oakfells
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Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #3 [20/02/2023]
🕑 Added 2023-02-20 13:29:21 +0000 UTCFirst dev log since the release of v0.1.0, let's see what I've been up to!
Music!
I have some early drafts for the music that will play during battles. For now, each section is about ~1 minute long and they don't loop particularly well... it's very much work-in-progress. And you read that right, each section! I've already thrown them into the game to test out the dynamic music that'll ramp up between 3 versions as the participants gain weight! There's a lil' preview video in the attachments so you can download that and check out how it sounds. (it also features a peek at a fun new card!)
I'm quite happy with how it sounds so far, so now the goal is to actually finish composing them. Listening to a 1 minute loop in a slow-paced strategy game doesn't exactly sound like a great time, after all.
I also started working on some background music to play as you're walking about town, so give that a listen as well!
Exercise! Sick gains!
Some initial design work has started on the weight loss mechanic! For now the basic idea is this: the player will have a stat denoting Fat Burn(... or metabolism? we'll have to workshop that). This stat can range from negative to positive, and it represents the amount of activity the player does to stay in shape. When your Fat Burn is negative, it means you just stuff your face all day, which in turn causes you to gain that much at the end of the day. The opposite is self explanatory. Exercising will allow you to raise this number, meanwhile doing nothing will have it naturally deteriorate over time.
Even if the Fat Burn can go as high as 4.0 (losing 4 Weight per day, as is the plan for now) that's still somewhat slow. There's a bit of a inner conflict I've been having over this: I don't want the player to be able to just clear out all the Weight instantly, as the "permanence" of all the fat is part of what makes it exciting to me. Driving that point home by making the player have to work to lose weight is nice, but it's pretty awful from a fun, gameplay standpoint. It means there will be a lot of downtime between fights when the player is losing weight, so what do we do about that?
Oh no, another game with forced Crafting in it!
Indeed there will be crafting at some point. I'll be scattering a few materials across the town map. These materials will be used to create new cards and perhaps create consumables that temporarily increase your stats or help with weight loss. They will regenerate and spawn on the map over time with some semblance of randomization. Doing things like the aforementioned exercise will also give you some unique material.
I think this is a pretty reasonable to approach to getting new cards, since attaching each card to a single opponent is of course not very viable. I could also give each opponent several potential cards and randomize the drops, but not only do I dislike this in games, it also incentivizes grinding, which is actually quite impossible with the slow burn weight loss design right now. That is in fact one of the reasons I went for this direction, as I don't want any of the fights in the game to feel like "just another generic mob". All of the opponents you've seen so far have names, some semblance of personality or backstory, and are all intended to return at some point. Yes, even Arnold from the intro.
So back to the crafting: that'll be one of the things for you to do while you wait to get back to tip top shape. Unsurprisingly it's not enough. I'll have to come up with more activities to do and even then I'm not sure how fun this "management" aspect of the game will be. The nice part is that this isn't some big game studio where I have to churn something out quickly for the christmas season. Especially with the feedback I can get after every version release, if it doesn't pan out, we can always scrap this whole weight loss mechanic and try something else (but of course fingers crossed it won't come to that.)
That's it for this post!
As you can tell, apart from the music, I've mostly been doing design stuff and not much implementation, as the upcoming features are quite essential to determining whether the core game loop will be actually fun to play. I thought all the work I did on v0.1.0 was enough to shift the game over from a prototype to a fuller game, but unsurprisingly, there turned out to be so many more systems that still need to be done.
Just to make it clear, the upcoming updates won't necessarily include all of the things I discuss in these logs. It'll depend on if I manage to implement and polish them to be meaningful enough to include in the update.
Thank you for reading another monthly log on the game! I haven't said this explicitly yet, so to let you know: any ideas and suggestions are welcome, so feel free to post them in the comments, or you can message me on the many places! They don't even have to be particularly intricate: even something as simple as "that idea seems pretty good/bad" can be helpful!
... I would feel a little bad if I didn't include some eye candy in here, so I'll leave you with this:
Comments
Pout
If you were open to the idea of some cards allowing you to lose weight during a battle, I think a good card would be a single-use “Crash Diet” card that’d do something like -2 weight, -2 fitness costing 2 energy. So if you play it without any planning you’ll end up even heavier than you started.
