Aftermath

A dark narrative-based game about death, sadness, and revenge.

You awake in your hometown, but everything is burning to the ground. You find items of a past life scattered around the town, and it would appear that you are the only person who is left. All alone and injured, you are dragged deeper and deeper into feelings of revenge. Time for vengeance.

There are three (technically four) possible endings, can you find them all?

This was my first time ever doing the Compo, my first time ever doing a narrative-based game, and my first time using my own art app and music app. In comparison to last Ludum Dare, this is also my first time having a game soundtrack and making a game that isn't half bad.

#### Enjoy, everyone! I barely made this in 48 hours, so I hope you enjoy the end result of the most stressful 48 hours ever!

Tools used:

- Engine: Construct 3
- Art: Partially my own app, Peace Of Cake Art Maker!, and partially the Construct 3 Animator
- Music: Partially my own app, Peace Of Cake Music Maker!, and partially GarageBand (iOS)
- Hosting: Scirra Arcade (Construct-only free HTML5 hosting site); Google Drive

Known Issues:

Because there will always be issues....

- Going left too much results in falling through the ground of the world. This is a pretty hilarious bug because last Ludum Dare I managed to have the same bug in the game (but that one was only if you played two consecutive games). Fix this by refreshing the page or reopening the app. [Fixed Post-Compo]
- The text is rather difficult to read sometimes. Sorry about that, that one is my bad! [Fixed Post-Compo, hopefully]
- The MacOS and Linux builds may or may not work.

How to unlock all of the endings:

!> The first ending, Pain, is unlocked if you decide to rest, or if you don't decide to get up quickly enough. The player doesn't have any reason to hold onto life so they die because of their injuries. I made it sound like resting to gain enough strength, but if you read carefully the player mentions being very injured. The injuries are too severe to keep living.

!> There are two versions of the second ending, Vengeance. The first one is if you haven't picked up an item and you locate the criminal responsible for the massacre. You'll kill them with your bare hands. The second version is if you pick up the knife on the ground, which I placed strategically so that the player is tempted to pick it up. You'll stab the murderer to death. Regardless of how you kill the criminal, you'll die because of the injuries. This is the darkest ending, because you seriously killed someone.

!> The third ending, Vengeance Without Murder, is a less dark version of the second ending. Instead of killing the criminal who killed your family, you have to go left at the start of the game. There will be an old pole with rope hanging down, and when you grab the rope you'll get a chunk of the pole, too. When you find the criminal, you will end up knocking them unconscious with the sliver of the pole and you'll tie the criminal up with the rope so the authorities can take care of the criminal. In case you were wondering, death is inevitable in Aftermath because there's no way to prevent the player from getting injured.

An important note I would like you to consider when rating Graphics:

I would appreciate it if you know that for the graphics, I did an intentionally handdrawn look. These graphics weren't just thrown together in about 5 minutes, I did spend time making the graphics have a deliberate handdrawn look to them. Thanks for reading! 😊

To MacOS users:

MacOS automatically tries to block any app I make, so you'll need to find some way to allow my app to run in the administrator controls.