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Been there, currently doing that. It really sucks. So much grief. 

I didn't think it was cliche and saccharine, because it was honest, and I think that by being sincere you sort of go beyond worries about cliche and saccharine. I don't know. I'm glad you wrote & shared this. 

I am too old and not enough connected to contemporary TTRPG scene to care that much about "lore" as it is understood nowadays. Back in my days, your "lore" was a quicker way to mean, "your character's backstory", although reading your manifesto helped me see that this convenient shortcut was already a slippery slope. It's also explained why I felt a bit confused with the word popping up everywhere. Thank you for making this and sharing it.

Came here for the cute rodent cover picture and intriguing title, stayed for the outspoken and explicit permission to depict cultures that aren't my own. This is actually stupidly relevant to me because I live in the south of France, and it's absolutely impossible to write/create something set here without also depicting other southern European and northern African cultures... else you fall into a whitewashed, blander, uninteresting mess. Anyway, thank you for writing this. I appreciate it. 

Not only is the future possible, the future will happen whether we want it or not! Only by being truly in the now are we truly alive! Or something. I've been too depressed to think. 

The design of this page looks like what I imagine a stroke feels like. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I definitely feel about it.

Hi Wyvern! I saw your comment and got really moved about  it, and so it took me a while of letting it percolate before I could bring myself to watch the video (and then another while of fighting through YouTube age requirements thingies as the video has been marked age-inappropriate, but I still wanted to hear someone read my own words back at me!). 

I would be very curious to watch the whole stream if it's available somewhere, but I mostly want to thank you for reading my words and "playing" my "game" and letting me know about it. It means a lot to me. It really does. I am very grateful for your effort. 

And thank you for dedicating your time and energy to support trans rights and to show off marginalized creators in the TTRPG space! 

You're welcome! I love Narrat, it's such a fun little engine. Wishing you best of luck in your gamedev endeavours!

Yes, of course! Thank you for asking. I'm glad if my little zine helped, and I'm honored to be included in a library!

Very cute! And as someone who's dabbled in PICO-8 before, I'm very impressed at how good and detailed everything looks!

Super cute! A bit confusing and eventually Bumk  kept on asking for plants I did not have but overall an enjoyable experience.

Thank you! This means a lot. I think I have a lot to say about being "heartless" and aro, but if that's a word that makes sense to you as an identifier, that's fine too! 

I think you're allowed to be as mean and independent as you are; there will be people who are compatible with that who will find you and who will be interested in the kind of bonds you're looking for.

I've been doing well! I'm still living with the same goblin I made this game about, and I think we will continue in that fashion for the foreseeable future, which I am very happy about. I wish you lots of happiness, no matter what it looks like! 

Would love to read the privacy policy before I create an account! That's a legal requirement btw.

Thank you for playing and commenting <3

I don't know! I think it depends on how you define what a game is. 

This is lovely! I really liked the Snake one too! Thank you for organizing this and to everyone who shared their wonderful art!

This is great! Thank you for organizing this and to everyone who shared their wonderful art!

Thank you <3 You are beautiful too! 

Please keep on commenting (on my works or others'), it's always so encouraging to know my work touched people.

<3 Thank you! May you find your own protective monstrous form!

<3 Thank you for playing! May you find softness.

Very useful, thank you for creating it!

Thank you! I'm glad you think so!

Thank you so much! "There is no saving, there is only yourself and what you can do to exist within your reality (...) answering to yourself and your needs" yes, I really agree and relate to this. I'm glad my work could touch you!

Thank you!

Thank you so much! And thank YOU for playing and commenting. May you have a soft, soft new year.

Thank you! I am actually considering the series idea. I love those characters a lot, and I just really like writing silly & cute stories like this. 

I didn't know about neem oil! When I was living in the city, I actually went ahead and bought live ladybugs for my plants, which inspired this little game. The ladybugs didn't stay very long, so after buying and releasing a silly amount of them on my balcony I gave up and used a solution with black soap instead. I wish I had known about neem oil instead :D

I should know better than to do such generalizations (like, when people complain about "chemicals" in food, I want to tell them, "everything is chemical!!!"). I will keep it in mind for the future, thank you!

Thank you so much! (and for all your hard work in organizing this!)

Thank you so much! I'm so glad if it proves useful to you. 

You know, I have asigmatism, and I had no idea that's why I actually preferred the dark grey/light grey options. I literally sighed of relief when I opened the "lowcon" version of the guide because this combo is SO pleasing/restful to my eyes.

Thank you for your hard work! I will definitely refer to the guide in the future!

Thank you so much! I'm glad the work resonated for you. It IS very important for me to acknowledge both sides of that coin and so I'm very glad that I seem to have succeeded.

Oh thank you very much!

I am so sorry if "robe" isn't the correct word in English (which isn't my first language) and if I made it confusing. I will check it out and correct the zine, so thank you for pointing it out!

In this context, I meant "robe" as in "the colour of the liquid in the cup". So black tea has this rich, red-brown colour, while green tea might have a clearer, yellow-ish or green-ish colour. 

Yeah, and like... I care about you enough to want you to know what I think, even when it's less pleasant than usual!

