BloatLand is a weight-gain inflation platformer inspired by the Wario Land series, with a focus towards the older games of all the entries.
You play as Googal, a gourmand pirate who is out in search of some tasty treasure. Your goal is to retrieve the legendary cuisine that is found scattered all through-out Bloatland, by exploring different areas where the goods reside. There will be many obstacles and enemies in your path, as well as strange transformations that are caused by the Land of Bloat itself.
So far all I’ve got is a prototype, which you can play on itch. This prototype has all the necessary basics; Googals moveset and one transformation, enemies, and some lesser stuff. Decided that it’d be better to announce this sooner than later, as well as get feedback throughout development.
Feedback is appreciated, and I’m excited to continue forth on this journey! ^w^
Seems fun so far! It’s a bit tricky to do a ground pound, and even tricker to do a backflip, you might want to make ground pound a dedicated button, perhaps?
Yeah that might be a good idea, I’ll experiment a little and see if I can come up with a better input method for both of those. I just wanna try to make sure it can’t be easily executed on accident.
This is helpful input, thank you and I’ll try to think of something! ^w^
good day, the game feels more or less interesting, although some things are unclear to me how to get through, where there are high ledges. as if you need to somehow climb, but I did not understand how
and so, I found a small bug (when I tried to go through a narrow passage with S, D and space)
That bug is easily repeatable with every other corner in the prototype. Another issue I found was that you can’t break blocks if you’re standing directly next to them.
Bugs aside, I would suggest implementing “Coyote Time” to help with platforming and being more specific about key movement controls as its pretty hard to platform right now.
I was attempting to get into in the picture above. I had to bounce off the nearby enemy, ground pound, and then quickly cancel it with a backflip to reach the ledge. It took me a while to realize the backflip isn’t the “jump when you land” variety and I still can’t tell if the High Jump is when you bounce off enemies to get slightly higher or not.
Oh yeah that’s no good, I know what the issue is so it should be fixed by next build. The blocks not breaking when really close was fixed, but the fix was causing other bugs so I undid the fix for now.
I did implement coyote time, and jump buffering. Both are set to 0.1 seconds which may be way too tight and people might prefer the window to be more forgiving, if that’s the case then that’ll be a quick tweak.
Yeahh, the highjump is different from jumping on an enemy. You execute it by jumping as soon as you touch the floor after already jumping or falling a certain distance. Think of the second part of Marios triple jump from Super Mario 64. You can visually tell when you can do it whenever Googals arms are in the air when falling.
Might be a dumb mechanic that should be removed, like the punch attack that used to be in the oldest build. You just never know until you get a bunch of people trying it.
I could’ve done better explaining the controls and how to do everything, but I just wanted to see how hard it was for others to figure this stuff out on their own.
Yeah, I didn’t do a great job explaining some stuff. For the really high ledges you’ve got to use a combination of moves. Highjumping off an enemy and then doing a backflip, or longjumping with the rush attack and then diving if you want to do it horizontally.
I thought I fixed that bug by preventing uncrouching in spots like that, but I guess I didn’t. That’s no good if it’s that easy to get stuck, I’ll look into it.
Interesting, I wonder if you got stuck like you did in the above example or if one of the wider hitboxes didn’t turn off and you weren’t able to go through the one-tile gap. I definitely try to figure out what the issue is and hopefully get it fixed up.
hiii!!! i love the things u make and i am very very hyped that ur making a new game. i was using the web version and found 2 bugs. one of which has been mentioned here multiple times, the getting stuck in a corner thing. but also i found out if you just mash x and z fast enough while holding down + left or right midair you can backflip infinitely, and essentially fly! which im sure isnt intentional
Thank you!! OOOHHH that’s a really good catch, that was a complete oversight I never caught! I’m glad you found that out, it really needs a proper limit or something to prevent that from happening.
A minor oddity I found while trying to get all the get all the nuggets. The breakable blocks stick out a bit. If you go over to the four blocks right of the starting area, you can stand on top of the very edge of them. This probably isn’t a problem, but I thought you might be good to point out.
Also, I was able to get into the upper right room using the dashing and diving method once I knew the jump buffer time.
Oh yeah that’s something I noticed but didn’t think too much of, but the wonky collisions definitely needed fixed on those boxes. It really trips you up and halts the flow of the movement. The boxes were kind of just slapped together as a last minute thing to show how attacks can interact with the environment.
I’m glad you were able to do it! I probably stretched that jump too thin and jumps like that won’t be common in the actual game, I was just testing to see how far you can go with the movement.
Really love this demo, I had fun with the moveset even if I didn’t understand it at first. I do think there’s something a little weird happening right after a backflip. I found myself able to crouch and get an extra jump at the end of it, and also this:
The big backflip
For some reason it was easier when facing left than right, but it is doable.
(Man I really gotta read other comments before posting stuff, someone already found this)
I’m super excited to see what comes next for this, it’s got a really good foundation and it’s fun to mess around even in this small test level!
Thank you! Yeah someone already found this out but man is it mesmerizing seeing someone actually pull it off. I’m also surprised you can gain an extra jump by crouching and jumping out of it, I’ll have to see if I can recreate it later.
I really appreciate it, even though it’s still really rough, I’m feeling a lot more confident with this project since I spent the time making a good foundation. Some more work and I think it’ll be a solid base to start building off of!
Got an update up, 0.0.13. I believe I’ve dealt with everything everyone had issues with, and it’s feeling better now.
You can go try it out on the itch.io
Also just quickly jotting down what I did, since I don’t knowif I’ll be able to keep up with making dev logs on itch.
Quick Summary
Biggest thing being the janky collisions, redid a lot of the collision stuff and now you shouldn’t be able to get stuck anymore. You can now break blocks up close as well.
I also tweaked the moveset a bit. Highjump was removed, makes things simpler on my part, but I dunno if you guys think this was a good idea or not.
I made the backflip it’s own button input, and now the groundpound has no cancel but feels a lot smoother to use. Also squashed the infinite backflip loop.
Made the coyote time and jump buffer a little more forgiving as well. As well as fixed some bugs as they came up.
I’d be curious to see what everyone thinks of the new controls, as it should be easier to execute some of the trickier moves now. I also wrote down the inputs for all of them on itch.
Only thing I was concerned about was it being too easy to execute one of these moves on accident, but unless you’re using a really sloppy d-pad like the switch pro-controller, it shouldn’t be an issue I’d think.
I tested the new version a bit and it does feel better. I don’t have a switch pro controller, I’ve been playing on keyboard, so I couldn’t test the D-Pad thing. However, I did find a bug that allows you to pick up defeated enemies and hold nothing at all:
All you have to do is pick up an enemy and put them down near a wall, but position yourself so that they land on top of you. Then, dash attack while the enemy is on top of you and grab them afterward. If done correctly, the enemy should switch to its defeated state when picked up. Dropping them and trying to pick them up again will result them being defeated with Googal holding nothing.
A few more things, you can slide by ducking after gaining momentum with a dash attack. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but you could do something similar in the Wario Land games. Honestly, I always show it as a positive. The High Jump removal isn’t that noticeable to me even when trying to reach the ceiling of the left room. I do think a butt bounce or squat jump would make a good replacement if needed.
