Alright, launching a new build for people to look at. Not much has been added, but it’s enough to warrant another release. You can download it up at the first post.
Fixed some bugs
Adjusted all of the enemies, most notably the fairy. I made them more annoying.
Adjusted quite a few stats on enemies and the adventurers to try balancing things a bit for more interesting combat without making the enemies too difficult.
Adjusted how the maid character interacts with the weight system. Now she doesn’t get effected by the digesting status, nor does she gain TP. I might adjust this again later, but w/e. This will be in the next update.
Added a new skill for the maid, some more items to mess around with, and a few new enemies (you can interact with the hole and the plant now), including a boss Minotaur for a harder enemy to test the combat with.
I’m hoping to whip up a quick senario before the game jam ends in order to complete the whole vertical slice thing, but, given how much work I’ve already put into this, I might just end up calling it here. We’ll see. Either way, once the jam’s over, I’m going to be shifting my focus into making the story and areas from the beginning.
I really like this concept. Didn’t even realize you could have AI controlled party members in RPG maker. It’s crazy how many creative new game concepts people can make with the same game engine. Can’t wait to see more.
I think it needs to be harder to fatten them up though I understand this is still an alpha and the pacing will probably change, I still think you should have to really stuff them a lot more to get the numbers to go up. I think digestion could be slowed down a bit to increase the importance of tactical belly rubs, maybe digestion speed could be a stat that increases over time as the game progresses? Stuffed/food coma states should be made more obvious the player, maybe a bit of dialog from the two girls when they reach it telling you they are too full to fight or just a short game message. Also, will it be possible to make the maid gain a bit of weight herself? I hope she isn’t completely left out. I want to just say again though, this is an awesome game concept.
I accidentally stumbled onto that when I was trying to make a Bezerker in VX Ace. Now I have to restart the whole project in MZ because my old computer died, and the cloud save failed.
On the subject of this game more importantly, I really like the concept and can’t wait to see where it goes.
There’s a specific reason why the adventurers put on weight so easily. It’s for mechanical and story reasons.
Mechanically, the point is so that you can change the adventurer’s weight mid-battle if desired. After all, getting fatter is not meant to be a straight power upgrade. It’s a trade off. A higher weight makes them slower overall and locks them out of certain skills, but it also gives them new skills and makes them a bit beefier. They used to gain weight slower, but it didn’t feel good, since if you got into a battle that really leaned towards one adventurer being a certain weight (like the ninja getting magical attacks), the battle just turns into a slog of either trying to kill them without getting fatter, or getting fat enough to deal with the enemy more efficiently. This is also the case going the other way, and I’m planning on putting in some items that make it a bit easier to lose weight as well. Though, using skills + the healthier items
can do that alright. I hope all this ends up being a bit more obvious when it’s more than just a test room.
Story-wise, I’m going to keep that for my self for now.
As for the visibility stuff, yeah, I definitely want to make certain pieces of information easier to see for the player. Though, I’m not really too keen on doing dialogue stuff in combat. Not really sure why, but the more I think about it the more it bugs me. I guess I can’t help but think about how ungodly annoying it is in games like Xenoblade Chronicles and the like.
Just realized that I didn’t mention the stuff with how long digestion lasts. The mechanical point of digestion is simply to give the player time to use another food item before the adventurer goes off using another skill, and it just so happens to make sense in context of the game. The only reason why belly rub exists is to allow the player to make certain skills happen faster if necissary. It’s not something to necessarily use all the time. Though, I’ll admit that how it’s currently balanced makes belly rub a much more necessary part of gameplay than I’d perfer. Though, my thoughts on that skill may change over time. Regardless, I’m not really interested in forcing people to use the skill more by lengthening the duration of digestion.
Ah I see, playing 0.2 now and their weight is fluctuating much more. Are you planing to slow the pace of the WG as it’s introduced into the story though? I really like the idea of slowing “training” characters to become gluttons over time. Like slowly increasing their stomach capacity/greed/etc. just from overfeeding them over time or having them leveling up. Maybe have the chubby,fat, obese, etc status locked behind a certain level or story events before allowing the characters to use them?