Walrus
A simple mechanic for weight loss could be at the end of each fight your fitness gets subtracted from your weight. So if you end a fight at 32 with 2 fitness then you'd leave the fight at 30 weight. That would allow you to loose some weight after a fight (or gain if you ended with negative fitness) but have it connected to how you played in the fight and also not require "grinding".
Noka
(also I feel like I should add on here: I like the idea of the more fat you have, the better at the Fattening you become, and I would enjoy a playstyle where you seduce feeders and maintain a thick status to play cards like Vernon's and crush opponents with a rushdown strategy. I really like the idea of feeders just being a necessary component to maintain large weights, and I'd enjoy some "romance" the game has being filtered through that lens.)
Noka
Re: weight loss, it depends on the structure of the game's story, I think. If you intend to have a focused storyline, a way for players to reduce weight quickly is super necessary. But if you intend to have the game be mostly formless with a sort of mission-oriented format after the initial tutorial, then you could have de-fattening be slow. The problem is that you don't want weight loss to become so tedious it causes players to put the game down. If you want to avoid the tedium, I think there's some good answers: A way to expand max weight (perhaps height manipulation/growing taller? adds a 'tolerance') would both make sense AND not diminish the need to lose weight, just mean your ability to buffer more weight goes higher and higher... Until you're a 6'10" lazy fatass. A way to transfer weight onto others (maybe a card archetype?) ++ some level of ability to seek battles infinitely for card gains and etc. Being able to maneuver around an opponent you seek, dump all your weight on him, and then render him immobile is very in-character for the game, would feel good to the player, and would answer the need for weight gain solutions. After near immobility (once someone else has to feed you), make it so the player naturally loses weight unless they deliberately coerce someone into being their feeder. After all, if you're a lone superchub who barely has clothes to speak of, in a town with low infrastructure, with no Uber Eats or anything... how are you gonna manage to get that many calories to upkeep yourself? That combined with max weight expansion would allow you to build into being the Avatar of the Fattening if you wanted to. A 6'10" fatass really out to get big. In general though, it makes the most sense to either put weight loss mechanics into the card game where you can play the game to redistribute the weight, or add minigames. (If you want to make the card game less viable for offloading all your weight on a few weenies, adding a "max weight that can be transferred over any one combat" would prevent it from becoming a menace of a strategy.) Without the card game element, I would say passive isn't enough. Adding minigames (maybe just little mini-card-games) makes the most sense for giving a sense of time progression while also not taking forever. Have fun with it. From a gameplay perspective, I personally wouldn't click with the game if it felt like I was obligated to do a ton of actual tedium where I need to click the same button 10 times and skip all the cutscenes just because I played recklessly and now the moment I walk into the next combat they beat over my cards so hard my clothes fly off.
Oak Fells
I already have a debug menu I use to view how the character models look, so if I just polish it a bit, I could definitely do something along those lines! As for romance, it's not explicitly in the plans, but the way the the game works, it definitely lends itself to the idea! It won't necessarily be an entire mechanic but there will definitely be the option to get more intimate with some characters.
Aaron M
In regards to the weight loss mechanic, I have a couple ideas right off the top of my head. First, foraging for materials could help you lose weight little by little. Second, you could make crafting cost more materials while you're fatter, (because all the weight gets in the way or something) but you burn off a portion of fat when you craft that way. Both of these things would allow weight loss without necessarily adding a whole mechanic in.
Joe
I think an art gallery of opponents you've beaten would be cool, like of them in various stages of fatness. Also, part of me thinks it'd be cool to have different romance choices. But that may or may not work with how the story and characters interact. I'm also suggesting that because something about Vernon makes me very interested in him.
Frank
I wonder if there was some system you could use where in the guys could “share” weight, ie you transfer over some of your excess weight to Gordon or another guy on the squad between battles. Could help build comradery with other guys on the squad, help to fatten them up too, and give a quick way to decrease weight. However, this becomes another kind of resource to manage as there is only so much weight you can transfer before the guys “fill up” and reach their limits
Khen
For additional weight loss, what about "sparring matches" with Gordon? None of the weight from the fight is kept (and no weight gain animations since youre not actually trying to fatten eachother) but some portion of leftover fitness from the battle apply to weight lost at the end of the day. Also gives people a way to try out new decks without being in a real fight or help them "train" to a certain weight for their next real fight by letting them play a fitness deck to lose weight. Could also be a good way to spend time with Gordon...You know, for people who want to see more Gordon.
