Debu Complex : a tamagotchi-like game - 26/04/23 | HIATUS (version 0.8.1)

[Champion6]

Dang, ok. Most of us, (if you ever revisted the deviant art page) were really disappointed at 4chan for making you guys abandon the game, tho it is interesting to know what happened, truly.
Actually, was it really 4chan? The general conclusion was you guys were bullied so much bu them that you guys simply disbanded,leaving the project to rot.

Either way, that matters not. What matters is that you’re back, and making games again! Which is great!
The preview bavk them (demo) was already rather promising back then, so looking forward to this new slightly different one! Keep it up!

[darnetal]

Eh, as far as I’m concerned the bullying didn’t really affect me, I even remember agreeing with some stuff I read on the chans. It was way too early to start talking about anything anyway.

In any case, I’m working at my own pace now, so there’s that. I also became an actual dev, so I can use the right tools for the job instead of forcing it on RPG Maker because that’s all I had in my toolbox. And the lockdowns certainly helped me “rebooting” the project and seriously getting to work.

[firesoul10]

I thought something seemed familiar, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

In any case, I can’t stand people who are pushy about stuff like this. Dev team members OR fans. Hopefully this works out for you much better. =D

[darnetal]

Alright, update time.

I didn’t do much graphic work in the past two weeks, so there isn’t a whole lot of changes to how the game looks. Just reworked the inventory so it’s a bit more pleasing to the eye, but there’s still a lot I want and need to work on, so expect it to be different by the time the game is ready for early release.

I also added two new tabs, one for the game settings to allow the player to save, quit and go back to the main menu, and also change some of the settings while playing (game volume, unit system, …), and one for some debug options to make up for the lack of features and quickly test the sprite cycling.

I also started working on the last key features I want to introduce before release : personalities and reactions. Basically giving the character a voice and allow her to express her gratitude or concern when you force her to shove food down her throat (just to be clear, this will not be voice acted, I don’t have the kind of resources for that). These dialog lines will be fully customizable for those courageous enough to mess with the game files, and you will be able to change or even add your own lines. At least that’s what I’m aiming for. Those will also depend on the character’s personality and preferences, so I’ll work on implementing this personality system to give you an example of how it will work in the complete game.

Basically, when defining the character’s personality traits, the options you select will act as a simplified “personality test” to determine which of the available personalities will fit your character the most. These are what I call core personalities. Each of these core personalities have their own set of default dialog. However, on certain situations, these dialog lines will change depending on the personality traits and preferences you selected : a feedee character will be more enthusiast about eating and feeling full and will have their own set of lines when feeding her. A character who has the personality traits “reserved” and “sensitive” might be more self-conscious, and if in addition she is not into gaining weight, it will result in her having a special set of lines to reflect that. These are what I call variations, which are conditional sets of dialog lines that substitute to the default personality lines under certain conditions.

As you certainly understand, that’s a lot of planning and writing. The advantage of this method is that it should provide enough variety to give the impression each character is unique while still being less of a chore than writing unique dialog lines for each of the 1000+ combinations of available personality traits and preferences. But it’ll take at least a bit of time to finish, so the first release will most probably only feature a watered down version.

Other than that, classic boring developer stuff : optimization, glitch fixing, and so on.

[darnetal]

Happy new year everyone !

I took a small break for Christmas and new year eve, so I don’t have much to report this time… I mostly worked on the sprites since I have finished most of the features I want to include in the first version code-wise. So I remade some of the item sprites and added some new ones, and finished working on the inventory. I think I’m pretty happy with how it looks for now, it feels a bit more polished. Now, only a shadow of the item will be displayed if you don’t have at least one of it, and the quantity owned will be displayed in an infobox along with a couple other info when your mouse is hovering the item. I also added an outline to the items : when an interaction is possible, the item is outlined in green. Otherwise, it is outlined in red.

I also successfully implemented the personality system and customizable dialog lines. Each personality will be bound to a file containing every possible dialog line, so you’ll be able to mess with it a bit and add your own lines. For now, it won’t be possible to add a whole custom personality, but I will try to make it possible in a future version ; I already have a slight idea of how I’ll handle this.

This first version is starting to come together pretty nicely. There are only a few features I’d like to finish before releasing it, like finish the sprites related to stuffing and finish writing a sample set of dialog lines. I also need to work on a bit of code, clean it and make it as bug-free as possible, properly handling the character display, adding a few character creation options (hairstyles, etc…) and I’ll be ready for the first version. I’ll try my best to release it this month, and I’m both super excited and absolutely mortified by the idea of finally releasing a playable demo. It won’t be much feature-wise, you’ll just have a character in a closed room with food to give her, but that’ll be a huge actual first step after many years of trying, failing and giving up and I really hope you’ll like it and there’ll be many more steps to make afterwards.

