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Perfect Tides: Station to Station is Coming to Switch

Today I’m announcing that Perfect Tides: Station to Station is being developed for the Nintendo Switch, along with the planned PC, Mac and Linux releases.

You can read the press release here or watch the announcement trailer below:

As a developer I’m very excited for the prospect of more people being able to play this game. And, on a personal nostalgia-poisoned millennial level, it will be very nice to say I have a game of my own on Nintendo. I hope you will join me on your platform of choice!

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PT: STS demo out today!!

Today is the day. A demo for Perfect Tides: Station to Station is now available on Steam. Please enjoy!

It’s an incredible thrill to be offering this first look at this game, which could not exist without the artists who’ve helped to craft it. Please join me in celebrating the work of the core team Soren Hughes (Background Design) and Daniel Kobylarz (Music), as well as the artists who have contributed graphic assets: Garrett Hobson, Carly Monardo, and Tony Wilson.

This build has also benefitted from dozens of hours of testing and feedback, thanks to a generous and dedicated pool of playtesters. You will find their names at the end of the demo, when you’ve experienced their efforts for yourself.

While you’re downloading, consider wishlisting the game! It keeps you abreast of game updates, feeds the Steam algo, and is a big help toward getting the word out about these games.

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Backgrounds I did a few years ago for Meredith Gran's game Perfect Tides! The demo for the sequel, Perfect Tides 2: Station to Station comes out on steam next week...check it out!!

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Vote for Perfect Tides in the 2022 Aggie Awards Reader’s Choice Poll!!! It was a ton of fun, hard work making this game with Meredith and it’d be pretty cool to win an award for it ! plus who doesn’t like voting in polls :)

https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/2022-aggie-awards-readers-choice-poll

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Perfect Tides Hanukkah Sale!

Eight Crazy Nights!!

Perfect Tides is on sale for 40% off - a cute Hanukkah-appropriate price - for the next week! get yourself or someone you love that Most Cryable Game of 2022 you've been hearing about!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172800/Perfect_Tides/

Itch: https://granulac.itch.io/perfect-tides

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Perfect Tides is a wonderful game, especially if you grew up in internet chat forums and want to get punched in the gut with all the emotions of being a mess of a teen with online friends that feel closer than real ones.

this is my favourite scene from it, which i had to immediately stop and draw when it happened. while filled with just love for friendships like this one… overflowing even. thru my eyebals.

anyways, Highly recommend, 10/10.

ALSO there’s a sequel trying to get funded on Kickstarter, with only 5 days left! It has Station in it’s name TWICE and we all know how great mass transit is, ontop of the first game being great, so trust me, you wanna check this out.

Perfect Tides : Station to Station

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This week I played Octopus Pie author Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides, a visual novel/point-and-click adventure game about being an internet-addicted teen girl in the year 2000:

That either makes you go ‘ugh’ or ‘omg mood’ and no one can tell you otherwise, but it nailed it for me, this game hit so many good notes. To just cover a few:

It walks the line really well of “this is a nostalgia game made by a 40-something” and “it takes itself as seriously as its main character would”. Mara is an idiot, for sure, makes naïve mistakes and takes seriously what fundamentally isn’t. But none of that tone is disparaging, how much she suffers at the hands of a social order than is utterly normal but that she still cannot grasp is so felt so keenly despite your own position of greater maturity & knowledge. Some pain transcends. 

This btw is aided by the developer commentary - Mara receives a poem from her fanfic forum boyfriend which hits hard on the cringe line but that effect becomes raw as fuck when you learn that is an *actual poem* Gran wrote for someone online when she was 16, plundered from the past and enshrined in the digital museum that is this game. Perfect Tides is 50% autobiographical which really helps sell it.

There are so many little touches of ways the characters act, the things they do, they show the depth of the author’s emotive insight - character motives are not just ‘depressed teen’ or the like. Many would be spoilers to list, so Ill just note a super minor example where Mara gets stuck arguing with mom over a comparison (about the Titanic film lol) that she doesn’t remotely believe in because…like arguing with her is her default state, and she is in too deep, can’t bac kout of the argument now right?  This sounds so trivial, its hard to communicate why it matters, but Mara is made up of distinct little instincts & desires like these that are core to how real she feels.

Related to that a “Meredith Gran” specialty is how many of these character touches are never explicitly stated. Mara self-narrates so she is a little direct, but the other characters all have a ton going on that can only be inferred - like what Mara/people in general have to do to socialize in real life! Personal nod to her not-boyfriend Jason who has this desperate desire for everything to be “okay” and fully resolved the moment a problem comes up as he can’t handle the anxiety of unresolution, a trait Mara never picks up on but drives several of his scene - I absolutely share that instinct.

Finally its batshit hilarious, between the era references and Mara’s tilted worldview and the inherent insanity of teenagers and the comedic timing of animations, scene shifts, its funny in so many different ways.

My only complaint would be that the ‘internet/reality’ dichotomy is not truly taken advantage of - it sets itself up as this sort of split story, of Mara being a part of an active online social circle contrasting her grim reality, but that online social circle falls away halfway through and doesn’t play as large a role as one expected. This is of course a product of development - Gran had more online content, additional concepts and a branching path for the main online romance, but it got scrapped due to time & narrative bloat. When something is this indie its hard to fault, you easily forgive these mistakes, but its there all the same.

So yeah, go play Perfect Tides. Its amazing, just kickstarted a sequel, and tiny games like these need all the support they can get.

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WE DID IT!!!

As of today, Perfect Tides: Station to Station has less than $10,000 to raise on Kickstarter with 4 days left to go!

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As of today, Perfect Tides: Station to Station has less than $10,000 to raise on Kickstarter with 4 days left to go!

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Cool video essay about PT!

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Sequel!!!

Hi everyone here! I wanted to let you know I’m planning to make another Perfect Tides game. I’ll be running a Kickstarter campaign all month to help fund it. Rewards include a discounted copy of the original Perfect Tides, plus lots of other goodies. You can find the Kickstarter here:

https://t.co/IAoDKqeFmQ

You can also watch a teaser trailer here. I hope you will join me in bringing this game to life!

https://youtu.be/xAF69uAkjuI

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“‘til they stop making Manic Panic”

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Here's the best thing in Meredith Gran's new adventure game Perfect Tides about a teenage girl growing up in the year 2000.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172800/Perfect_Tides/

https://granulac.itch.io/perfect-tides

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Love the tidbits of inspiration on the Perfect Tides Quit Screen.