Thanks everyone who played “The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer” - and special thanks to everyone who reviewed it, including @n-n @mathbrush @doug_egan @kaemi @aschultz @deusirae, and the anonymous commenters on the IF Comp site.
I’m pleased to have placed 24th place in the comp. Any cash prize will be returned to IF Comp or donated elsewhere – watch for updates.
Compared to my other games, “The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer” isn’t focused around a single idea, so every reviewer’s interpretation was fairly different, and it was great to read them all.
Of course, there was a central joke, and I think everyone got it.
Special Thanks to Andrew Schultz and CMG
Thanks to @aschultz for beta testing and @cmg for early feedback. Andrew tested on a pretty tight deadline, and the result was a very polished game despite the short turnaround.
As for why I reached out to Chandler Groover specifically… he’s had good things to say about my games before, and his entry last year, “The Bat,” was in the back of my mind while making this game — parodying popular characters by playing them completely straight.
Of course, “The Bat” isn’t the first thing to do this, but I wanted to be clear that it was an influence. Judging by his rating of my game on IFDB, he seems to have liked the result. Thanks CMG!
In Memory of Kenji Eno
As for Kenji Eno himself … @mathbrush’s review asked: how much do we really know about anyone through their work?
Kenji Eno’s games are pretty inaccessible in a lot of ways. I only know bits and pieces of them through secondhand coverage and playthroughs.
But I am familiar with his career, and recently, I had been looking into his audio adventure game Real Sound pretty closely. I wondered what the planned sequel to that game would have looked like. I could have left this idea on the back burner for years, but when censorship suddenly became a hot topic this summer, I decided the time was right.
Anyone who’s interested in digging into the actual real-life facts and interview quotes that went into “The Kidnapping of a Tokyo Game Developer” should check out this document (which is also linked in the in-game about page).
There is also this YouTube documentary from the people who knew Eno best, which you might be interested in:
A New Website
Finally, I’ve launched a new website. After taking my games off of Itch io, they’re now available here:
Abd congratulations to everyone else who entered IF Comp! Unlike other recent competitions, I only played a handful of games and didn’t have time to write reviews. But plenty of games from this year are now on my backlog.