A cute and laidback nightly farm simulator, where you grow strange and glorious flowers for a charming cast of characters. At night, use your action points to plant your garden, clear debris, and explore the forest. As your blood runs out, return to your crypt to dream the day away until sundown.

Bleak can be played in nightly segments, or at your own pace. You can choose whether game actions reset at midnight each real-time day, or just after sleeping in-game.

Content warningsInsects, Blood, and Death

Controls:

  • Move: Arrows/WASD/Mouse/Gamepad sticks/D-Pad
  • Interact: Space/Enter/Z/X/Click and hold/Gamepad face buttons

Made by Sean, Michael, and IAN for #AGBIC 2022.

Inspired by the Famicase Bleak: Survive and Thrive by Caspian Whistler.

Bleak is a farming sim and survival game in which you play as a vampire existing in solitude after those silly humans wiped themselves out. Manage your time and blood supply as you slowly cultivate the earth to once again become a place full of life.

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

Can I start by saying that I absolutely adore this game - what you have made here is a work of art and I have thoroughly enjoyed playing it. I might just be missing something very obvious, but I can't find the final material that I need to plant in order to (I assume) finish the game. There are no obvious places to find it, and no new conversations to trigger, so I am at a loss as to what to do next.

(+1)

If you're stuck, I'd recommend double checking that characters don't have anything new to say on repeated conversations in other branches.

If you're really stuck, here's a full spoiler answer to where you might have missed things (in rot13):

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Deleted 1 year ago
(1 edit) (+1)

You can download it via the itch app and try to run it that way (you may need to run a local server for this), but it's a browser based game, so there's no dedicated desktop build. Are you having any particular issue with the browser version?

Deleted 1 year ago

Ah, that's an itch CSS problem; I think if you click the fullscreen button in the bottom right it will resize down to fit, or you can right-click the game and do "open frame in new tab/window".

(+2)

This is gorgeous and the character writing is very interesting! Super intrigued to play more, little by little.

(+3)

Lovely art style! I love all of the attention and care that was put into all aspects of the game

where and how does one find Lucian!?! Love the game btw, I need more! I was watching the credits and saw lucian in there but never saw him in game :/

(+2)

Thanks for playing! Turns out there was a minor sequence break possible that would make Lucian never show up; we've fixed it now, so if you continue your save or restart you should be able to meet him.

(+5)

YEAH BABY, THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT, THIS IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR, WOOOOOO!!!

Wonderful game! I've found a bug however - if I talk to Bertie from Day 3 onwards, I get the following message in place of his dialogue:

"This shows up when a passage failed to parse, or doesn't even exist. Try checking the link for spelling errors or the console logs for more detail on the error."

When I try advancing the dialogue, the same message appears two more times.

I'm believe this may be blocking me from advancing through the game as I'm not sure where else to dump trash?

(+1)

Hey there, thanks for the bug report! I've pushed an update that should fix the issue, but if you try again and still get the error message, could you check the console for more error details? It should include a message like "Failed to parse passage titled "<broken passage title>", going to "DEFAULT" instead.", and that would help me debug further.

The bugs been fixed, is Bertie supposed to be repeating the same dialogue every day?

He should repeat once you have the option to give a plant, but his other conversations end with him leaving the area, preventing you from repeating. Is that not happening in your game?

(note that it would be expected for him to repeat at least once as a result of the bugfix; if you're playing on gardener mode, the next time he shows up it should progress)

I'm playing on gamer mode, he's repeating the dialogue from the first time I met him every day

Hmm, it sounds like the savestate's not recovering from the previous bug. I've pushed another update that should hopefully fix it (again, expect the first convo to loop once but if it loops twice, it's still broken).

If this update hasn't fixed it, you'll probably need to try modifying the save directly from the devtools, or clear your save. To do the former, you would:

  1. Open your browser's devtools
  2. Set the frame context to the iframe (by default it will be on the outer itch page)
  3. Enter `var s = scene.strand.savestate.npcs.Bertie; s.current=2; s.next=0; s.spoken=true; s.done=true; scene.strand.save();` into the console
  4. Refresh your game
  5. Bertie should be present and say his second dialogue

If none of this fixes the issue and you'd still like to help debug, feel free to DM/email me with the full contents of your `scene.strand.savestate` and I can try to see what I've missed.