Hello Everyone! Sorry our first official post took so long, we needed step back for a bit just to process everything that happened last month with the release of Closing at 2. There's a lot we want to say, but first, we need to say thank you. Thank you to all our players, for all the comments, favorites, ratings, and videos that have been made and are still being made to this day. Believe me when I say we did not expect this amount of attention at all. We expected maybe 3 comments max and 10 plays if we were lucky, since hundreds of great games are added to this site each day. We're very grateful that we have reached so many people who enjoyed our project.

Now that all the fluff is out of the way, we wanted to share some context and explanations in response to the questions and comments we've been seeing here on Itch and on Youtube. Please read towards the end, we also have a question for you...

Why is the game so buggy?

WE DIDN'T THINK ANYONE WOULD PLAY THIS OKAY? I'm not sure how many people actually know this since it's barely mentioned on the itch page, but this was for a school project. We had roughly 6 weeks to make an entirely new game from scratch for our game dev class, so we had to meet a bunch of deadlines along with other classes, jobs, and finals to deal with. So yeah, it's gonna be buggy! Again, we did not expect anyone to actually play this aside from some friends and classmates, so we couldn't fix all the bugs in time unfortunately. Sorry about that!

The ending felt really anticlimactic, what's up with that?

The ending feels rushed because it was! We decided to leave the game open ended since there wouldn't have been enough time to build up a proper ending. 3 hours before the game was due I realized we didn't have any way to wrap this up, so I just quickly wrote some dialogue to give some kind of semblance of an ending, otherwise the game would've just ended after Marcus' third round.

It feels like there's a lot missing from the game.

You're totally right in thinking that, we think so too. Again, we couldn't implement everything we wanted to. Our focus was on providing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and because of time constraints, we only focused on the core game mechanic and basic dialogue. There's a lot to be desired from this version. A lot of the suggestions that we're seeing were included in our original pitch, we just had to cut them, unfortunately.

Why is there a shaking mini game if all the drinks in the game are stirred?

Look, it was never gonna be 100% accurate, alright. We originally had a stirring minigame too, and a bunch of more drinks that would have actually been shaken. It is kind of funny though.

What does it all mean? Why did all the customers go insane? Is it a commentary of the social acceptance of drinking alcohol to avoid dealing with your problems? Is it a metaphor on the dangers of alcohol consumption and that turning to harmful coping mechanism can be detrimental to someone's mental health and reveal the true monster that lies inside?

 You got all of that from 15 minutes of gameplay?

So what now?

Although there's a lot we wanted to do with this game, we couldn't include everything. That aside, we're very happy with all the feedback and attention this game has gotten. We're so glad so many people enjoyed playing, and were kind enough to rate and leave comments on what they thought. I also want to give a shoutout to ManlyBadassHero, Neco the Sergal, Jay from the KubzScouts, GamerSault, special edd, and every single person who has made a video on our game. It means so much more to us than you know that people cared about our game enough to share their thoughts about it to the world. We see all the videos and we thank you. I, (Natalie), also want to thank Olivia, Rachel, and Cameron for being awesome game devs and great teammates. While the game is under this specific Itch page, know that it was 100% a team effort.

Now, we didn't really plan on working on the game after it was due, we're proud of what we've accomplished and are totally fine with leaving it as is.

However...

We want to know what you think. As we mentioned, we did have a lot more planned, and working on this was very fun for all of us. So we want to ask you: Would you want to see a full game? There's a lot of logistics we'd need to deal with, of course, but we think it would be fun to continue :)

We want to hear from the community before we promise anything, but we're very excited for this year and there's a lot we hope to accomplish with Closing at 2, so please stay tuned. See you soon!

Love,

The Closing at 2 Team