Understandable about the dialog in combat thing though. Maybe just a distinctive icon or a short status message instead?
Really love how their skillset changes as they get fatter though, that is brilliant.
I guess I am just a sucker for that sort of thing. Love it when a person overeats to the point of helplessness. Really like the idea of a character being completely overstuffed but needs to keep forcing food in because they need the health/mana/tp gain to win, making the maid alleviate their stomach ache as a time crucial game mechanic. Think it would fit pretty well into a game where we basically assume the role of a feeder in combat. Just my $.02
I get what you mean with the latter part. Like I said, I’m still not 100% sure what I want to do with the digestion, food coma, and belly rub stuff in terms of balancing. My “I’m not really interested in x” comment is more just my stance on it right now. That could very well change. My end goal is to make the combat fun, engaging, and relatively balanced. Basically, I just want to make a good game with that stuff.
As for the leveling up thing, I already kinda started going in that direction without realizing it. Each skill is unlocked at a certain level, with the final skill unlocking at 25 (right now, at least). Since those skills are kinda tied to the weight levels in a way, I could easily lock weight levels behind that as well. Though, it might not be a hard limit 'cause it’d be weird to introduce immobility as a failure state 25 levels or so into the game. But, it still could be done in some way, I’ll think more on that.
Alright, releasing one final update for the jam. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have any story, but it does have some things to go through, so it should produce a better feel for the game then the test room stuff did.
Anyway, here’s what I added:
4 new maps, including a forest area, cave area, and a shop.
Some enemies have been adjusted, and I’ve added 2 more, while getting rid of the thug. He just didn’t fit the area.
a bunch of new items, some have place-holder names though.
New battle music.
A bunch of treasure chests around the areas. I’d recommend checking each of them twice for reasons.
So yeah, I’m officially done with the jam. Thank you everyone for the support, and I’ll see you when I get the ball rolling on the game proper.
This is a really interesting concept! The idea of just having your partners do the fighting for you is really neat, and I feel like there is a lot of potential in this game! You did a great job!
I would like to ask if it would be possible to download the game from a site other than Mediafire? The download speed there is always so slow for me. Even this 800MB game gives me an estimate of needing ~5 hours to complete.
Sure, just give me a bit to upload it to somewhere else. Only real reason why the game is 800 MB+ is 'cause I didn’t want to waste dev-time making sure everything was better compressed and taking out unused files. RPG Maker MV’s “don’t include unused files” feature doesn’t play nice with my game.
It’s no fault on your end or anything. I wouldn’t care if the game size was even several gigs. It’s just that Mediafire servers don’t seem like they wanna play nice with me.
Can you explain what the “Conjure Food lvl 1.” and “Triple Stuffing” do? And it seems like you can use “Triple Stuffing” out of combat, but I don’t see any effect.
Conjure Food lvl 1 adds a number of food items to your inventory at the cost of MP. It’s to ensure people aren’t dead in the water with no food. In the full version, the plan is to get higher and higher levels of it as the game progresses.
Triple Stuffing is something I was experimenting with. First, it’s not supposed to work out of combat, I forgot to set it so that it doesn’t. The ability basically makes it so that, on your next turn, you can use 3 items rather than just 1, but you can’t use any spells at that time. It’s kinda a prototype of the skill, since it’s a bit jank atm.
Ok! I found that the Steak item does not add any Stamina, or it doesn’t show that it does.
Belly Rub seems to put the target to sleep? I’ve had rounds where I’ve used the ability to help speed up the round and it ends up slowing instead. Unless I’m misreading it. I’d like confirmation that other people are having issues with this too
Not sure if it’s intentional, but the Maid doesn’t gain weight nearly as quickly as the other party members.
There’s no place to recover a KO’d party member early in the game, is there somewhere later or items you can buy to do that?