Hello. I am here to write about Neapolitan, the 3 in 1… thing!

Neo-Interactives

My last game launch was all the way back in late June with goodnight, with my last update being in the following August with Milk Game 3.0. I haven’t really gotten the opportunity to really dive into making something for a while, part of it was caused by just not really having time.

During all of this, the hosts from the Neo-Twiny Jam made their own group, Neo-Interactives. They have been specializing in interactive fiction game jams since then. I happen to have been made aware of it when the Revival Jam was coming up, so I hopped in right before the start of it.

So why three-in-one?

Originally, I was going to do three separate games. Let’s make a game (working title for what will end up being Vanilla), The Garden (what will end up being Strawberry), and Flowers (New Idea) (which I will still need to make at some point). This line in the jam page, however, inspired me to do this instead, which was “you can revive one of your old projects that was previously unpublished (or will be very significantly updated for this jam).” I decided “oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I just took these ideas that I have been sitting on and do a Bohemian Rhapsody on them?” I’ll go and explain where each of these ideas come from.

Let’s make a game! (Vanilla)

Return To Your Roots was a game jam that ran in January 2023. I was going to make a game, or story rather, that was a fictional take on how I went about making my first game, Ice Cream Clicker. It was originally going to have branching paths and some interesting interactions that certainly didn’t happen in my life since I was alone for all of that. That ended up not happening due to me being quite busy during that time, which was a shame since I didn’t properly get the opportunity to make until now. I probably won’t update this to add branching paths though, since current day me wanted this be more linear.

Cheesecake / Red Velet Cake (Chocolate)

I think most of my older fans know that Cheesecake was an April Fools joke for Get a Glass of Milk Because You Have To that came from two related cancelled spin-offs. I talked about this before on my site. Milo and Ray love story was an idea that came from Miitopia of all places. They weren’t really meant to be together, at least in this lore. I don’t think they are that compatible. I think it could make for an interesting story though. In the end, I cancelled the two in favor of other works.

I didn’t plan on reviving the idea until now since I wanted to focus more on Milk Game rather than spin-offs.

The Garden (Strawberry)

This probably has the most interesting history of all three, especially for people who have only played my Itch releases.

I been wanting to make use a garden setting for a while now (at least since 2023). I never really gotten the chance to do so though. I was either working on something else or too busy to make something with it.

The Garden formed as a gift game to someone (who I’ll name Cee) for a gift jam (don’t ask what it was because I don’t remember). The garden was kind of meant to represent healing with two characters mirroring me and Cee’s relationship. This never really went anywhere. I tried again for another gift jam more recently, but this also never went anywhere.

I realized that for this particular jam, prior to combining these three ideas, is that I should probably not try to write it for someone specific. I mainly would of (and did) wrote it for the sake of having it finish. It helped to base it off Wizard GSA Club too (title is not final) instead of an actual real life relationship.

Freezing!

I started working on the game at some point around the 13th of March. I was also working on the Roblox The Hunt review on my site which made it difficult to work on this when the review had a mostly consistent schedule. I mainly wrote in bursts whenever I had inspiration, starting with Vanilla followed by Chocolate.

I decided to make each of the 3 flavors represent 3 different eras of my work, with Vanilla being based off mainly nonsensical early things that I made in 2018-2020, Chocolate being based off the the humor filled things with story in 2021-2022, and Strawberry being based off the story rich games in 2023-2024. Part of why I made Neapolitan available at launch but not Strawberry was because my other Itch releases could fill that missing part in (although not fully considering that those were not made with this in mind).

Vanilla (and the 4th story, Neapolitan) was interesting to make considering that I wanted to take what happened in real life (the creation of Ice Cream Clicker) and make it less personal for my sake. I took the opportunity to also make it more interesting than the actual real life story since I am trying to cover some of my own personal life. It’s kind of where this line came from.

“I just… don’t have anything that really defines my life. I’m not an A student, but I’m also not failing. I have no talents. No disabilities. No life drama. No tragic backstory… ok maybe it is a good thing I don’t have a tragic backstory.”