[CreatureFeep]

I’ve been looking forward to seeing this, glad to hear a first demo is around the corner! Whatever you put out looks like it’ll be really fun! I 100% understand the anxiety behind actually making something public, but trust me that it will feel fantastic to say you accomplished something and have a tangible demo out in the wild.

[JohnDoe1101]

You’ve got no idea how thrilled I am to see you following through with this because this kind of thing is right up my alley. Even if it’s nothing super in depth yet, I think your execution here is spot on. Please keep up the great work!

[FeelingHealing]

This, alongside idle games, is one of the most criminally underused concepts for wg games.

All these jump n run games with characters who definitely should not be running, let alone jumping

[darnetal]

A short update, I kind of underestimated the amount of “small things to take care of” and the time it would take me to bar them all off the to do list. However, I don’t want to delay the release of the early build, mostly because we’ll soon enter a pretty intense period at my job and for a couple weeks I won’t have as much time to work on the game as I do now.

So I’ll probably half-ass a couple of the remaining features to be able to release it on time. It’s a bit of a shame I won’t be able to show you this proof of concept in its intended glory, but it wasn’t supposed to be complete to begin with and most of what I wanted to show is done.

So, I’ll post the demo in the next update. For the sake of surprise, I also won’t share any screens or post in-depth development report this time. I didn’t really do anything too spectacular in the last ten-ish days, but I still don’t want spoil everything before it’s made available.

[darnetal]

Alright, it’s up. Link is in the top post.

It should work alright on most computers, but if you have any issue, just let me know. I uploaded this as early as possible, so I still have some time to fix things before the big crunch falls upon me at my job.

I will now have a nervous breakdown for the next few hours.

[Kitsune]

I haven’t really started but I need to say a few things first:

• Would it be possible to change the window size? As it is it barely covers 40% of my screen and I can neither adjust the size nor the position
• Please don’t use our Windows User Name as our ingame name
• Would mouse-controls be possible?

[darnetal]

I need to take a look at how resizing will work. Problem is, as this game is 100% pixel art, resizing the game can absolutely mess everything. So for now it is in my “pain in the ass I don’t want to look at for now” section of my to do list, but it is in my to do list.

Regarding the name, I plan on letting the player chose how they want to be called (yes, I want my characters to call me “master”, fight me). But before I do that, I would like to allow multiple save files so that the user’s nickname is bound to a character, so I needed a placeholder in the meantime. And “user” or “player” didn’t sound fun enough.

Regarding mouse controls, I wanted to make a distinction between gameplay and menus to prevent missclicks, and other more artistic reasons. But I can look into making it fully mouse-controlled.

[Kitsune]

For resizing just make sure the aspect ration most computers use is preserved and fill anything left over with a black screen. That should preserve the pixel look as it allows you to scale each pixel with a 1:1 ratio.

You address the player indirectly as you’ve done at all other instances of the conversation. They know who they are, naming them, especially by their Windows Name is really not necessary. (Note: At this point I only encountered the naming bit at the game start as I haven’t progressed much further than the tutorial yet - this takes precedence)

Not being able to use the mouse for menus is incredibly jarring, especially as it’s used later on for interaction. Mixing mouse and keyboard is fine, not being able to use the keyboard for everything is fine, but not being able to use the mouse for things that could be solved by clicking or dragging is not really good.

Other than that it looks pretty good so far. I’ll probably write something more later after actually getting to play for bit xD.

The dialogue is pretty neat as of now, lot’s of great lines. I’ll assume lines for changing weight will be added later on. The artwork looks pretty clean most of the time, the only exception being the character portrait when stuffed at higher weights, the stomach kind off looks like a random bump there. The feeding system works pretty well, though I can’t say all that much about that right now as money is not a factor beyond that some values for food size are a bit low. Then again that may just be a misconception because our girl can eat about 12 burgers before being full.

Bugs:

• Values are not reset on return to title - when choosing a new game previous name, character choices from the character selection and fullness carry over

Feedback:

• Tell the play if saving was successful and when it happens
• Allow manual save creation - as it is choosing new game always overrides our current save

Still so far it’s pretty fun. Thank you so much for making this game!

