itch.io

thank you for the kind words - and yes, the talent cutoff for hololive is very high now! i applied around the time they were recruiting for advent + justice… and the people who  were picked have incredible qualifications under their belts. 

i don't believe corpo vtuber life wouldve made me happy in the long run, so looking back, i made the right choice to turn to gamedev instead. 

thank you for the kind words, i appreciate it! it makes me happy to hear that my character writing's improved over the years... i put a lot of effort into that while making ckofntac. glad you found the presentation and foley effective too...

I'm glad that I never really tried (before???) to become a known artist online. An art style really is so recognisable. I've worried about this genre of topic a lot -- the way people treat you when they know you're 'an artist' is unfortunate, somehow. Other people in these comments will put it better. Even now, I sometimes see people coveting wishing they 'had an artist', and my gut reaction is not joy at being wanted but wariness over the unsubtle 'desire to have'.
yeah... i think some people have weird relationships with creators online (esp in fandom/fandom-adjacent communities) where they only see you as a content machine for their fav character/ship/etc. and nothing else. from a distance, i've seen this entitled behavior towards to artists/writers/devs i love, and... it sours my stomach. i don't think modern forms of marketing yourself to survive (eg. engaging with your fans directly) help either. we live in hell LOL

once again thank you for taking the time to play my game! \o/ i'm happy you gave it a chance.

disquieting, grotesque, and thoughtful. 3,000 words that captures the humiliation ritual of being unemployed in this modern job market, having your capabilities and self whittled down until nothing's left but a sycophantic piece of furniture.

thank you so much!! thats exactly the feeling i wanted to give with this game... classic NDS/GBA pixelly goodness. i hope you enjoy the full game too!

also thank you for the kind words on mo.'s design! 

thank you so much! im glad my game could resonate with you and make you feel less alone.

thank you for playing!

thank you so much for the kind words! i'm glad you liked my presentation and art for the game.

Sunny's behaviour and dialogue is bizarre and disturbing and provocative, the paradoxical "the straighties can go elsewhere for their yaois" truly killed me and will be hooked in my brain for days, maybe weeks, or months. And this is the thing that gets me about seeing characters like this, and living alongside people like this: they are addictive to think about, because they are so confusing and repulsive and pitiful and all these other complicated things. Their ambivalence is maddening and captivating. This is an interiority and a humanity that Anita lacks; textually, one she doesn't allow herself, but also one that the writing seems hesitant to give to her. It doesn't surprise me to see a victim spend all her time inside the head of the perpetrator. In the same way, this work does as well.

i'm glad sunny could fascinate you in this way. what's interesting about this work is that... i've gotten split reactions from people on which of ckofntac's two girls were their favorite. some people found that sunny was the more compelling and thoughtful character, and some found that it was anita. i love that you mentioned that anita doesn't allow herself that interiority and humanity that sunny gets. i did write her as someone who was uncomfortable with showing off the human sides of herself (for fear of punishment), though i do wish i could've expanded more of her on her own aside from the little fragments we get in her phonecalls and the ending. (i feel the same about sunny too, actually... if i had more than 6 weeks to make all of this i would've gone and addressed those issues XC )

once again, thanks for reading!

thank you for the kind words, i appreciate it! i'm glad my game could leave an impact on you and encourage discussion between you and your friend... this game came out because of similar experiences i had with an older ex-friend lol

I felt this profound shameful embarrassment at the fact that all the Tumblr core medias Sunny talked about were things I like or love but also I love a lot of art that lets me access parts of myself they otherwise wouldn’t had they not been transgressive or upsetting in some way, as well as a lot that’s transgressive in ways I just think are fun. In my mind art that inspires or excites me and art that incites personal or societal reflection and sorta ying and yang, at least that’s how I’m coping with approximately 33% of  my taste in media being depicted as the Wojak 

i think its important for people to engage with all sorts of stories: both the comforting and the discomforting, the serious, the fun, etc. in my own case i love plenty of "tumblr-core" works... namely undertale (which inspired me to go down the path of a gamedev), and deltarune (which could end up as one of my favorite games of all time. toby is a genius.) the problem with sunny is that she doesn't want to move outside of her pg media comfort zone, so she stays in a state of arrested adolescence despite being in her early thirties.

also to answer your questions

• no additional meaning to C•ko•fn•ta•C! it's just a stylized form of sychophantasy. i was inspired by a nippon-ichi game called hotaru no nikki: the firefly diary, where the title is stylized as htoL#NiQ.
• i want to!! it's on my to-watch list... i love works about the nihilism of the modern internet. in turn i'll recommend you barbatus's ROTTEN: gorehound's retrospective which touches upon similar themes of the desensitization of RL violence and death online (though it focuses more on the shock sites era of the early internet lol)
• totally coincidental! the UI of my game (from sunny's POV) was inspired by the layouts of PC-98 games like Diver's and Sotsugyo Ryoko, but with a hand-drawn twist. the sunny name was also a coincidence: i just wanted to pick a cutesy, twee name for her.

once again, thank you for the kind words!

thank you for playing! im glad my game could leave an impact on you...

thank you for the kind words, i appreciate it! i'm glad my visual novel could provide you with catharsis on this behavior... it was cathartic for me to write as someone who went through similar. 

thank you for playing! i’m glad my work could resonate with you and i will indeed continue to create…

thank you for the kind words on my game, i appreciate it!

