I’ve been thinking that a small town with areas where characters could go out and interact before being immobile would be nice, but that’s probably part of what made you rethink the scope. I’d say at least a physical map with each location would be nicer than just a locations menu. Maybe the apartments, warehouse, and 3rd area could be separate on the map as well, but I’d imagine that could create issues.
As far as furniture goes, maybe using preset room layouts like Tomodachi Life does would be enough? No need to have the furniture be usable, or in the middle of the room, and it’d help distinguish your characters’ rooms from one another.
Some more animations would be nice as well, like sitting, reading, or playing games. Characters could just do these things on the floor or with handheld items, to not have to use furniture.
This part is more personal preference, but I’ve been thinking it’d be nice if the game had a slower pace to it. To bring back the Tomodachi Life comparison, gaining level at a pace of maybe one or two per day would be nice, along with slower weight gain. Right now, the fast pace works well considering there’s not much else to do, but if you want to add more content like minigames as you’ve said, a slower pace may end up feeling better.
A visual day/night cycle would be nice, even if it just stays as a shop restock timer, since sleeping poses would probably be too much of a handful.
Anyway, I’ve also got a few bugs to report:
Stomach sounds play on full stomach-related blurbs even if they’re disabled.
Empty stomach-related blurbs don’t seem to play. I’ve gotten comments from characters saying they’re too full, while they were at 0 for a while, which makes me think that the full stomach ones may be playing regardless of fullness.
Room settings used to be changed per individual apartment, but now are reflected in every room. It seems like it’s related to the fact there’s the warehouse and 3rd area to switch between, but I’m not sure whether or not it’s intentional.
I think the game already feels pretty complete as far as basic functionality goes. It could do with a few more bells and whistles, but the core gameplay feels basically done to me.
Minigames are a good idea, especially if they put the character in a situation where all that blubber gets to move a bit. Bonus points if the player gets to interact with it directly- maybe something like the classic ‘applying sunscreen’ trope?
I feel like if furniture is going to be a thing, having some internal ‘size checkpoints’ that make the character interact with the item differently (or not at all, if they’re too big) would help things look a bit cleaner. I’m not sure what determines the distance the character holds their arms from their body, but something similar to that might be helpful to determine which furniture animation to use.
Some other misc thoughts:
-The random events are fun, but they should use the character’s stats to determine the outcome when taking certain choices, and which ones the character gets in the first place. I got the elevator one with a character that was under 200 wobbs, well within a reasonable size for an elevator to handle comfortably. I also got the soda one very late in the game. It feels a bit weird to have them fail to chug one two-liter bottle of soda when they can down ten mystery kegs in one go.
-A way to respec points would be nice. There’s a bit of a learning curve to how best to upgrade your character, and it took me a few tries to learn what upgrades to take and when.
-Not sure if this is a bug, but it’s certainly fun: When adjusting height in the closet, moving the slider quickly causes the character to jiggle.
-The particle effects for eating should be attached to the head and move with it as the character grows. Right now it seems to be attached to the character’s origin, which makes it so that it gets buried under fat as the game progresses. I can actually clip my camera through the character’s belly and see the crumbs floating in the middle of their body where their head originally was.
-A freecam would be nice. I’d also like to see some more fixed camera angles- one from the side and one from the back at the very least.
Overall, really good work so far! Even at this early stage, this is one of the most polished games here IMO. Looking forward to seeing where it goes next!
Yeah, minigames for sure.
Definitely have one for each of the three stats we have and drop the current mechanic of just leveling up after eating enough.
One minigame to train capacity, maybe stuffing with water or air to stretch out their stomach? Probably keep a little pressure gauge at the right level for as long as possible.
One minigame to increase passive happy points, though I’m not sure what the minigame would be like. Maybe rock-paper-scissors, I don’t know.
One minigame to increase digestion rate, probably something like some of FieryLion’s games where you have to rub spots on the belly and find where it gurgles the loudest, or something.
It’d certainly make the game more personal and not have the level up system rely on just dumping random food into your character forever.
As for scope and features, new key elements to the game:
Make the willingness to gain stat actually do something beyond just flavor text; if they hate gaining, they get a passive, slow weight loss. If they love gaining, then weight functions the way it does now.
Minigames, of course.
Interactions between characters? I don’t think they do anything with each other, so having more than one or two characters is meaningless right now. Doesn’t have to be anything as fancy as actual sex scenes, maybe just poofing one character into another’s room and having them chat back and forth, or be amazed at how huge/little the other one is.
