today we are gathered here to celebrate the release of yet another new game (wow!) and you may notice it's pretty different from the rest of my games, namely the fact that almost everything besides the UI is a photo, like my hand (yep I know, I can't be a hand model)

I'll get this out of the way now: 'tis a one-time thing, so for better or worse, don't expect another game like this from me any time soon. why this is the case: making all the assets photos was a strategic move to save on time, but it turns out… I hate cleaning photos lol
but it is very crunchy and certainly an aesthetic so that's pretty cool, right…??

so this game has basically been on the back burner for almost a year now- the concept was an offshoot of potential update ideas for Catching a Date (the update will be released when it is done and that is whenever i have the motivation to, unfortunately), namely the idea of having to fend off spam calls while gameplay goes on. Initial photos (of my hand holding a phone) were taken in August of last year and the photos were used in a player interface demo on a whim some time before Anomaly Eater released, with a video of it posted at some point to Bluesky, so believe me when I say it's been a long and arduous journey… but we're here now with the majority of the game having been completed within the last 2 weeks.

perhaps the most difficult problem to solve was the highlighting, because we can't read the player's mind (not with our current technology at least) and with duplicate numbers (i was the one who wanted them) it becomes even harder to select the correct path without running through every single valid combination. honestly we probably spent at least a day, probably 2 days on that and i would not recommend doing such a thing unless you are very good at problems that involve optimally finding paths (we were not). without getting too technical, we had to rely on both gaming the system to prevent too many edge cases as well as context for choosing the correct duplicate. it works now as far as I know so I'd like to think everything's fine.

so some fun facts: 
- all of the ending pictures are random pictures I took at some point in the past, not for this game, edited and filtered
- similarly, all the enemies are random objects I had on hand; this was done because I didn't want to draw photorealistic demons (that's too hard)
- the tutorial enemy sprite is randomized from a pool of pictures of vintage phones from my garage… and then there's the Nokia internet tablet
- each level introduces a new enemy (or they have a probability of spawning at least) with each level themed after one of the seven deadly sins
- when I initially took the first set of pictures for enemies I didn't have a banana on hand and the next best thing was a cucumber. this was not an ideal situation. I sent the picture to AtomicAnt and we both agreed we weren't going to use the cucumber. that would've been awful.
- I just really wanted a 1:1 aspect ratio because it'd be funny and so the game is a 1:1 aspect ratio and i am very happy about that

anyway, I know it's a bit of a hard sell compared to my other games given that there's no anime girls and it looks a bit like a joke game, but I hope people enjoy it nonetheless. as always, I wanted to make this game because I wanted to play it, but I'm starting to wonder if my taste in games is a bit abnormal, so maybe I'll take a break for a little bit at some point. I think I've said I'm going to take a break multiple times now. we will see when I actually take that break.

if you want a hint for the secret ending, just do what people normally do when they get spam calls.