E-Roguelike: A weight gain and inflation roguelike in progress.

I can run Skyrim with like 150 mods so I don’t think it’s my computer it might be but I’m able to play it. It’s random and nothing is really happening

New thoughts, but no new updates!

Some things I need to do based on feedback:

  • WG Content
  • More lights and more diversity in rooms
  • More actual gameplay

Mechanically, I’m pretty happy with how it is. I think there could be a little more tuning of how the player moves at bigger states.

Something I was considering adding back was fairies in small bottles. If you knock over the bottles, the fairies are free and will cast spells to blow you up or fatten you up.

I’m thinking of adding a ‘miniboss’ in the maze. Really, just a portly lady who wanders around and whom you can offer food in exchange for working towards a cure. That should satisfy, in a small way, people that want more weight gain in the game. It also gives an end state, which is needed.

And as a fun interaction, if you can bait the fairies into fattening the portly lady…

2 Likes

The fairy thing sounds fun

Great interest

:sweat: I hope not to disappoint. Had some time last weekend to do some work but I’m not happy with any of the changes. I need to take a vacation or something so I can work on this more.

1 Like

Some very small updates, just so people can see what I’m doing. Not ready for a new release yet.

  1. A UI. I was resisting this on the grounds that it seemed like it was breaking immersion, but I don’t think I can push back on that any more given the next couple of things I want to include. For the next release, it will just show how full the character or how close to popping you are.
  2. The main character model’s hair was higher poly than I realized, so I changed that which should help with performance a little bit.
    blender_2021-09-11_10-31-03
  3. I added render portals (not in-game portals; it’s just a developer term) which should greatly improve performance at a cost of a slightly longer start up.
  4. I started modeling the fairy jars, but I’m not happy with them. Going to block in the behavior to see how it feels.
  5. Crafting, which was originally going to be part of the project, then got removed, is going back in. This will probably mean some tweaks to how quickly the player blows up. It adds more depth to the gameplay. More on this below.
  6. Dialog and dungeon NPCs to satisfy the weight gain angle. This is another thing that was available at the start but got removed. UI means this is okay.
  7. Animations are terrible still, but this is lower priority. I have a problem here because it’s really distracting me but every time I go to fix it I lose hours and am still unhappy with it.

Going into more detail on number four, there are a few components that need to go into a good crafting system. The crafting loop, search + collect, build, repeat, needs to add to the gameplay. Things you craft should let you have an easier time finding things or let you explore more areas. It needs to be minimally grind-y and maximally fun, and there has to be a diversity of items. I was/am having problems thinking of ways that crafted items could make it easier to unlock regions or find more stuff. Maybe I don’t have enough mechanics to support it yet.

My thinking was that I’d have a small set of items that you could find in the dungeon and a medium to large set of ways to combine them. I started working on a crafting table where you would draw alchemical symbols to transmute stuff into other stuff. This way, you’re not really bottlenecked (pun!) by what potions you find but you still have to explore and read to find what you need.

I need to prioritize these a bit instead of working on them at random, but also I like working on what I feel like.

5 Likes

Hello, hello. I have this problem where the texture and character model is all messed up. I haven’t seen anybody complaining about this so, I’m not sure if it’s a problem from my side.

Nonetheless, the concept is great and I’d love to see what flourishes up out of it!

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That’s happened to me too. Not sure if it’s just incompatibility with GoDot, though.

Any chance I can bug you to take a screenshot the next time it goes nuts? Maybe a little info on your system setup? (Graphics card, processor, operating system, etc.)

Had a bit of a scare earlier. A user reported the file as having a trojan, but after a bunch of testing I figured out it’s the way the file bundling works. I’ve uploaded two separate but identical copies of the game. One uses the bundler and the other is just a zip file with the game and the resources separately. One has a false positive for the trojan, the other does not. I’ll see about getting a digital signature to ensure that people are a little more comfortable playing and I’ll consider doing a consistent thing where I release separate copies of the code and pack files. Can see more here: v0.10.1 Released: Minor Update and Split - Accident in the Alchemy Lab by captainstupids

2 Likes

is there a limit to how big she can get

Yes, but it’s much bigger than you might think. Every potion of vitality gives you a little more room to grow. At a certain point, some parts of the map become inaccessible because she’s too big to fit through the columns.

what happens when you reach that limit or is there a mode that allows for endless inflation

The player bursts, though it’s implied and not shown. There’s no mode for endless inflation right now. I’m not sure how I’d even do that because the player is confined by walls.

2 Likes

I had a little time this weekend to do some work. I started adding some long planned dialog for interactions with other characters. I also had hoped to do a little more UI work tonight because that was an often requested functionality, but I’m out of time.

