BloatLand - A WarioLand Inspired WG Inflation Platformer (0.1.51)

Poor platform placement is something I’m gonna try to be more careful about, which I’m sure there’s a couple jumps I made too hard, but I do want to state that this game isn’t going to be a simple walk through the park either. There will be tight jumps, and some maneuvers will require a certain level of skill to pull off successfully. If you find the dive to be too slippery and hard, try using the rush attack to jump over large gaps instead, the stop for it barely slips at all.

That is a good point, I’ll make it to where the player sprite can flip even when not blowing. While the Air Inflation will keep the inverted controllers, the Water Inflation won’t in future builds, it’ll control more like normal swimming.
When you are inflated and underwater, the character is slowly taking in water, which is why you expand. The underwater segments are a race against time, if there’s a narrow passage, you better hurry up before you get too big to get through.

As time goes on, the jank will be ironed out, and certain sections and mechanics will be reworked to be less frustrating. The game will not become easier though, I plan on having this game being pretty challenging, so the game may not sit right with certain people. I have set expectations for the players ability and skill, which is already a pretty low bar, and I’m not going to pull back any punches for those who can’t meet these expectations.

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Just remember that what you design is already going to be harder for players than it is for you because you’re the one who designed it. You already know where to go, how to use the mechanics, and figured it all out ahead of time before implementing it. Players don’t have that.

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Oh yeah for sure, it’s an easy pitfall for devs to fall into, so I’m trying to keep that in mind and not fall into it myself. I just meant that I’m designing the game with a certain skill floor in mind, I have faith in the player to be able to jump across a gap.

The game is still in a rough prototype state though, and is in desperate need of level reworks, tutorials, improved mechanics, etc. It’s missing a lot of stuff that players need, and I’m hoping to get the game to a state where it’s not as frustrating or confusing in the future.

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Omg love what you have so far, this will be so cool finished!

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Another progress report, uhhhhhh I’m doing stuff I guess.

I haven’t gotten much time this week to work on this. I think next week will be a little busy too but I hope I’ll have more free time.
I did get the Water Balloon transformation reworked into something I’m somewhat happy with, I think it’s an overall improvement. Of course, then I turned to the fat transformation and realized this was going to be a doozy too. I started to lean more towards stuffing/vore than fat, but I got the fat transformation feeling better, and gave it more utility than the old version. I haven’t finished play-testing this transformation yet, but I’m hoping it will be more fun and won’t be completely worthless now.
I’ve also been messing with hitboxes, edited and add some mockups to a transformation. I’m mainly just trying to adjust stuff to where the corners of the collision shapes line up better with the sprites, so it doesn’t look like googal is standing on nothing when on a ledge.

I can’t think of anything else, it wasn’t a very productive week, but that’s to be expected, I’m not gonna beat myself up too hard about it. I’m already anticipating for an entire week or two in December to be eaten up by holiday stuff, so I may slow down a lot.

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Due to recent news about the future of weight gaming, I started looking into some stuff and setting things up, for whenever the projects category gets locked down. (I asked and it was confirmed in the discord server, the projects category is still going to be locked down. Whether it’s temporary or permanent depends on how well the donation drive does.)

Just stating it right now, I’m not leaving Weight Gaming, I’m gonna try to stay here as much as possible. While I want to try my best to not split up too much between multiple sites, some of it may be inevitable. So with that out of the way, here’s what I’ve been looking into.

I’ve looked into the wiki a little bit, and ended up getting carried away and making a BloatLand wiki page. Anyone can edit or add to it if they want, regardless I’m gonna do what I can to at least keep it up to date. I’m planning on making wiki entries for my previous projects too, even if it’s minimal.
The wiki is limited, it is a static website, and migrating over there means losing a lot of functionality that we have here on the forum, like communication and notifications. I think it works for what it’s made for, but I’m still going to have to look for a alternative to cover what the wiki lacks in.

I’ve also enabled the forums on BloatLand’s itch page, just in case my other options don’t work out well. However, I still don’t feel like opening the itch page to the public yet, so still, the only way to access it will be through this thread, or the wiki page.

Also, I am not starting a discord server, no way in hell.

The best solution I could come up with at the moment, was to start a ko-fi. It’s been something I’ve been interested in doing for a while, but never got around to doing it until I got my rear kicked into gear recently.

https://ko-fi.com/jacotomo

With half of my main outlet for my game dev stuff getting axed, temporarily at best, and with my lack of activity on Furaffinity and Bluesky, I figured having a single place where people can follow and keep up on whatever I’m currently doing would be handy. I go into way more detail in the blog post I made on my Ko-fi.
So what I’m planning on is having my game dev progress posts and other stuff, including access to the BloatLand itch page, up on the Ko-fi for free. There is also a $1 membership, which I will be doing a monthly sketch, that supporters can vote on via a poll, for.

So whenever the projects category gets locked down, the plan is to use the wiki, Ko-fi, and itch, to keep this thread going, at least in spirit.

That’s that, just wanted to throw out there what I’m doing. It may be a little early to start prepping, but I’d rather be too early than procrastinate and try to do all of this last minute.

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The itch.io link on the wiki does not work, it ask for a password and I think it’s because you typed “goop” but the password was “Goop” XD

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OHHH you’re right, thanks for pointing that out! I’ll fix it if nobody else has yet lmao.

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Well, it’ll be nice to still have a place to stay up to date on updates when the project pages get shut down, whether temporarily or permanently. Respect on not making a Discord BTW, seems like a hassle to handle one, especially if it’s publicly available. Made an account ASAP to follow - and found out I apparently already had one that I just haven’t used in forever, so that was neat. The adventures of Googal getting mildly inconvenienced by being turned into big shapes continues!

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Yeah, I wanted to try to keep updates and discussions alive, while trying my best to keep the inconvenience to a minimum. DEFINITELY, it seems like a lot of work to run one, and I just don’t have the energy for that. I’ve seen too many servers crumble because the owners weren’t capable of handling one, I’m not falling into that same trap lmao.
Yeesss, the goo is gonna keep on gettin’ gooey! >w>

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Itchio does have a little ‘Community’ thing you can have for posting topics if you want to keep discussion going, at least. It’s already there at the bottom of the BloatLand page.

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Yeah, I already enabled it for that reason. I’m gonna feel around with the Ko-fi and itch community section, but I can already tell that the ko-fi probably won’t be good for feedback and all that stuff, so I’m probably going taking advantage of this itch feature.

I am wondering if I should make a few dedicated threads on itch for bugs and stuff like that, or if I should just let other people make the threads themselves.

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Not much of an update, as I’ve been using whatever free time I had on other stuff.

I mocked up a room or two just to get a feel of how a tutorial might play out, or how it feels to go back and forth the same room, but not much has been done since last time.

I’ve also been thinking on the layouts of levels, and what I could do to make better ones in the future. With the current levels, I always feel like each act forks off onto their own path, with their own separate section of level. I feel like these acts need a little more overlap, and I’d prefer the levels to be a little less linear.
One idea was to take a key location from an act in a level, and incorporate it more into the main level layout itself. Like with the winter level now, it’s just a mountain, with a reactor sub-level set off to the side; so what if instead, the reactor was more built into the mountain?
I don’t know, it’s just some thoughts I’ve been having.

While I may not be able to get as many experimental stuff implemented into the prototype level this month as I hope, I’m gonna try to get a new build out in a week or two. I wanna get this out there before the end of the year gets crazy for me.

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