But it's even more interesting as a person who's started reading more and has slowly been realizing "yeah just because something makes me uncomfortable doesn't mean it's necessarily bad" ( Especially thinking about Harlan Ellison in particular. I do not like that man!) but that doesn't mean there aren't conversations to be had and that his works are bad! 

yup yup yup, absolutely. i mention this every time harlan ellison is brought up but him being a piece of shit in real life doesn't exclude xenogenesis from being an important backbone to ckofntac's existence. that collection of testimonials is important in the discussion of bad fan/creator relations, and how they haven't changed that much in 40 years. 

i was a sunny in highschool as well, and i'm not proud of my behavior now. but i think a big part of graduating from that mindset was... exposing myself to works that explored uncomfortable themes on my own terms (and not necessarily in "acceptable" ways. ursula le guin's the left hand of darkness and octavia butler's near of kin come to mind — but also pulp genres like splatterpunk.) i hope that more people can approach these types of fiction/themes from a place of curiosity (a "why?", "what's the goal of this work?" angle) versus shoving it (and by extension, their creators) away in performative disgust.

thank you for playing! im glad my game could leave an impact on you

thank you for the kind words, and i’m glad ckofntac could speak to you (and that you liked the layout… i had a lot of fun with that)

Media is weird. Censorship is weird. As much as it is easy to say, just let people write what they want. It's a double-edged sword in the grand scheme of things. Which conversations people desperately want clear-cut, all the more messy. Which I wholeheartedly enjoy since as mentioned in your aftermath from Muir, "critique requires a conversation". But it's hard to do that, especially online. Hm.

yeah, absolutely. i think one of my biggest issues with sunny-style critique/engagement in online spaces is that… its not really critique - or at least, good-faith critique. social media is a terrible place for these types of discussions bc so many platforms encourage ragebait and mass-harassment of creators (esp marginalized creators) for clicks and social capital. and on the creator end, they’re just expected to take the bad-faith criticism as part of the job while forcing themselves to foster parasocial relationships to pay the bills. it sucks…

thank you for playing! it was not easy for me to make, but im glad it could make you think…

a muggy massachusetts summer permeates this vn. the sweat, the stink, the oppressive heat making robin ruminate over her many, many losses. (also the descriptions of skin sticking to leather car seats... god i experienced that so many times.) 

i resonated with robin's anger and isolation, but i think the thing that got me the most about her was her anhedonic thoughts on baseball towards the end of the story. i guess i have similar feelings towards most organized sport lol (the pointlessness of it all. how players can earn millions of dollars for hitting/throwing/catching a ball over and over, how your life in this career ends at 30. how we all participate in this mass ritual anyways.) 

also the vertical baseball card format is genius. love to see renpy games play with the format for the UI. great job

great use of tension here.
.

.

.

.

.

.

.

watching mammillaria slowly involve herself more and more with daizy until they're practically inseparable. i think it's awesome how her influence makes itself known early in the story with the CTC indicators... and how we see her thoughts invade daizy's mind well before she makes her physical appearance in the story. 

love the twofold toxic yuri approach too. it goes without saying that mammillaria's relationship with daisy is... skin-crawling. as other commenters have said, she's meeting daizy's needs as someone on the schizo-spectrum — but in the most violating way possible. i also wonder if daizy's mom was one of the worshipers of mammillaria, given daizy's final childhood memory in the story... also good choice of flower for mammillaria. nipple cactus. breastfeeding. never escaping the influence of your own mother.

and then there's daizy's relationship with anisia where... if you don't interrogate it too deeply, it seems like a loving and cute relationship. but there are those little moments where i had to step back and go "okay, that was strange" — like anisia fattening daizy up or any of their sex scenes together that really toed the line between "uncomfortable, bad sex" and "straight up rape." and then, of course, the epilogue, where we do see the events of the main story from anisia's POV — and we get the confirmation of her involvement in bringing daizy to mammillaria. and that shooes away any plausable deniability of her innocence in the main story. 

also i love the gradual melting of the backgrounds in the game as things get worse for daizy. lovely visual touch. adds to the dread as mammillaria takes over her life. 

great game overall! thanks for making it!!

thank you for playing!!

thank you for the kind words. i'm glad my vn could leave an impact on you. i'll try and implement an auto-forward feature in the future, though i'll probably release it after judging for the toxic yuri vn jam is done. 

these girls are messed up... loved reading through each of their povs in each section of the game. 

