Mythic Meetup

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The discontinued characters are:

-Xavier (X)

-Manon

-Gabriel

-Tink

-Nature

-Mai

-Ronnie

Since these characters played a large role in our Phantasia Jam project, we have decided to discontinue that project as well.

Third game on my Otome Jam 2022 entry play list was Mythic Meetup by Heartmoor Studios.

TL:DR

It might feel like a tribute to another popular indie otome game at first, but it has a lot more to offer. Featuring some very likable, yet believably flawed characters, cute visuals and nice representation.

Story/Writing

Do you also go around clicking random chatroom invite links are end up in the weirdest places in the middle of the night? No? Just me?

Well, that's what happens to the main character - she (pronouns selectable) - a regular, ordinary (well, maybe not super-ordinary) human ends up in a chatroom filled with mythical creatures. Shenanigans and heart-breaking backstories occur as a result.

Each of the chat participants have a distinct writing style, which definitely makes the game come alive.

The main character is mainly a self-insert, with some little backstory pieces scattered throughout the story and a bit of a snarky personality in the non-choice parts of the story. And choices there are a galore - thankfully the developers have provided handy guides on the right ones to pick to end up in the hearts of the eligible mythics.

There are quite a few choices to make and the developers have provided a nifty guide on the right ones to pick for a happy ending with

It's very enjoyable to see representations on the ace/demi spectrum, including flirty ones.

I really loved the fact that the characters were friends in real life as well and appeared together in video calls and in each other's rooms. It definitely gave

A thing that initially threw me off was the chapters being called days. My initial thought was that the plot of the game is happening over the course of several days, but they're more of a series of snippets of what's happening over the course of a longer period of time. I feel like calling them chapters or weeks would have been more friendly.

Another small issue that I noticed is that while you can select your pronouns, some of the scenes default to other characters referring to the main character as they/them instead, but it might be intentional.

Art

The art is definitely cute. Each of the characters have a different background for their room and they match the characters very well.

As the resident memologist, I enjoyed the meme pictures that were scattered through the chat.

I especially liked the programming of the videochat sprites - there are little wobbly effects happening with their arms, which make them seem more alike. Ditto for mirroring effects.

Similarly a great shoutout to the CG programming - I know that under jam limits we work with a very limited set of VN assets and the ending CGs were utilized to the fullest with their panning and other effects.

Music and Voice Acting

There is an original soundtrack and it matches both the scenes and characters very well, without being overpowering and distracting. Everything loops seamlessly, there are relevant sound effects scattered through the game. I also liked the music room which was added in.

All of the videochats are fully voiced and it has good sound mixing. My favorite was Vera Tan's rendition of BestieBB, but honestly - they're all good.

A nice feature that's very, very easy to miss - if you click on the side character's profile and click on the little speaker icon if it's there - it's gonna play a line from them from a few random lines. It was very cute and helped to put a voice behind some of the chat avatars.

GUI/Usability

There is a cute custom GUI and I generally liked using it, especially all of the little bits and bobs that you could click to go to different screens and such. It really made the game feel very immersive.

After some fine-tuning I found the right text speed for me for the autoplay and just watched the chat go on. A little thing that I felt was missing with the autoplay system was a hard pause at the end of the chapter. Once or twice I found myself scrambling to reload saves because the last message of the chapter was quite long and the day change happened before I got to read it.

I'm usually an avid history reader and there were some overflow issues there.

The font size is pretty good if playing on large-screen devices and the font is quite readable for the chat. Increasing the font-size would have been nice for playing on devices with smaller screens (like the Steam Deck) though. Reading white text on yellow for the videochats did get a bit straining on my eyes, but I work with code all day, so they're pretty sensitive come evening when I have time to play games.

Playthrough notes - here be slight spoilers

I'm not interested in getting too repetitive, so let me quickly get a couple things out of the way that I've already said in a million other places:

1. The reception to BP has been quite the unexpected ride, and shockingly is still ongoing

2. I'm thrilled to see that BP helped people find their creativity in the same was that similar other media helped me back then

Yes, technically the anniversary of BP was on 06/30, but I was too busy downloading a bucket of otojam titles. It was a really impressive turn out this year -- nice job to everyone who participated, old or new devs alike. For the new devs, I hope you learned a lot from your experience and I know you'll only improve further. I certainly know BP taught me a lot.

Let's get into some of that, actually.

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LESSONS I LEARNED FROM DEVELOPING BP AND THE YEAR AFTER

1. Imperfection is sort of sick.

BP is by far NOT a perfect product. There's small bugs still lingering, a few typos, some odd characterizations, rushed plot beats, all of that. But by letting myself be at peace with that and ship it, I allowed myself the brain space to focus on other projects and not dwell eternally on hunting down issues and rewriting bogs of text. I still vividly remember the first few times I saw people streaming BP -- ohhhh how I hated BP back then. All I saw in the streams was every mistake I had let slip through. But as I kept watching more and more, I saw what people actually cared about -- the heart of the story and the sexiness of my BOYS!! So, I chilled out. It made me realize that it's okay to release something a bit imperfect, because I know my heart will still be heard.

