no for the graphics part but imma also add that crashing moment also happens without bursting sometimes but that harder to recreate
New Release!
Changelist:
- Added Male Player Character
- Getting caught in the rain now has consequences
- Fixed the crash on game over
Get it at the link above, or On the Vine by captainstupids - itch.io with password âwgforumâ.
This is a DEBUG build, so if there are crashes it will spit out error messages.
New Release!
Changelist:
- You can now forage nearby for essentials
- Finished the environment for the abandoned(?) shelter
- Day/night cycle is a little more even and thereâs more daylight
- A bunch of new items
- Slight difficulty change, which Iâll talk about in a bit
- Finished a new secret and extremely rare encounter
Thereâs still a lot of difficulty to rebalance and one of the things Iâm trying to get right is hunger. Right now, if youâre really infected it makes you starving all of the time. If youâre not very infected you donât get as hungry. Previously you were most likely to just pop from not finding enough batteries and juicing machines. This update is more balanced towards either starving or bursting, but I might have gone a little too far on the starving side. IDK.
Story wise, it makes most sense for people who are extremely infected to just never starve (but always be hungry). Gameplay wise Iâm not sure what I want to do. If you are extremely infected youâll always seem to be hungry and every bit of food you eat will go straight to your growth, but itâs possible to starve still. I think I might rebalance things so that more infected means less hungry but more in need of juicing. That makes two food items a little unnecessary, but perhaps thereâs a way to work it in.
I havenât started making the city yet, but I really should. The game needs another level.
I havenât figured out how I want combat to work yet, either, and Iâm not happy with any solution Iâve made so far. Might continue to ignore all combat and just make events.
Do folks think this is ready enough now to show the public?
3 Likes
I rebalanced hunger a little so itâs more of a balance between infection and hunger. If youâre less infected youâll get hungrier faster. If youâre more infected youâll fill with juice faster but get hungry less quickly. It means the player only has to really worry about one thing at a time, but itâs still challenging. I started working on the city and have ideas for two encounters, one in the outland and the other in the city. Still donât really have a formal combat system, but Iâm increasingly okay with dialog only. I do wish I had something more to offer than just hitting buttons, but not many ideas.
New Release!
Changelist:
- See above for rebalanced hunger/infection.
- New encounter in the wilderness - can encounter male bandits and Iâll be doing a matching female encounter soon.
- A bunch of new items that I forgot to add to the spawn list. ._.
Would be good to know how people are dying (starvation vs bursting vs injury), as whom people are playing (male/female), and if people have found any of the âsuper rareâ events.
1 Like
I am normally playing male and mostly dying by bursting (didnât even know there was an injury ending). Just one thing about the dialogue, after a while i just started spamming through everything, though it might be that there are not that many events yet. If you want something more to do you could put minigames for some rare events, such as âyou find a supply bag in the middle of a bush use your hand and donât touch the spikes or risk getting infectedâ, âoh no you just entered a room in the sewers and the door locked behind you also the air is tasting quite blueberrish find the key/valve/crowbar and get outta there (there would be a image of a room filled with stuff and you had to find the object with the screen getting progressevely bluer until you couldnât see a thing and the âPOPâ Game Overâ, and one last one âyou find a survivor that is offering some rare supplies in exchange for some money though you feel like he is trying to cheat you somehow barter with him to get a better price and donât get him to angry or you might leave with nothing except another enemy in these dangerous timesâ.
1 Like
Good recommendations all around. Appreciate the feedback.
:nod: There are two ultra rare events like this, but no minigames yet. I keep trying them but Iâm not finding any that I like. I was thinking maybe a âlook around in the darkâ or in the fog and click on stuff to pick it up, but the others I tried didnât âfeelâ great.
This is planned! Originally the player was going to have to trade batteries like currency, but I havenât made them yet.
EDIT: One other thing thatâs planned is being able to combine items. Finding recipes or just experimenting really appeals to me because of the prospects of hidden content.
EDIT 2: That âreach into a bush to grab somethingâ minigame sounds like it might work. Reminds me of Surgeon Simulator. x)
I got rid of a bunch of dialogs that were saying things like, âYou return to your shelterâŚâ and the game does feel better. I will play some more tomorrow after Iâve had a chance to rest.
Also based on feedback, I got rid of most dialog notices and instead put the data inside the player status area. Itâs messy now but I can make a real UI for it later.
One other change that made sense was to get rid of foraging nearby and instead let the person enter how much time they want to spend outside looking around. I havenât done anything but add the UI component and need to figure out what balance will mean, but this seems like a better choice than just foraging nearby or exploring. Presumably if one is out longer youâll find more things and better things, but thereâs also more risk of attack and youâll get more tired.
2 Likes
Some ideas Iâm kicking around:
Maybe the juicer should be portable and battery operated. STALKER did the thing where bullets were both currency and ammunition. I was hoping to do the same thing with batteries, but having to seek out the juicing machine doesnât make much sense, then. Just being able to hit âdoor â go to juicerâ or even being able to pick one up and bring it to your place makes sense.
I had imagined outlands â city â office â labs, but perhaps it makes more sense to just be able to go from the outlands to wherever and back quickly and easily, like CoC. That is, âexplore outlandsâ, âexplore Xâ, âexplore Yâ. This would mean I donât have to spend as much time building a separate shelter for each new zone and the player could have just one base.
Grabbing stuff in a bush as a minigame is a really good idea (props to Glass), but itâs a little hard for touch pads, touch screens, and roller-ball mice. I imagine itâs hard with gamepads, but havenât tried. I want to try and keep the game as accessible as possible and so Iâm trying my best to stick with JUST touch input.
