I’m split between these. It has a LOT of benefits for you wich is great, less work and stress (wich are great for keeping up morale IMO) and (probably) less time from one update to another, but in the other side, that would be a lot less “WG kink” stuff in the game (Hehe, stuff, stuffing, get it? Yeah i know i’m terrible).
I think you should put the stuffing aside for now until you find a better way to compress it. I heard that changing a file format (if that’s the word) should make it weight less, like changing it to .jpj to .png or stuff like that, but i ain’t no programmer so i’m not sure about it. Anyway, good luck pal! Keep up with the good work!
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Idea: it may not be that much, but what about “cutting in half” the stuffed frames? Like, keeping only two or three of them (example: bar full for one third of it, two thirds of it and then the last one, the overstuffed one).
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I actually had no idea the stuffing effect was made of separate images and not one object whose size changed dynamically with stuffing level. Is there an aesthetically pleasing way of implementing something like that? I assume it would cut down on file size tremendously. But, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was weird to implement it that way, considering the outlines might look funky and all - I’m no animator.
I think you should put the stuffing aside for now until you find a better way to compress it.
“cutting in half” the stuffed frames
And I agree with @Edgar.1 that, in the meantime, I think it’s better to trim the fat until you have completed your core project. It’s not like it can’t be re-implemented later.
However, removing it entirely would be sad for me, like every click has less of an impact. Still would love the project; I don’t hop on here and say that enough!
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The problem is that the game doesn’t have much of an animation engine. Almost everything (with the exception of bars/floating numbers/etc.) is static images, and any appearance of animation is just switching between static images. Changing this would most likely require reworking the display code from the ground up, which would be prohibitively expensive in terms of time investment.
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One potential fix (though you may have already considered it) would be to, instead of the stuffing level being its own separate copy of the original image, it is instead an overlay that is transparent everywhere except for the new belly shape that gets added on top of the existing character image. This would stil require the same number of images, but their file size should be greatly reduced. Admittedly, this relies on you using .gif or .png files (or any other image format that has a transparency layer) and not jpegs, and I don’t know what you are currently using. However, it should take the stuffing images from ~80% to ~40%-50% of the game’s size, based on what I can see of the game’s current stuffing levels and images.
Personally I am against removing them entirely, as there are many characters that, in end game, do not even gain one weight stage before the level is over despite being the main dps (Spellblade especially, but also Thief), thus playing with them would be rather boring as there would be no change in their appearance until the end of the level, when they instantly go from skinny to blob and then immediately back to skinny when you extract them on the next screen. Other characters (Illusionist and Witch, for example) tend to gain weight while fighting, thus preventing this issue. I would personally prefer that the characters typically build for capacity get something out of said capacity, so as to not be boring compared to the characters built for metabolism.
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Maybe there is some kind of vector based image rendering you could use instead… somehow… or something. (I don’t know if such things are possible using this engine).
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Maybe two instead. one for <50% and one for >50%?
or maybe no stuffing images and instead having a seperate KO image?
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I like this idea, but it may end up being more trouble, because you’d need KO images at potentially every weight stage.
personally, making a low cap and high cap frame feels best to me, because some frames persist between weight stages, right? if I’m wrong about this let me know.
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Reducing the number of stuffing images ain’t a bad idea at all.
I never wanted ETD to be a huge engineering project, I want to be able to focus on art and content.
This is one thing I tried, but then this starts relying on multiple draw calls and with the pixel interpolation on resize there was a lot of artifacting.
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I understand the want to reduce load times, but personally, I’d rather have a game with more stuff to enjoy than a few seconds less to wait to play, though I will admit that I’m biased because my internet usually works pretty well. Taking out the stuffing somewhat detracts from the core theme of the game. If you want, you could just reduce the number of stuffing images to just 2 or 3 per weight level–1 for overstuffed, and 1 or 2 for intermediate fullness. That’d cut down the number of images considerably without taking away from that particular kink component.
TBH if that’s a concern then I think it’d be perfectly fine if you released all the weight levels, then add the stuffing levels.
I think you might be on the wrong forum, pal…
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i mean it gets to the point where you don’t even see the stuffing change.
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I think removing some of the stuffing images may make more sense in a way, considering that majority of players here have already gotten their adventurers to where they want them.
For me just about every time I use someone they will usually reach the final stuffing portrait with just the one enemy (the Witch and Illusionist the most notorious), due to this you have to watch their bellies shrink after the stuffing. This is also more apparent when your just extracted their weight, and by the end of a level they have already shot up to the second collection of weight images.
So reducing the images on each weight level to perhaps two or three would make sense since there is little time in the later game to really focus on the subtle changes (thanks to high Meta and Cap), while early game is probably the only time you’ll see all the stuffing stages as you need to grind the characters out.
Edit: In my opinion, you can probably cut down the second and third collections of stuffing (where they have gone through the significant portrait changes) down to two since they have enough weight in their bellies hide the basic stuffing, while the first collection could be argued for three images since they barely have enough fat to sort of hide the stuffing.
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It’d be somewhat dull if there was nothing at all indicating stomach fullness, so instead of complete removal just having one or two stuffing images per weight level would be the way to go.
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Yeah I need to consider users with slow internet connections. 400MB is huge
This would be absolute Hell, I would go crazy if I had to do all the stuffing levels at once.
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Well I was picturing doing it in stages like the gain stages, but if it’s just not practical in any capacity even if you only have a few images to do, then whatever works is fine. How many stuffing images are there per gain stage, per character, anyway? Curious how much you’re cutting out if you drop it to only 2-3 stuffing images.
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honestly i dont mind in the slightest, it is purely beneficial
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If you need to cut the stuffing animations, I’m willing to accept that. A reduction, at minimum, would definitely be in order though, if the load times and file sizes are that outrageous.
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I’m in favor of cutting down on the stuffing images, but I’d prefer that they weren’t removed entirely. Not only would that be disappointing in terms of art lost, it would also remove visual feedback from the gameplay element.
I think there’s like 10-ish stuffing levels for any given weight sublevel, which is just way more than there needs to be. Maybe 4 would be good? 3 at the least IMO.
If you removed a weight sublevel from each weight level, that would also cut out all of that sublevel’s stuffing images, but I personally would be disappointed if more than 1 weight sublevel were cut, since I do value those more highly than stuffing variants and there’s only 4 or 5 of them per weight level.
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Not long at all, this was my first time opening it in months
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