I was really hoping I could add three characters in the next release, but I’m thinking that might not be workable, so I’m scaling it back to one. Here’s the proposal. She’s rigged for just one scene right now:

But there’s a bunch more bugfixing and cleaning up to do in the interim.

10 Likes

She looks great, and this whole game is one of the best inflation games I’ve seen on here both in concept and design!

1 Like

Haven’t had the free time to do much of anything on this in so long, but I was able to make a little forward progress the past few weekends. One more inhabitant has entered the dungeon:

The fire elemental!

She’s a good bit shorter than the player but is nothing to trifle at.

I’m happy with how it mostly worked out, but there are a few systems that need to be in, most notably damage. Right now she just wanders around and bumps into walls. A lot.

I also realized I never had the player cast any spells, which is a problem. I’m going to start there.

4 Likes

I made an update on itch.io and didn’t CC it here. Here’s a copy/paste of a dev-log:

===

As odd as it might sound, this project started off as basically a clone of Animal Crossing, but with villagers and fantastical elements. The difference between the first version and what it is now is kinda’ staggering. The first version actually involved typing /north and /talk and /eat. I wanted the character to be able to interact with a world.

Even when things became procedurally generated dungeons, I wanted the player to be able to encounter NPCs who would provide quests, like, “Could you make me this cure for lycanthropy?” And then the player could whip up a cure for lycanthropy or taint it with something that would blow up the NPC. If the player give a cure, you get a male NPC in the dungeon that might help. If you do something else, you blow up the wolf:

This character never made it in, and the dungeon itself stayed mostly empty. I started to like the idea of fighting against time, but coming back to the project after a hiatus does leave it feeling a bit empty.

Dialog in games is more complicated than you might think. You have to pause the world (not all of it!) and make sure NPCs aren’t attacking, except the ones who should be attacking, and you have to manage cameras and events and user interfaces and and and…

SquishySofty released a game called Bakery Bloat Out which I think is phenomenal. Link here: https://www.deviantart.com/squishysofty/art/Release-Bakery-Bloat-Out-V1-1-889854… It does a huge number of things right. In particular:

  • The game is fun. The mechanic is simple, but challenging and addictive.

  • The player has to tow the risk/reward line of being more powerful while inflated but also more vulnerable.

  • The inflation is fairly well integrated. It doesn’t feel like someone said, “Let’s make a puzzle game” and then added inflation. It feels like it was made with it in mind. That said, it’s still slightly bolted on, but it somehow works.

There are some things that I think could be done differently:

  • Once you see the maximum size of the player, there’s really not much more to see. The game is still fun, but it never surprises me.

This point is one of those that I really loved about Trap Quest. Even after reaching the “biggest state”, the interactions with the world would leave me wanting to explore it and see if there were things that could make me bigger. Same with the Corruption of Champions. I would love to try and give those surprising (but rare) bits of content to this game, and that led to this decision in design:

​"You pretty much never see the player at her biggest."

Unless you’ve been really grinding or hacking, the player’s max size is, in fact, room-filling, and you’ve probably not seen it. Why would you? It’s a boring grind. But, inspired by SquishySoft, I think there’s a way to change the direction and make it both more fun and more satisfying. (I will admit I’m ripping off Bakery Bloat Out.)

  • Bonk enemies with telekinesis and then blow them up with magic.
  • If they bonk you and you’re KO’ed, struggle before they blow you up.
  • Being more blown up gives you less control but more speed. You use half of your fill on enemies to blow them up faster.
  • Importantly: you stretch out. Your limit at the start is very low. Towards the end, you’ll reach a point where it’s hard to fit through doors.

That’s the direction I want to go. I haven’t decided if I’m going to change the random level generation yet, but it’s not off the table. I also don’t have a time frame for how long it will take to do these changes because I can never predict my work schedule and I only have a few hours per week to work on this. And I’m​ lazy.

8 Likes

I wish there were a way to do an update without bumping the conversation.

I did more work on bonking enemies and I haven’t really been able to make the game “feel good” with this kind of interaction. That, plus the ~2 star average rating is hinting to me that perhaps this just isn’t the way to go with the project. As much fun as it was to make this, I don’t want to keep leaning on it when it’s not working. I might take some of the assets and put them into a new project.

One game I find myself playing a lot is TrapQuest, if only for the pregnancy, weight gain, and inflation content. I tried my hand with a little bit of roguelike coding and had fun, so maybe that’s a way to go from here. I’ll leave this thread open, but I don’t think I’ll be doing any more updates on this project.

I actually like the game never did rate it sorry but it never really had much of an objective overall if that makes sense yes get the potion fix the issue sure but there was only how long before you couldn’t move and pop hope this makes you feel better about the game