I purposely made Alex just be some average person. I still consider Alex to be me, but really only the stuff I would want to talk about on the internet. In the end, I did make Alex less average by making her closer to how I am in real life. Jonas himself does not appear in the real life story nor an equivalent either, although he is based on real life friends I had in the past few years including at the time Vanilla would of taken place.

Everything else in Vanilla follows closely to how I made Ice Cream Clicker, at least how I remember it. It has been 5+ years at this point so I can’t remember everything accurately.

Chocolate was worked on at the same time. Everyone except Nikki were already established characters in Get a Glass of Milk Because You Have To so it wasn’t hard to replicate the style of Milk Game at all. Erica too apparently; you all might ask who they are and my answer is this: Yes! Nikki was created because there really wasn’t a character from Milk Game that would go out of their way to give Milo relationship advice. Like yeah, I could of make Lemon, Enthusiast or the Narrator voice person do that, but I decided it would make more sense to make a new character. There also is a heavy lack of characters with neopronouns, so I made Nikki’s pronouns ze/zim.

The story was the hardest to write as I didn’t have a real life point of reference to point to while writing it. I never broken up with anyone on either end of a relationship. In fact, I haven’t been in a romantic relationship since I started this whole mess of me making things on the internet. I mainly just took what I knew from other media, friends, etc. and looked up stuff when needed. I basically (carefully) put together a story from that information while still retaining the humor from Milk Game.

On that note, somehow I remembered about Johnny Appleseed so I made some connection to Chocolate with that guy and his apples. I just decided to do that when I decided to name the park. There’s no reason for it other than that.

Doing those two stories as well as the review on top of my college courses was too much to do at once, and it actually made me behind on Neapolitan. I had to sort of rush it to make it by the deadline, which meant dropping Strawberry and the additional cover art so I could be able to finish it. Three-fourths of Neapolitan was released on the 20th. Strawberry was meant to release the next day, but it ended up releasing on the 23rd.

Strawberry is quite odd. It’s based on a work that has barely been started. Other than the ideas in my head, most of plans documented here are the only things that have been laid out properly. Regardless, I based Strawberries out of that though since I wanted to base off the garden idea on something that isn’t real life.

I wrote that using what comes to mind (assuming it makes sense for the plot). I usually don’t do that for my works, as I preplan in my head how things will go. However, since there wasn’t much in my head outside of the characters, I wrote things as I went. I think this has a name, but I can’t put my finger to it right now. This is culminated into the Strawberries that you read.

Strawberries isn’t the best thing I’ve written but it is something. Actually, nothing here I would consider my best (maybe on Itch, but certainly not overall). It is probably the best thing I’ve put out in two weeks though, despite feeling extremely rushed.

The art was the easiest of this. I went for an ice cream packaging look. I reused the Neapolitan icon, cleaned it up a tad bit, and upscaled it to make it work in the promo art. I used the gradients tool on Paint.Net to create the, well, gradient. I’ve used it before so I knew the quirks of the tool.

Pros, Cons, and some flavoring

You know, I haven’t eaten Neapolitan ice cream in a while. Neapolitan (the game) is quite neat though for the 3 in 1 approach that I took.

Pros

• Got a really neat thing out of 3 ideas that have just been sitting there for a while.
• Fun naming scheme for new characters (my own opinion haha).
• Realistic depictions of struggles according to Manonamora.
• Jonas and Nikki. I love them.

Cons

• The stories could of been developed further (though this is an issue with the format)
• Rushed.
• Could of used more art? Mainly would of just been covers for the individual stories so I don’t know.
• The screen flashing. I didn’t mention this yet because I have no idea why it’s doing that. Pervious twine stuff used CSS so it may be the Harlowe code causing it.

Tasty!

I don’t have any closing words on Neapolitan. I will say though that it has revived my motivation to actually make fun creative things after more than half a year. I will be participating in more Neo-Interactives game jams after this. You all will get to see more of me in the coming months.

On that note, have a good day. :)