You Make Me Lovesick! 2024.9.12

You Make Me Lovesick! is an arcade-style platformer game inspired by Crush Crush, created for the fifth Strawberry Jam. Play as a tag-team of a wannabe charmerand anadorable cold virus, and win your lovers' hearts while simultaneously conquering their immune systems!

(Note: there is no actual'explicit' content in this game, no sex or nudity or gratuitous violence. However, due to the kink-focused nature ofthe content and the game jam this was created for,this game is marked as mature and NSFW. Please play with discretion! ^^')

BGM by Abstraction:https://tallbeard.itch.io/music-loop-bundle(Ludum Dare 38 - Track One)

You can probably tell what category I'm aiming to score high in ^^' Icould probably have gone further/made it a bit more on the nose (pun intended), but this is my first real foray intocreating this sort of content, rather than consuming it, so I'm still forcing myself through a couple mental blocks writing-wise. This game was difficult to make, but it turns out the hardest part was exporting and posting it... T_T

--Plans--

More levels to play featuring more characters,and 'story' cutscenes describing how you met them. If I've done my job right and kept all my labels and files straight, this should be as easy as 'draw the next character, copy and paste a bunch of stuff, change a bunch of 1s to 2s, make a new map', but we'll see. Ideally, some of these further levels would be playable with the taller bacteriophage character seen on the title screen, and perhaps some other germ shapes as well, but that'll be harder to implement.More polished gameplay. I'd like to make it feel a little more fast-paced, and give it a little more depth than Iwas able to slap together for the jam. Plans include healing items, enemies that move in different ways, more complex maps, et cetera... I'd also like to tweak the rate of point decay to make it feel more consequential but not punishing, and maybe implement a more permanent progression system. The current 'get points, lose points, get points, lose points' system works well for this small prototype, but in a more fleshed-out game, the player's actions should feel more impactful, and I kind of want to have a relationship progression sort of thing as well. Maybe more actions to take on the right panel? (1 part needy platformer + 1part menu game = ???)More responsive dialogue (this is relatively easy, I just have to write it T_T).Make it look a bit better. I'm not replacing the player sprite, you can pry it from my cold dead hands, but the rest of the assets (walls, background, ui, title screen, etc) need work. I'm a fan of the pixelly aesthetic, I'm not gonna swap to anything sleeker, but I want to make the platforming area seem a little more organic than blank squares, and fix up the ingame text to be less... default-style.

--Other Stuff--

Again, please don't be mean in the comments^^' Iknow this game isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, and Iknow it's not exactly good yet, but I'm trying my best! (If itisyour cup of tea... don't flame my spelling job- *shot*)Ido not know why the health meter and the pink button move around slightly and the rest of the ui doesn't. They all use the exact same code for following the camera.I hope I like the right-panel art style enough to not change it. The girl's spritework is simple, but it took a long time anyways... It's a new direction for me artistically- mostly, it's inspired by the game Dream of Gluttony. Iwanted to emulate that style where the characters are cute, but still have a certain maturity to them for the most part. (Also... she doesn't have a name yet. That's on me.)Istarted this project over many times with many different engines, and this final product is completely unlike the original plan I had... I'm not even that big a platformer fan T_T It's likely that the current gameplay will stay in place, but Imay replace it if Ican think of something that is both better and easy to implement. A clicker would work, but I don't want to make a Crush Crush clone, and Ithink something like this gets across the concept better. The most basic of ludonarrative harmony?Idon't know if it'll work on mac. If you try it on a mac and it works, please let me know! If you try it on linux... don't talk to me (/j)And if you're looking through the entries trying to find the one Isubmitted because I brought the jam up offhandedly in dms and you're curious, or if you just recognize the way Iwrite... listen, listen, listen. Please don't stop talking tome- *shot*