First Devlog

This is my first devlog on Itch.io. Hopefully, it’ll make sense.

I want to announce this game and explain some trouble in making it.

A game jam for the simple game engine VideoTome recently close. I learned of it 15 minutes before it did. That wasn’t enough time to download the engine and read through its files. By the time I did, another game jam caught my attention. My work used to be predominately Men’s Love, or M/M Romance. How could I miss MLM Game Jam 2025?

I only had enough available time for something incredibly simple. Out came VideoTome, up came a poem in need of revision, and eventually formed this version of “Marriage Hack”.

Except half an hour to the jam’s closing, I still didn’t know how to test if it worked. It wasn’t until a few minutes after the cutoff time that I realized my personal website could run it. By then, I had used Itch.io for testing. The trouble was, it took several uploads to determine how to fix the code.

What did I do to break the first copies of the game? I don’t know for sure. My initial mistakes might have been in removing the untranslated word for “start”, including blank lines in the story.txt, repeating the clearscreen prompt without new text or an image in between, and reusing zip file names.

That shouldn’t matter now. The current version plays. For the next round of edits, my testing grounds is at Neocities.