Stats. If they’re not strong enough, they become immobile sooner.
More little interactions and activities for the characters. If they’re still small and hate gaining, they’ll run around the room a bit or do jumping jacks. If they love gaining, they might laze about randomly, just laying down on the floor or leaning against the wall. Seems like all they do right now is just walk around in circles forever.
On top of food, there could also be specialized machinery you can buy to handle certain foods in bulk. If they’re absolutely massive, you can buy a ceiling-mounted pump that fills the character with a hose that pumps water, protein shakes, blended food, whatever, all stuff you buy separately from the regular food, maybe through a new shop.
New NPCs in general. Helps flesh out the world a little, even if it’s something like an NPC that gives random tips about how you’re dumping points in during level ups, or an NPC that you can hire to find specific kinds of food when it’s not stocked in the shop, or an NPC that sells clothing that you weren’t able to pick when you made your character.
Lock most of the clothing and accessories at first, but have the player buy all the clothing that’s been locked, and have it so each article of clothing only supports sizes of a certain range, so as they get bigger or smaller, you’ll have to buy new clothes to fill in the gaps. Most of the clothing for the smaller sizes are more intricate and detailed, modeled with more bits and bobs, while the clothing for when they’re HUGE tends to be more simple, easier to animate.
Give a use for reducing body weight, maybe a point system where the more pounds you give to the doctor, the more points you have, and the points can be used to unlock special foods, new clothing, new rooms, special characters, etc.
Furniture is cool, but if stuff like couches is too much of a nightmare, furniture like fridges tables and non-functional chairs that could get pushed around via collision detection from the characters girth could also work to make the living spaces feel less empty while also keeping things simple and less of a nightmare model and animation wise.
You could also add these things to the other environments too like forklifts in the warehouse, school buses for outside, etc.
I think mini games making use of the character’s weight and some basic interaction between at least two characters at once would be great (even if it’s as modest as letting another character walk around another characters room for the size contrast.) Besides that the basic gameplay loop you have now feels pretty good.
I don’t think the game needs to be super ambitious. I would just stick with realistic goals that are fun to make.
One thing that needs to be considered is that once a character reaches a certain size, any correlation to Tomodachi life kinda collapses, your character can’t move and is put in a place completely unrelated to an appartment. After this your’ character’s ability to interact with anything basically disappears, future developments will need to somehow keep this in mind and work with it.
Right now, I can’t really think of many new key elements to add to the game and the ones presented here above me are pretty good.
Some kind of progression aside from the individual progression with each tenant, minigames and fleshing out the ambience would bring more life to it. (I’m not a big fan of locking everything that’s in the game to new saves but I see how this could work right)
One idea that I think is interesting is maybe have a floor in the building for the kitchen? Kind of like the Free Sample Sandbox gain jam entry, having up to 3 or 4 of your tenants randomly chosen to be walking there (I have no idea how much that would impact performance) every time you enter. Without the feeding part because that’s done in their rooms, I guess, (I get it, it’s the kitchen, but still) and maaaybe have little dialogues between them. It sounds cool, but just thinking about the 28 different combinations of personalities makes me tremble. And that’s without them acknowledging each other’s weight. Make it 84.
And I agree with Tombot here. When one gets to the warehouse, that character becomes a bit isolated and it doesn’t seem that there’s much to do aside from growing like bread in the oven infinitely and alone. I don’t know what could be done to remedy that.
I also thought about…
Me talking about expanding what is already there
…how to spice up the shop. Right now there’s no problem with it, it serves it purpose well. But the pure randomness and sense of “missed opportunity”, more so now that the days are faster, can get a little nerve wracking and activate the Optimize-The-Fun-Out-Of-The-Game mode in people like me. It doesn’t bother me, but there could be a little twist in there. Something like 2 aisles in the store, where one is exactly how it is now, and the other is a 2x2 or 3x3 grid with a limited stock of food items (like 200 or 500 25 or 50 (I just realized how that adds up quickly when restocking daily)) that doesn’t change with each new day but rather trigger a restock, WHICH we could pay to change what selection of items will be there. That would allow Scribbles to carefully choose what items are in each preset, if the rarity of certain foods is a concern, and it could be themed like “dairy aisle” or “junk food”,…
…but that’s just me thinking about expanding the elements that are already there.