You could make an option carry it on you but loose on carrying space or risk damaging it or leaving it at base and risk it being stolen
Trash Panda Simulator Confirmed
This doesnât have a good feel to it yet. Maybe it makes sense to only grab one item at a time and use a different approach.
It does make foraging for stuff more interactive, especially if time is connected to real time. Iâm also thinking about how to make exploration less of a âclick and waitâ fest. Doing something like picking one of four cardinal directions and then having random encounters from there might work, but thatâs a lot of effort and is maybe going in a direction I donât want it to. Even just going through the trash for items might be a wrong turn since this game really should be narrative first.
Maybe people clicking through dialogs is inevitable and I just need more unique encounters and less time spent trying other systems. Or maybe I should play more CoC to critique how they do it.
Guess Itâs true. Narrative is definitely a good option, and if you feel like this new system doesnât aline with your vision for the game you should srap or reporpose it in another way. But the problem here that we have I believe is infinity or more specifically there being no end goal. The game as it currently stands is an infinite text box where your choices always lead to the same results making it repetitive. While there are many games that take care of this problem by either adding new systems, I see that that is not what you really want. Therefore if you want to focus on dialogue i suggested goind the route that the game â60 secondsâ took where there are many events which might lead to consequeces for other events, plus and this is really just something that you should only add if you are sure of it, make the game progressively harder with resources getting scarcer and scarcer until you either pop, starve or finish the game (though for this last one you would have to create one or multiple endings)(cause it stands that there is no really risk if you play your cards right). Ok I went quite a bit on a tagent, but last but not least the most important thing, just have fun and know that you are doing a good job.
1 Like
Iâm really enjoying the inflation aspects, and thereâs plenty of it to go around. Iâll need to do some more runs of the game to see more of what it has to offer, but Iâm definitely interested to see how this evolves.
However, thereâs something about the artstyle that just rubs me the wrong way. The player model just looks slightly⌠unsettling. Personally a more stylized visual style would work better for a topic as unrealistic as blueberry inflation.
Despite that, Iâve got high hopes for this game. Iâm looking forward to seeing it grow (heh)!
Fun game so far! Though the small max size and lack of color change does throw me a tad off, canât wait to see what comes next thought!
Oh! Thereâs definitely an end-goal planned. See spoilers in the first post. I still have at least two regions and (maybe) a craft system to put together.
Thanks for the kind words. For size, see if you can find some more eslastinup. 
Iâm still trying to figure out the color change. -_-
New Release!
Has it really been two weeks since the last release? Wow.
Changelist:
- Removed a bunch of the dialog that says âYouâre feeling X,â or âYouâre hungry.â The player needs to check their status proactively now, which should lead to less wild dialog click-throughs.
- Added a rough âgraphicalâ display in the character panel for the different features.
- If youâve been to the juicer enough times now, you can memorize the way, meaning you only need to worry about keeping enough batteries on hand.
- Added a new encounter â the female bandit!
- Thereâs always a 10% chance of success now, even if youâve completely burnt out a stat.
- The playerâs weight and fill will change less quickly, so now you can see the effects of taking things which thin you out (or blimp you up).
Next:
- The uninfected caravan will likely get converted to a trading caravan.
Iâm still trying to balance hunger and the physical systems. More infected means you wonât get as hungry, but youâre more likely to burst. Let me know what you think of the difficulty change and if the new UI makes sense.
5 Likes
Small Release!
Was hoping to have more done for this but decided to stop waiting and just get something out of the door.
Changelist:
- Players will turn more blue as they become more infected. This can be disabled in the pause menu under settings. Iâm having some issues with making it stick across saves.
- The caravan encounter is turned off while I rework it.
- Small balance tweaks and (hopefully) some bugfixes to weird animation things.
Next:
- Still fixing the caravan into trading post.
- A new person from whom you can barter.
- Diegetic UI â Going to have to break and make this happen, much as I wanted everything to happen in-world.
BUG: If you have a game over, âload gameâ from the title menu is doing something odd. Closing and restarting the game will make load work correctly.
Iâm still not super happy with how it plays, but I canât think of any mechanics that donât really distract from the nature of things.
4 Likes
Something about the non-diegetic UI that I like is that it takes out the disconnect between using items and their effects. Being able to see basically real time what they do is more helpful than I expected. I knew feedback was important, but even hereâŚ
It makes me wonder if perhaps itâs worth getting rid of the home base entirely and just having people click screen to screen. That would help with agency, though itâs still a lot of clicking. If this change feels good I might have to change how dialog works.
to be honest itâs up to you on how you want to take things
This definitely has a lot of potential. Personally, Iâd like to see a ânon-burstingâ setting, where the bursting outcomes are replaced with âimmobileâ or something.
Also, Iâve never encountered this trader you mentioned, probably because the RNG for events and the stuff you find is kinda frustrating. The items that make you not explode like the infection-reducer and capacity-increaser should show up more often if you want runs to last longer than five minutes.
3 Likes
New Release
Lots of systems changes to make it easier for me to add new events, so let me know about weird bugs. A bunch of new items and new encounters are available, plus some drop-rate changes.
Changelist:
- Caravan is still disabled, but there are two new events and one new encounter.
- New UI that somehow changes how the game feels a lot. Itâs still possible to click on things in the world and Iâm considering removing that interactability.
Next:
- Thereâs a code split between âeventsâ and âscenesâ that I think might not make sense. I was going to get rid of it this release but Iâm going to push it back to think about it more.
- I might maybe change the encounter rate of two ultra-rare encounters and just make it so that they canât be encountered in the same playthrough.
- Need to find a new ânext phaseâ, but that would be somewhat predecated on the event/scene change above.
- Changes to caravan.
3 Likes