digitalfurbelow
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GrowthRPG Post Mortem
🕑 Added 2025-01-09 16:30:25 +0000 UTCNew update to the game was just pushed. It contains some small fixes, I may push another at the end of the month to fix some small bugs.
Here are a few of my short thoughts on GrowthRPG and the development process. Thanks to everyone that made this possible, I had a great time working on it.
What went right
The fact that the game exists at all. Theres very few growth games, especially 3d, and I’m glad I was able to work on this one and get as much done as I was able to, some people even have fun playing it. I hope there are many more to come in the future.
I like that I was able to try some of my dumb ideas. I had a lot of fun designing things like the antibodies and worldbuilding. The fact that there is a lake that is a big pawprint and the big body of water in the middle of the map is a big eye, the giant sword making a canyon and the albino gators living underground.
I am pretty proud of the character creator. I like that it's incredibly varied and for the most part seamless. It was fun having patron’s submitted characters in game too. I love that people made their fursonas using the game. It is something I want to focus on in the future by expanding it in the next project.
I like that the game was built in mind with no real limits. I think it's fun when you can get as big as the world if you were inclined, the only limits being what would crash your computer or when it would be rendered unplayable.
What went wrong
Combat overall is a bit of a mess. Especially concerning balancing, I had a lot of trouble with getting damage output to feel alright. I felt like a lot of my time was taken up by combat and not focused on the growth aspects of the game
The scale of the game was a bit too big. Making an open world RPG mostly by myself was probably a mistake. I wouldn’t even say it was feature creep either, there certainly are some mechanics that could be culled, but the basis of an open world RPG is already a huge ask.
The monthly update was a bit of a mistake. Earlier on it was fine but I think as the game grew people wouldn’t want to start over every single month, especially when I have the hotfix so its closer to every 3 weeks. I do feel like it helped keep the pressure on to motivate me, however towards the end it was more of a detriment as the game grew. Especially since the game getting bigger meant bugfixing would take longer, and it would be easier to miss something.
Coding practices, basic systems were setup improperly making them inconsistent and unstable. Unfortunately it caused a lot of bugs, made adding new content a struggle and overall the game was a lot less polished than I would have liked. I am positive I could rewrite the game to get rid of these errors now, but at that point I would be making a new game from the ground up. You sure do learn a lot in 5 years working on the same thing everyday, I am sure I have a lot more to learn too.
The sacrifice system could have used some more work/retooling. In general its a bit of a compromise to try and get growth to last a bit longer, since it was planned to top out around 1000 visually for most stats. And since this is a game you may spend quite a few hours in I didn’t want players to speed through it and have no place left to grow, but I think the system was unsatisfying at best and confusing at worst. Maybe there could have been a way to recontextualize it to feel better. It was something added fairly late into the dev cycle, I think next time the plan is to try out mechanics like this early to get feedback on them before trying to build the rest of the game.
Scripting especially for quests/dialog was a constant mess. Both from my dialog system having data loss and quests constantly breaking. I wish I could have done more sidequests and more for the main story but unfortunately, I have found scripting is not my strong suite. Which is a shame, I had a lot of fun ideas: running into more of the apothecary's former apprentices, the lich turning into a recurring boss that transforms more each time you meet them, a noble knight on a quest to find the largest butts, and a dungeon boss that was the person driving the nail into the roots.
In general, I wish I were able to put more content in the game, I still think it's a bit lacking, and the world is empty
What I learned
Having characters that can scale indefinitely is a giant pain. From things like culling, to camera placement, interactions, collisions, to even having them not fall through the floor is a gigantic challenge in its own right. It makes nearly everything harder because there's nothing you can assume for characters.
Next project updates will take a lot longer. For the next project I will be aiming for every 3 months while doing dev logs. A bit less pressure on me, and they would be proper sized updates for people to get excited about.
I do wish I had accepted more help from the community. The help I got was incredible with animations, environments, and icons. I do wish I had asked for more help with even the simple things, like releasing the files for texturing the body so I could crowdsource the patterns, or have someone help with dialog. I don’t think having someone help with code would have worked for this project, just because it was so messy, but definitely in the future I would be fine with hiring people to help.
I would like to have some dedicated playtesters next time, that way I don’t have to release the game, get bug reports, and then do the hotfix. I could have a few people play it before release, report back and then release that instead. And doing some automated testing for the next project too, but I think right now that might be beyond my skillset.
Next project is going to have more of a plan. I had a basic design doc when I started but I did basically whatever I felt like month to month. will have a more concrete plan with a set end goal and time. This was my first big project, so I wasn’t sure what to expect or how to plan it. I have a better idea now but game dev is always a bit of a tricky business.
Comments
Andreas Apollon
Try to add more in your next game like inflation , digestion vore, expansion from vore , transformation, more character features and even sex with bigger and smaller characters. Its a fantasy game so you can add whatever you want basically
Top Snapper VZ
I never really knew you design this game with a limitless mind set, i just thought it was a side effect of your personal approach. The uncapped growth is somthing this game definitely has, where most other games would have pre defined teirs. The only other thing that i can think of of the top of my head that has this sort of small to massive scale is the katamari games, but they all use some trickery with unloading and loading assets to pull off the illusion. in GRPG you can definitely go from small to so big the game is on its knees, in a very smooth way. Its somthing this project has in spades and without a doubt the games best feature. In so much growth content, nsfw or not, there are so many characters that mindlessly chase more growth and ignore all consequences/repercussions, I think its oddly poetic that the limitless design of the game generated so much trouble in the long run. I hated the sacrifice mechanic alot; i probably suggested a few changes for it at some point. I understand its inclusion, how it affects progresson, its just not satisfying. Seeing it as a know issue is great news to me. I definitely would have went nuts creating new pattern peaces if the option was available to me. Even when moving to a 3 month gap between releases you can fill us in every month, and i kinda miss when poles where around. Sorry this is already long. Im very happy you have been super transparent on the game and outside factors that have affected the progress. When this project was mostly finished you probably learned most of what you could, but you still spent the time to polish the game and have a proper end. You clearly value your community and doing your best to do the right thing. It means alot.