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

ga-yeong's snarky, cynical detachment from the world she lives in — and the uncomfortable contradiction between what she says and how she behaves towards han-byeol and jenny. the scene where ga-yeong pins down jenny after eun-mi's murder and accuses her of behavior ga-yeong herself shows towards han-byeol left me cold. 

han-byeol... oh han-byeol. her pov made me so sad. the angel factory descriptions were visceral, and her seeing herself as a child bought from the factory, and needing to prove to her family and everyone else around her that she's not going to turn bad... and interpreting her parents' abuse as signs of love. even if she did kill eun-mi by accident, i feel terrible for her. she's eight. she didn't know. i pray she can find another friend like eun-mi who loves her for her, not for the idealized version that she has to put on around everyone else. 

and then jenny... jenny makes me sad for a different set of reasons. forcing yourself into the ideal valedictorian model for years and years until one day, you just snap from all of the familial pressure and spiral into a mindless routine of alcohol, addictive mmos, and niche booru browsing. i do find it interesting too that you contrast her otaku interests with her genuine concern for han-byeol's wellbeing versus ga-yeong being the exact opposite of that lol (loudly saying that jenny is disgusting while she grooms han-byeol) 

one last thing: you really capture how ga-yeong and jenny are unwilling to examine their own slices of bigotry with the one-off comments they make about gay people, trans people, black people, etc. that they meet in their lives. it adds to them being products of the conservative catholic environment they grew up in.

alas, i'm working on another game right now... :'> but im glad my team's pre-existing work could make you feel strongly about this! it's never too late to pick up renpy and start

thank you for playing! glad my game could speak to you

Thank you for playing my game! I'm glad it could leave an impact on you...
Your observations were very interesting to read. In particular, your comments on Sunny's view of Anita, and the nature of her love. 

I can only hope that at some point after the ending, Anita can reignite her passion for her artistic work again, making the kind of work she really wants to make.

thank you, kyou! that's very kind of you to say

also yes... let's destroy sunny together 

i’m afraid not… the web build is likely the last build i’ll make of this game.

thanks for playing! \o/

thank you! it’s an ending for TRUE tv lovers

thank you so much!!! apologies for the super late reply!! 

late to the reply party but thank you!!!

thank you for playing! glad my game could resonate with you!!

thank you for playing my game! i'm glad it could make you think...

thank you for playing my game! i'm glad both sunny and anita could leave an impact on you in different ways and make you think...

will do! thanks for enjoying my poisonous meal! 🫡

i like the comic-inspired presentation for this game (especially when it uses panels as mini-cgs.) the character designs are really cute, and i found the non-linear structure of the game interesting (if a little confusing at first.) 

.

.

.

.

.

the title drop in-story was a massive twist of the knife. you could sense throughout that zoey and cherry want to get closer to each other, but because of their lack of communication and their own hangups about each other, whatever relationship they would've had with each other fizzled and burned out, which feels true to life. 

a lot of other commenters have said this, but you capture the "grass is greener on the other side" mentality well, especially when you contrast cherry's perception of zoey to her actual lived experiences. everyone seems to be doing so much better than you until you actually walk up and talk to them. good stuff. thanks for making this!

thank you so much! yes, all of the sprites and most of the cgs/ui were hand-drawn. glad you had a good time with my postmortem.

yeah! it's brief but i always loved the stylization of that title. glad you enjoyed the postmortem.

thank you oscar!! i'd love to create a reading list for this game a little later... there's more where that came from

thank you!!!

thank you so much!! \o/ and what a funny coincidence omg

tender and sickening, all at once. beautiful prose and dialogue, where what isn't said screams loudest of all. the stark reds and whites of the art add to that intensity. will forever think about scarlet's observation of the two bathrooms in her school, or blanche being told she's too sensitive by her coworkers, or the split-second observation scarlet has of a mop of blonde hair rising from her bed. little reminders of the systemic failures that led to blanche's and scarlet's lonely, exhausted existences.

.

.

.

.

.

the way this vn presents rumination, and complex intrusive thoughts is fantastic, too. i genuinely felt ill during the final scene from scarlet's pov — her desire to comfort and support her mother as an equal, mixed with the nauseating realization that this wasn't what she wanted, that she was violated, even if it was gentle.

the final sequence, where blanche's pov is shown was also powerful in the short time we see it. watching everything get ripped under her feet in a split-second, and her own intrusive thoughts, her own violating experiences made the earlier scenes between her and scarlet even more painful. 

i'm going to chew on this one a lot. thank you for making this.