place to publish games, but I'm thinking of publishing it elsewhere too. But maybe after enough people download and test it so I can make sure it's good enough to publish it elsewhere.

Overall I'm just glad I finished a game. Woohoo! I hope people will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it!