First Person Sweetheart

First Person Sweetheart is a visual novel developed by Team Sweethearts for the 2024 UChicago Game Jam! This short and sweet game follows you, a Gamer(TM), during a long day away from your long-distance partner. It features three minigames, one cutscene, and four unique endings (one good, one neutral, and two bad).

This game requires a mouse and keyboard to play. Most of the game follows a standard point-and-click format, but there is a rhythm game portion that uses the arrow keys.

Thank you for playing! <3

---

The theme for this jam was "X within an X", e.g. dream within a dream, story within a story, or a game within a game.

• Computer within a computer - The main interface for our game mimics a desktop computer, complete with a messenger and games.
• Game within a game - Our game simulates the feeling of losing time on other games, namely first-person shooters and rhythm games.
• Conversation within a conversation - Depending on how you read it, FPS either follows the winding path of one drawn-out conversation, or many short conversations. You're always asking your partner about your relationship, just in different ways.
• Persona within a persona - You, the player, translate your thoughts into the choices presented to the player character (persona #1), who then translates their thoughts into their own online messages with varying accuracy (persona #2).
  
• Time-waster within a time-waster - Isn't there something better you could be doing besides playing this? Isn't there something better the player character could be doing, too?
  
• Picture within a picture...? - Yeah, this one's a reach, but by golly there are pictures inside of other pictures. Even a video inside of a picture!

---

Credits

Designed and developed by Team Sweethearts

• Ashley Dai - Ashley Dai
• Gabriel Byrd - gabeb8403
• Jude Denning - nebuloous
• Rafael Queiroz - VoidFlare1

Pre-made Assets

• Big thanks to the developers of Ren'Py, the engine that made this game possible
• Chat log script - John-Michael O'Brien / PoorLifeChoices (2019) - itch.io
• Rhythm game engine - Lynn Zheng / r3dhummingbird - GitHub, itch.io
• "Disappearing" FPS enemies were based off of the work of user philat on the Lemma Soft Forums
• Royalty-free stock photos sourced from Canva Pro Assets Library, Adobe Stock, Pngimg.com, PurePNG, Vecteezy, PNGTree, and DreamlikeStock