Thank you so much for the comment. :,) This is by far the most "basically a literary journal submission" story I've put into a game, so I was really worried it wouldn't land. There are a lot of different micro-threads to pull at to explore Amias's character, rather than one solid throughline. If someone asked for a basic plot summary, I don't even really know what I would say. It's a style that's practiced pretty frequently in writing as a medium, but I don't know if I've ever seen a video game try it exactly like this. I really didn't want it to come off as a bunch of disjointed pieces of different narratives just being smashed together.
It makes me very happy that you seemed to have gotten what I was going for by telling the story this way, though. It's not just about Tulip, it's not just about returning home, and it's not even just about Amias's dad. It's about facing the past and dealing with the grief that comes with it.
I'm glad you liked Amias's attitude too. His temperament was really interesting to write, because he's simultaneously very emotionally intelligent and very emotionally constipated. (I think this is written almost verbatim somewhere in my planning document.) He knows he needs to seek some kind of deep revelation within himself, but he instinctively tries to guard against anything that might lead him towards that revelation too quickly. You can (hopefully) see why he would be this way given his parents' behaviors, too. Avery was written to completely contrast this; they're super open with their feelings, but they're not always the most sensitive or emotionally thoughtful, which pushes Amias to places (physically and emotionally) he would never go on his own. I don't know if he would have even gotten through one box in his mom's shed without Avery there, let alone go to the diner and think about the details of his dad's death.
I wish I could take credit for the custom tilesets, but those (save for the dream sequences) are actually all from TheJabberwockysMaw. I gave him direction for the types of tiles I needed and their color coding, (there's a very specific reason certain things are colored certain ways) and I shifted around a few tiles, but for the most part he just sent the entire sheets for me to work with. The dream sequences were honestly a nightmare to get right, though, because of how weird RPG Maker's texturing is. I used a mini texture pack meant mostly for materials in 3D games. Most of them lose clarity really severely at 48 x 48 pixels, and of course they don't natively follow RPGM's weird property of dividing certain tiles into thirds and only repeating the middle section of those tiles in some contexts. I honestly don't remember how I got all of those working... I think in a lot of cases, I just made sure to not put certain tiles in certain formations. All the objects like the desks and the bed are high-fidelity 3D models I manually applied textures to then exported renders of. I essentially learned the basics of Blender for the sake of this game, which is really funny to say about an RPG Maker game.
I agree that some of my own visuals are kind of lacking, especially in the CGs. For context, this game was submitted to the jam it was supposed to be a part of around 3 seconds before the deadline, and I still had to pull it because there was a hardlock smack dab in the middle of it. The character art style and the awkwardness that comes out of it in more detailed shots are really the result of my own panicking to get anything finished before a deadline. Some of them even have details traced entirely from my own reference sketches for the characters. The character designs were actually originally meant to be a vector style more focused on simple shapes (i.e. Amias's head would just be a sideways square with elongated diamond ears, Avery's head would have just been a circle with two teardrops for ears, etc.) to give them a more distinct visual style while keeping them simple. This sped up the workflow and looked a bit cleaner for larger images, but it looked awful to replicate it in the 48 x 48 walksprites.
Walksprites are also definitely kind of a sore spot for me... I always dread making the vertical walking animations especially. Something I really like about Jabberwocky's character animations in False Fruit are how they reflect everyone's personalities and roles in the story, and I'd really like to replicate that in my own work at some point. I think everyone in WHO ARE YOU? is just animated to at least kind of resemble walking with no extra flair.
Thank you again for playing and leaving such an in-depth comment!!! I hope it's not weird to write such a long reply. I really enjoy talking about my own writing with people and hearing how they interpret it, so I'm happy you posted your thoughts. :-)