And the idea of converting fat and happiness points into some special fat coin in the clinic sounds cool too
Edit: I’m bad at math
Edit2: I also played the game very casually these days so I don’t really have any new bug to report, forgot to mention that
I don’t have any super well thought out ideas but aside from minigames I think a big thing that will help is more being put into the post immobile sizes. Not really the model itself (besides the wonky arms) but more ways to feed and also things to drive home size progression more. I don’t think the time investment to go for the cap itself is bad but for it being where you end up spending most of your time on a character, it feels like you kind of lose features that are available in the early game.
For context in area 3 right now I’m finding the most effective way to do it is just dump points into passive happiness and wait for whales to be in stock and buy in bulk. Pretty much every other food feels like a net loss for the money/weight unless you are trying to optimize xp to buff up some stats I guess. So more options for what you can do, like some sort of passive feeding you can level up separately or something along with some other impactful items for the later parts. Pretty much all of your character customization also becomes irrelevant at a certain point since you end up going full mammoth blob and can barely even see their face. I don’t really think there should be much in the way of new customization options at that stage, but that’s where I think more freedom with the camera would help.
Also in general more easy size comparisons helps keep your actual progression in perspective, right now it mostly comes from comparing a specific camera position over time or the floor texture. Something like having other NPC’s/residents be present in the level might be able to accomplish that while also being a visual representation of the passive system or minigame etc. Just spitballing but maybe a “hiring help” sort of thing becomes available once you hit the warehouse.
Very fun game! I already made 12 varying occupants. So might as well share some thoughts while i’m at it.
The illness factor from events doesn’t have it’s timer go down while looking into other apartments, and while I adore my character staring at it for 3-4 minutes isn’t a very fun thing to do, other than that, I wouldn’t mind the ailment if I could do other things while it expires.
The Jillwich is by far the most op food item for early game, either i’m really lucky or i keep getting it. If the objective of the game is to be slow and steady while progressively ramping up, the Jillwich seems to immediately slam the pedal to the metal with it’s high calorie count and filling up the default stomach capacity. This is coming from a person who is typically impatient as hell with slow games, but I think it needs a nerf.
I agree. Give me monster girls or give me death.
On the topic of hats / accessories / clothing, I do have suggestions for more but I don’t think it’s within my jurisdiction to submit every idea I have yet (besides, if I read correctly, that is a patreon exclusive thing.) I do think hats could be positioned a little bit better, and the Killzone-esque gas mask / helmet combo headpiece would work better as two separate accessories.
More sounds, and the option to turn the eating sound effect off, or at least change it. Bouncy sounds could be a start, or thuds for footsteps at higher weights. Some sound effects could also be higher quality, but I feel like i’d be nitpicky at that point.
This is a very late-stage-dev question but possible modding support? I’d love to get crafty with this game.
I know everyone said this already but furniture, I know you said things like chairs would likely come later because of animations but I think the best bet is to start small with more static pieces of furniture.
Each apartment saving wallpapers and having individual wallpapers would also be nice.
All that out of the way, i’m having a lot of fun with the game and can’t wait to see where it goes next!
This update has be great so far, so here are my thoughts
The overall the main gameplay feels like it is in a great place of being simple but not a mindless clicking game. The only issue I had to deal with is the wait. There are some foods that have a great cost to calorie ratio and others that are only useful if you want a specific fat part of the body or farming xp. For example once I found the Jillwich I stocked up on that in bulk and then waited for the craving to turn to spicy or greasy then just spammed the serve max button until the craving changed or I ran out of food. Then I just waited doing nothing until one of the specific craving returned or that food was back in stock. I would use this strategy until I was able to get the stomach capacity for the vending machine and the whale which the process would repeat using those foods and their respective cravings.
Adding some more foods that are at the level of the whale, vending machine or jillwich but cover different craving would help fix the food problem but I think it would not solve the problem of the wait between getting the right craving to appear of food to be in stock. I would say maybe adding other minigames or just things to do on the side while waiting for time to pass would be great. even if they serve no purpose they would be nice in order to waste time while waiting for a food to be in stock or for a specific craving to appear.
For minigames I have no suggestions other than having them give a modest amount of happiness (like double or triple the amount that you get from clicking text bubbles) so the focus on saving happiness points is still there.