DigitalFurBelow
theres the discord, but thats about it. I don't think I will update my furaffinity in the meantime, and I don't use blusky or twitter.
DigitalFurBelow
yeah, thats why for my next project I want to make bigger updates that take longer. Like even most roguelikes I don't think people would play every single month, let alone open world RPGs. The combat being difficult was an embarrassing bug on my part, it took me so long to figure out what was actually causing damage numbers to take a nosedive.
DigitalFurBelow
there is the debug mode, although without the patreon you will have to beat the last boss for it
deatheater87
It was fun and interesting watching this go from the side scroller that it started as, to the full 3D it became. I will say, personally why I feel out of wanting to play it was the fact that as it got larger and larger, and a bit harder and harder. Fully resetting each month became a pain and I just started waiting for the game to be finished. That all being said, I can't wait to see what the next project brings!!
Asaskume
Will you be releasing the console commands too? o w o (for funsies?)
Ex-Advanced
i’m sad to see the project end, but so happy that it exists! is there any socials we can follow in the meantime?
Mishap
It's been a ride but you did a great job. Thanks for your hardwork.
CionHowar
I'm sorry English isn't my native language. The translator's words might be a little strange😭
CionHowar
Have confidence in yourself, you've made a lot of progress! Even though I was a little late to join, there is no denying that the game has left a deep memory for me. There are dreams in life. I wish you a brighter future. We will continue to support you:D Looking forward to your next work;P
B7AD3W0LF
i follow you since agust 1, 2021 if you need beta tester i will be happy to help you my door will be and will stay open if you need someone
DigitalFurBelow
I've got a few ideas for the next game I'll reveal later this month
DigitalFurBelow
thanks for supporting me for so long. It sure has come quite a ways.
DigitalFurBelow
Thanks for the support
DigitalFurBelow
all the usual tricks of hiding things from the player for optimization don't work because the player can theoretically see the entire map at once. Even stuff like the roofs of buildings which normally the player would never see. specifically for unreal the way a character is setup is that it will scale in the middle, instead of the bottom. And you can't really move it because the basic capsule collision is the root to that will always be in the middle. So I had to use a formula to try and find the correct vertical offset. Obviously arenas and environment can get too small which is why I scale them up depending on size, but that could mean you have issues with NPCs falling through the floor. Then theres the whole issue of having to keep your collision the same as you get bigger so you wouldn't get stuck, but you don't know where you actually are. I never found an elegant solution to that other than just putting the camera at your feet if you zoomed in far enough. Camera was a nightmare to figure out, especially for stuff like really big NPCs in combat. Cant have any hard coded values all needs to be proportional. Also because legs could grow that had to be taken into account, since they would get longer and would proportionally move everything around, so it make the vertical offset wrong, along with screwing up the camera. Those are a few I can think up right now, in general it made just about anything concerning characters harder.
DigitalFurBelow
onto bigger things
DigitalFurBelow
Thanks, yeah I wanted to make sure this wouldn't come as a sudden shock to anyone, which is why I planned it over a year in advance. I do wish I could have properly finished the project, but at the same time I don't want to be stuck on one thing forever.
sigsegv
Would you mind going more into the issues that character scaling presented? I know that, for example, at giga sizes sometimes you can run into z-fighting and other things (depending on how your renderer is setup), but I'm curious if you have like a big list of "here's what you probably think you can do and why that's gonna fail".
Lupusvir
I liked the concept of the game. The goal it was aiming for. It's incredibly hard to find any growth or hyper 3d NSFW games. Glad to see how you came through in the end giving us a final update. Curious as to what's next.
Legeden
Nicely summarized. Doing growth as a theme right is also a bit of difficult thing itself because everyone has their own preference what works for them and such. The scope of the open world RPG is very difficult to get right, but some amount of jank is just part of the course as shown by the AAA developers such as Bethesda. Overall, I found the project very interesting because of it's uniqueness as mentioned. Growth 3D games are very rare and the other games I've seen haven't reached anywhere near this state of completion. As someone who invested some money and time into projects like this one, I really value your honesty and the constant effort keeping community up to date. It's not uncommon for people to just remove themselves from the community or abandon their projects without as much as turning off their Patreon billing. All in all, I'm sure I'll spend many more hours enjoying the game and I hope I'll see you in your next project some time soon. You've earned my trust and I can't wait to see more from you.
The sniping spy
And the journey continues
House of arima
I've been a patron since March 2020, as soon as I found out about the game. It's sad to see it go, but also a great ending to a great project. Thank you for what you do, and here's to everything in the future 💖
Snowbun
Excellent retrospective, and congratulations again on a fantastic project. I came in late but was more than happy to support it. Thank you!!
