‘Memories in Calories’ is a short puzzle adventure where an amnesiac girl wakes up in a laboratory, regaining her memories through foods and uncovering the truth.
Each food item contains memories, so she must consume many calories even if she dislikes it.
Of course, you might enjoy this, but if she gets too fat too quickly, you’ll find yourself in a tricky situation before reaching the ending!
I made many unexpected elements into the plot and game mechanics to align with the theme of ‘unexpected outcomes.’
This includes not only the memories each food holds but also how your actions will influence the ending and the plot twists.
At the same time, I’m triying to maintain a balance so that players don’t have to do too many tedious tasks to reach the endings.
I think he’s just putting the work in progress behind patreon. Although, it probably would be better if it was public, just so you get more feedback when it comes to bug fixes.
But if it is the actual submission or if you plan to do that for the full release too, I don’t think it qualifies because of the paywall.
Assuming that the final Gain Jam submission is free, it should qualify. But if I’m being perfectly honest, when you’re making something for a game jam and you’re asking people to help play test it so that you can make adjustments, it doesn’t feel right that you would also ask people to pay for the privilege of helping you.
Of course, I’ll release the final submission version for free.
I just wanted to share my progress and concept in advance, and I don’t think it’s wrong to give my supporters early access to a limited beta version. After all, they’ve been supporting my development for a while, so I felt they deserved that kind of perk.
Game devs that offer early access for their patrons usually maintain separate free and paid versions throughout development, ensuring that patrons always have access to more content than non-patrons. The game jam format interferes with that, since you’re forced to make the final submission available for free. You can still plan to add paid content post-jam, but prior to the submission deadline, it’s to your benefit to get feedback from as many players as possible.
Perhaps some of your supporters, who already know who you are, will be happy to get the chance to help you. But for others who are just finding the game through this topic, there is little to be gained from paying for early access to something that will be both free and improved in a few days. The finished version of the game will presumably have more content and fewer bugs, so unless the preview images are so enticing that you simply cannot wait to play the game, you can get a better experience by just waiting for the free version. If anything, the people who wait for the free version are going to benefit from any bug reports from the patrons, which feels a bit backwards to me.
I don’t know exactly what you have planned for this game. Maybe you’re planning to leave it as-is once the jam is over. But if you’re planning to add anything at all after the Gain Jam, then I think you should save the paywall for that phase, rather than limiting your own chances of finding bugs right now.
Thank you for your advice. I thought this approach wouldn’t be controversial since some other developers who participated in Gain Jam did the same as me.
While there might be minor updates after submission, this game will remain free. I don’t think it’s that unusual to have a Patreon for early access to content that will eventually be released for free.
Anyway, I’ll leave things as they are for now, but I’ll consider these opinions the next time I participate in Gain Jam. Thanks for all of your interests!
Less disapproval (on my end anyway) and more that this just seems like it’s hurting the dev time for the jam for you will have less people testing it for bugs and the like. I don’t think this is scummy, or in bad taste, or anything like that. There seems to have been some confusion for others think this was the actual submission as opposed to what it actually was.
Looks interesting and I look forward to playing it when the jam ends. Good luck.
Our time as devs isn’t free, as time isn’t free. Empathizing with our supporters, without some perk, our dev time spent working on a game jam game directly detracts from 2 weeks of their generous patronage that would otherwise be spent on a project they’re sponsoring.
Patrons subscribing to participate in development incentives us to further make games financially, and the community gets a free game in a week. I saw new subscribers from my thread - and I’m sure you did too!
It’s a win-win, and nothing is controversial about it other than the entitlement of people unwilling to wait a week for a free game.
People are probably only reacting this way because there are so few jam games out right now.
I think that those who disagree with the practice in general are entitled to that opinion, but those talking about how games like this one and the one that you’ll be releasing aren’t eligible because they’re paywalled clearly just didn’t read the posts or the rules.
Though I’m personally of the mind that this kind of thing should be released for free initially, with following updates being exclusive to supporters (and ideally later released for everyone).
I think it not bad to have your Patreon play test the game first because they are still going to give bug reports and leave comments on have to make the game better, beside most of the games for the jam are posted like in the last two day anyway so that needs when the game is posted here it will be a better version of the game.
I really wanted to finish this game completely during the Gain Jam period, but unfortunately that was too much for me.
Still, I’ve uploaded a free version with 90% of the story and almost all features completed.
Due to the approaching deadline, I plan to upload detailed game screenshots and a teaser video gradually.
I hope you enjoy playing this game!
It’s a really fun game, to be totally honest. If you would make a full version, I would totally buy it. Different endings, character stages, dialogue, etc, are phenomenal. Even the Gain jam theme is made really good. However, I think making this gain jam project while using help from Patreon… I don’t know how to call it properly… Disrespectful to other devs who are doing these projects without any sponsors. So, yeah, the game is really good, but the Patreon in Gainjam thing is a questionable advertisement.