2. Cringe is cool.

Don't be ashamed of what you are passionate about. Cringe culture is dead. If I had let cringe stop me over the past year, there's no way I would have released BP at all -- the premise of the game alone would have rocketed me to another dimension. I think most of the coolest games out there take something a chunk of people might call "cringe" and make it fucken rad as hell by injecting their whole ass self into the project and making it scream "this is me. this is me." Think like undertale, or pony island, or dream daddy, or monster prom. They're unique and engaging and I'm happy they exist.

3. Unfortunately, you do not live on Mars.

There's a lot of reasons this is unfortunate. Mars sunsets look really fucken eerie and cool, for example. And I'm 99.9% sure that if you dig down far enough under the surface, you'll probably find strange alien skeletons. But, more importantly, Mars has ~25 hours in a day -- and we only have 24. You have to sleep. You need to eat. If you have a day job, you need to make sure you are doing it to keep paying your bills. At one point, I got so lost in the sauce that I nearly checked myself into the ER from not eating/sleeping enough and having some spooky side effects. I had to force myself to stick to a regimen for eating/sleeping, and while it did slow down some parts of the xyx route development (and current Adonia development), I am in a way better spot than I would have been had I not made these deliberate choices. Manage your time, take care of your life, and don't lose sight of yourself.

4. You are not the reviews.

If this is especially your first time in the review rodeo where people are rating something you put your heart into, I salute you. I did not realize how hard it would be to see reviews when I started out. Like with the imperfections, I had strong depressive moments when someone left a less-than-favorable review. It was almost like, at first, that they were reviewing ME, because of how important this project was to me. But I learned to let it go and try to glean the small useful knowledge points from them and then turn to the happy reviews as chasers. People are free to like what they like and vice versa -- it doesn't mean your game is bad, or that you are incompetent, it's just not for them. Reviewers also, frankly, don't know what went on during development and why things ended up the way they did. You cannot humanly please everyone, and chasing that down is a recipe for disaster. Your game will reach the people it's meant to, and that's what matters.

4.5 ...This includes the positive reviews.

"But wait! I thought you said the positive reviews helped you?" They did. They still do. But it's like taking an ibuprofen after a headache, or getting high after a nasty day -- a temporary solution. If you live in the reviews and feedback, you'll find yourself trying to keep those exact comments coming and slip into a "do what the players want only" mindset. Don't do that. Keep yourself at the front -- this is your story. I've already accepted, for example, that a chunk of BP players will not like Adonia, and that's okay. It's another personal story, and I'm making it for me first. If I lose sight of that, I lose myself. Game dev is supposed to be fun, not a mimic of me trying to please my family.

5. Fame is only sometimes cool.

I've talked about this at length in private, but not really publicly. I mean, I've mentioned that the popularity of BP was overwhelming and unexpected, but not much about what it's like shifting from a fan in fan spaces to a known creator in fan spaces. I don't think I can make any genuine fan-to-fan connections in spaces where BP is known, for example -- admirers see you through rose-colored glasses, and when they crack, you crack with it. Because I was so involved in otome communities before all this, it sort of feels like a larger loss for me than it might for others. This will come across as humble bragging to some people ("oh noooo my game got so popular that I'm too well known and too many people respect meeeeee") but it really has been one of the hardest things for me to face over the last year. I miss the days where I was just a nobody online doing whacky shit for fun with only a few eyes on me, I genuinely do. But I've come to terms with what my online life is now, and for those of you about to go through something similar, godspeed and good luck. It'll be okay. I did eventually find ways to navigate in spaces where people didn't look at me like that, and I'm much happier now.

6. Diversity matters.

If I have one regret for BP, it's that I played everything too safe. The designs of the og 3 are very typical otoge -- for better or for worse. They were designed to be instantly likeable by most otoge players. Otoge has a large trend of having mostly light-skinned love interests, and BP is part of that bucket. I'm happy Xyx is in the game as a LI, but I could have done more. People want to see people who look like them in games, and I heard that from so many comments/reviews and took it to heart. Adonia is part of that process. Another thing I played too safe was the lack of explicitly LGBT content in the game -- sure, i have 2 he/theys and everyone is technically bisexual (or a lesbian), but it's never really played out or evidenced in game. Like, Quest never says, "my ex-boyfriend said..." or anything along those lines. This isn't to say every game has to be very gay, but it is to say that I actively worked around that to try to please all fronts. I was afraid of pushback from some hardcore otoge fans that I've seen go after other devs for daring to include those things more openly in their games -- take the DUFE review bombing, for example. But, like I said before, you can't please everyone and chasing that down to make a clean, completely inoffensive game is maddening and a waste of time. I'm doing my best to ignore those fears -- mad props to everyone else succeeding far better than me. You are an inspiration.

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Here's Leif, Araminta's mentor as well as a Master Tea Wizard!

He loves drinking saloop tea and enjoys the slow, simple country life.