Re: genuine and honest, I don't really see why you feel the need to be genuine and honest. Like, it's OK to change your mind on what's written in your work, you don't need to make sure everyone else who comes after the change is aware there was a change. It's not like if you had committed harm and that part of the repair work was to always tell people "I messed up in that way" or something. 

I assume you want to leave the jam version up, so... I think what I would do is add a note in the jam version, like "post-jam note: I realized later that I do not want to condone the use of genAI in my works, due to the environmental, ethical, and other concerns regarding its current state. I'm still leaving this bit here for archiving purposes, since this is the jam version, after all. In the current version of the game, this bit has been replaced with looking into Wikipedia instead." and then in the new version, you don't mention the previous genAI bit at all, and you just write your Wikipedia gameplay instead. 

Although I, personally, would probably archive the jam version and just put up the updated one instead, maybe with a name like "Inquiring Minds v1.1" so that people know it's not the jam version.

Thank you so much! I do strive for earnestness in everything I do/put up on itch, the silly and the vulnerable alike. I wish you many cups of tea!

Thank youuuu Beth for the long, long comment. Actually, I really enjoy your lot of text, your taking the time and energy to tell me about all this. It feels really good and rewarding as the author of the work, so please never worry about that, okay? Even if it was a critique, I trust you to not being mean. 

You've said so many kind things, thank you. I am so amused that I "got you" as you said, because I was really like "this is not a game, this isn't not game-y enough" the whole time to my partner. I clung to the format of d6-friendly roll tables for my life, even it was clearly holding me back... But I'm glad I did, because I feel like in the end the result looks cohesive and game-y enough, you can barely tell the places where I stopped and paced around the room while flailing wildly. 

And yeah, for me a lot of the work is based the idea that there's no "should". There's no "you should/should not feel this or that way" that can lead to lessening your suffering, because you need to be OK with where you are first, as in, you need to have that compassion and acceptance for yourself first. And that means being OK with "not being OK with not being OK" and such. So many layers of shame and self-judgement to gently peel and wash away. It's a lot of work. If my little piece can help anyone towards that, I would be very happy. 

It made me very happy to read that you planned on coming back to this when you were not feeling better yourself. I really hope it will help you then. Please do feel free to reach out to me directly as well.

I love that it inspired you to make your own spin on this! I highly encourage you to do so. Please show it to me when you're done, okay? I would be super excited to have a look at it. 

I love the idea of the worksheet too! It's what I meant to do with the Quick Fixes at the beginning, I wrote them almost last, like, "if someone is having A Really Acute Bad Time when they read this, they're not going to care about all my ramblings on safety, powerlessness, and why I hate CBT". And in the end they're not Quick at all, but hopefully they're Fixes anyway (not that I agree with the idea that anything needs "fixing" but sometimes you've been writing for three days and "quick fix" is the only phrase that comes to mind). So as I work on a fancy-formatted version that can even be printed into a zine (omg it's going to be so long as a zine, but I digress) I am definitely going to keep that in mind and try to create that alongside it. I will send it to you when I'm done! You can tell me what you think then, if you'd like.

It's true that our issues are very different, because I hate the idea that I owe anything to anyone, I find it more upsetting than anything else, and I struggle with being crushed under the expectations, like... even just thinking about "living ethically" or "in alignment with my values", what am I doing? I am not doing enough, I am not doing enough to help all those causes, the children starving as we speak, the burning forests, the oppressed people everywhere! So, as you can imagine, telling myself I am harming the world... will not help :p No, I have the opposite thing, where I find selfishness and possessiveness very empowering and self-affirming. This is my life, and I deserve to live it my way, that sort of things. The fact that my way implies "everyone's needs are being met" is sort of secondary :p

Thank you Avri for playing and commenting. I'm glad you saw truth and intentionaliy in it. And that it made you laugh! I told myself, "even if I can't help anyone with this, may it at least make them smile" as I was writing it.

You're welcome! I think you did great, it sounds like you were a bit pressed for time but this doesn't feel rushed at all. 

I do like the other layout but it feels more "historical" and less "cozy" (and everyone knows that memories aren't always true to life anyway...) so I'm glad you followed Beth's idea. 

Thank you so much for your comment <3 "If my childhood self ever saw this far into the future, she would have refused to grow up." Yeah. I think that for me, it's the opposite, but that's because my parents painted such an awful picture of what life could be that what we're having is much better, dumpster fire, climate change, genocide and all. Anyway. I was really moved by your comment, I really appreciate the time you took to share your feedback with me. It's so bittersweet how relatable this piece seems to be. It's what I was hoping for but it saddens me so much that we are all in so much pain.

You're welcome! I'm sorry that my comment ended up being mostly about that, it was just so jarring to me. Like, "no, don't use it, not even to mock it!". 

Frankly, at this time the results on the 9th page might be more accurate than the ones on the 1st... we sure are living through interesting times!

Congrats on making your fun little game within the circumstances as I know they were Not Fun, and thank you for showing so much grace in front of my immediate, skin-deep reaction re: genAI! 

I'm glad it helped, even if just a little. It makes me so happy and yet so sad how relatable so many people find this piece.

You're so welcome. From a big-bodied trans to another, you've got this <3

You're welcome! Thank you for playing and sharing. I'm glad the pathstones and the pacing worked, it's something I worked hard on!

Thank you for playing it and commenting!