I think furniture would also be a great idea too, even just as uninteractable scenery. I wouldn’t really care if there was no animations them either, their existence would be enough just liven up the apartment and make feel less like an empty box. Along with maybe even the option adding different scenery to all of the size related locations.
lastly is just a some ideas of what could be added in the future (I don’t know if these a practical, just more things that would be nice)
size excusive cosmetics, where at a certain size a character can have them wear accessories like for example, a gaming pc setup that is near their head when a character become immobile or (spoiler as it pertains to post warehouse location) large mystery keg that is near the back (like the cat girl tail) can be available when a character reaches the field location size
more detail on the field location right now the field feels to barren that it doesn’t give any sense of scale. Maybe adding a some road, a farm, the apartment build or a bunch of power lines in the back ground would give it more life
A free cam mode, camera controls are great but the do become a little limiting at bigger sizes and I would love to see my character’s face
Modding support (I don’t know in what form but it would be nice to have)
Maybe some more interaction between characters where one can visit another’s house if they are mobile at least. Just something to get me to invest in other character as the cost of whales is a little too much for me to justify investing in another character
I echo a lot of the sentiments regarding the grocery store. The RNG, along with the PC’s cravings, can pretty easily leave you without an appropriate food for them. It can especially hurt if, for example, you’re trying to balance out their features, and every single item available focuses on the hips or butt.
One potential idea I had was having certain slots at the grocery store locked to certain food types. There’s always a slot for spicy, a slot for greasy, a slot for sweet, etc. I feel this would go some way towards mitigating bad rolls on stocked items.
I also have a couple questions for whoever can answer them.
One, what do the offset sliders actually do? I’ve fiddled with them a couple of times, yet I can’t tell if they actually do anything or not. Do they affect how your character puts on weight?
Two, I’ve been trying to farm and view the random events, though I tend to only see the same couple of events fairly frequently. I saw mention of an elevator event, though I’ve never gotten that one to fire. Is there only a small handful of events, and is there certain criteria required to make them fire? As an example, a certain weight window (500-3000 wobbs, say), or perhaps some combination of personality and gain outlook (airhead and into gaining, say).
Been really enjoying the update so far. It’s been exceptionally well done.
The offset sliders control the position of clothing as well as the face and bellybutton. They’re basically a way of helping things look better, such as certain tops clipping into certain bottoms. One of my preferred outfits is the jumpsuit bottom with a dress on top, but it does require using the offset slider to make it so it doesn’t clip horribly.
Honestly, there’s a lot of good ideas being suggested that I don’t really know what to add, other than more cosmetic options, like things to make a character more like a certain animal, or a small town where the chubs can get together and interact with each other and hold events.
Maybe once a day, depending on how many citizens there are and how happy they are, they’ll donate a certain amount of happiness points.
Aside from these tiny suggestions, I’m really enjoying the update so far. I’m on the third area right now and I’m still working my way up to the cap
That is what is known as scientific notation and comes in very handy for describing very large or very small numbers. In the very basic sense, the number on the left is what the front of the number looks like written out (10386…whatever) while the number on the right (7) is how many zeros you need to move the decimal point right (if the number is negative then that means how many zero you need to move the decimal to the left) In this example 1.038688E+07 equals 10,386,880, 1.038688E+10 would equal 10,386,880,000 and 1.038688E-07 would equal 0.00000010386… etc…
I hate to ask, but…Is there a way to speed up the process of getting to the really really big sizes? I’ve been playing for about 4.5 hours, I’m up to 140,000 wobbs, and I just wanna see what the bigger rooms look like without spending 60 hours pressing a button
There is. The fastest way to do it requires a lot of money and a minimum amount of levels in a stat but it is, and I can’t stress this enough, REALLY fast, provided you have enough food items.
What you want is to have at least 3000 capacity in your soon-to-be gigantic character and a lot of saved happiness points. Something like 120,000+ or 225,000 to be extra safe. That’s because you need to wait until you roll whales in the shop and 100 of those cost 225k iirc (you won’t need 100 to get to the 3rd area(well that’s embarrassing… turns out that you do need more than 100 whales to get to the 3rd area… sorry for the misinformation)). With enough whales and about 4 points in digestion you can get there in no time.
If you don’t have the levels yet you can feed them some roast turkeys, which are surprisingly cheaper than similar items, and mystery kegs. Both of them require less than 501 capacity. If you want something more caloric the jillwich is pretty good too, but not as efficient as mystery kegs xp-wise
Forgive me for asking this but… are you able to go to the grocery store? From this screenshot alone it seems that you just ran out of food, considering you still have a considerable amount of money. Sorry if you’re really softlocked