[tharsus]

I’m excited for there to be more interaction, and more to do. Clothing will be fun. A couple notes:

• Switching from metric to imperial doesn’t seem to actually translate. I swapped the option in the menu before beginning the game, and it didn’t really stick. The character creator remained in kg/cm, but then switched to pounds and feet once I got dropped in. So, my 155cm character was 155ft^3 (that’s how the units are shown in game) tall, but 50lbs. My minimum weight via debug is 64000 pounds. Kind of an issue.

• Less importantly, every instance of “developer” was spelled “developper”. Quick fix.

• I absolutely love the “you broke bitch” in the top right.

[darnetal]

Thanks for the feedback !

Both character creator bugs should be fixed in the next update. I was aware of the values not resetting, just wasn’t sure yet were it came from… But the units one was new to me. Turns out they both came from the same issue. I’ll wait a couple days before uploading the fixed version to see if there are any other bugs to fix.

The typos will also be corrected. Do let me know if you find any other, as English is not my first language. I try to be careful, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple errors.

Multiple save files and overall better save system is the next thing I want to work on, so it’ll definitely be implemented. Showing a confirmation message when saving should be easily done, so I’ll work on that too.

Regarding sprites and dialogs… I’m not satisfied with any of those, but for now it is mostly placeholders. I need to put more work into it. But since I’m not a good writer even in my native language and I have almost no idea what I’m doing when working on large pixel art pieces, it might take me a bit of time. If someone wants to help, I could sure use an extra pair of skilled hands…

Finally, the parameters associated with food items are a bit random right now. As you pointed out, without the economy, it’s hard to properly balance everything. But it will definitely change at some point. I also have a couple more features in mind to give a purpose to some seemingly useless items, that are neither filling nor fattening.

[Kitsune]

That sound pretty good. I can write or draw something for you if you’d like if you’d give me specifics, though I can’t make any promises on the regularity or speed of something like that.

[darnetal]

I think writing would be the easiest from an organization point of view ; there’s no hard limit to how many lines I can add so there’s no risk of overlapping work, I can add them pretty much whenever they’re ready, and this kind of game will benefit from variety in the dialog lines.

Basically, I need dialog lines for the three personalities available at the moment :

• shy character,
• cheerful character,
• tsundere character

For each personality, I need lines for :

• feeding : accepting, being forced or refusing to be fed,
• “touching” (clicking) on different parts of their body : thighs, belly, arms, face, chest,

I’ll limit the list to these two situations for now, but there will be more as I implement more options. From there, anything goes : they can enjoy it, they can dislike it, they can get upset, they can be shy, they can tease the player, they can have conflicted feelings… I can and will use pretty much any possible situation.

Each line should be no more than ~80 characters, so a simple sentence or two. Please also precise the size the character should be when saying the line, how stuffed she should be, and any required personality trait if any (the ones that show up in pages 2 and 3 of the character creator).

If I have enough dialog lines, I can also add a whole new personality rather easily, if anyone’s motivated enough to come up with one.

If you want to check how the dialogs are managed, the dialog files can be found in the folder gamedata/Reactions. I also left a read-me file in case some people want to play with these files a little.

[alexjay.read]

i can see this becoming a full fledged game. 9/10.

[Filin0]

ok so, I’m not a very easy-to impress person, and I might not like many things that are done by people here
BUT THIS LITTLE MIRACLE IS WHAT I ABSOLUTELY LOVE
I can see so much possibilities for that project in future
And all the passion you (and/or you mates) have put in the design, music and just overall quality of that small demo!
Maybe I’ll leave some thoughts on how to improve that project of yours later…when I will finally stop raving under that music and liking how cute everything is.
P.S. oh, and don’t use my pc name ever again please
it is a very scaring thing to do
P.S.S. wait…I just realized…all that interface…and narration stuff and…Debucon…wait are the DEBU project author? Shizl mate, I loved that thing, and I’m happy you are back with an even better thing!

[darnetal]

Thanks! I’m glad people like it despite how bare-bone it is for now. Just one little thing : I didn’t make the music, it comes from Heatleybros Music and it wasn’t made specifically for this game. They make royalty-free 8-bit video game tracks, and that’s the closest I could find from what I want for the game for now (and it bops). I’ll look into the ambiance and music themes a bit more when the game is more feature complete.

And yeah, I’m one of the guys who worked on project debu. I’m honestly surprised people remember it, now it makes me feel a bit bad that the project fell off so abruptly… I’ll try my best to make up for it with this game. If you’re interested, I posted a bit of backstory about it a couple posts ago (~post 20).