thats there because its awesome!!!
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yeah I’m gonna throw my two cents in- bouncing off of the charge shot is, incredibly difficult, and PLEASE if you EVER add accessibility options to this, please just give us a stock standard double jump. They are easily harder in certain places than some of the hardest platforming challenges in metroid, so please I beg of you add regular double jump:tm: for people like me who don’t want to spend five hours attempting to access one room that has one burger in it.
Also:
The fact that you can’t hold three burgers and have a way out of the lower area (where most of the burgers are) really is unfortunate. I like your idea of making it so that the game gets more difficult the fatter you are but making it so that it isn’t a lose condition is nice. That said- a little bit of player psychology here. the fact that you can’t collect more than three burgers and still use the elevator to escape the lower area means more often than not that players will not be getting more than two burgers per trip; I would advise lowering the elevator so a heavier player can still use it. Because otherwise I do not realistically see players getting big at all and intentionally playing the game that way.
The premise IS good, it’s a very good “seed”, I think it could just use some work to make sure that taking on the extra challenge from being fat isn’t “grind your balls against an extra three -particularly difficult- screens to get one or two extra burgers in one trip”. Like players WANT to be fat. But you have to make it so that being fat isn’t a condition so horrible that most players won’t bring themselves to do it when there’s easier options available, or else what you end up with is a game where nobody likes the mechanic that everyone is supposed to be here for.
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THe burger stuff is definitely my core design trouble with the game and will take the most work, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with something to make the decision of how much weight to take more interesting than just less is better, especially when “less” is entirely within the player’s control. So rest assured that will change when I can figure something out, because I want it to change. However, I will not add a double jump, I’m not very interested in double jumps
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0.2.3
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Also oh oops the elevator thing is unintentional, ill have to take a look at that
Edit: fixed now!
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Thanks to your changes i was able to get to 19 of i think 20 artifacts but i cannot for the life of me reach the one in Girth Canal, if there is a way i would appreciate to know, also i used my save from .2 and the health bug is back again, not sure if its from using a previous save but any health used anywhere is permanently never refilled, a very hard mode with this.
dammit, that healing bug… should be finally gone now with the nw update
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Hi! so yeah the double jump i’m not really asking for as a proper design feature more of just a much easier way of doing what the charge does. Alternatively, allowing the player to shoot perfectly up/downwards would also solve this issue in most cases, since you could just shoot the charge beneath you and always be aligned perfectly to jump off of it. That’s really the entire issue; I really don’t like the amount of fuckery involved in perfectly lining up the charge shot and landing on it. That said, it isn’t a fix for the room on the far upper-left due to the pit and the only way to really do that is to just give players a “perfectly lined up charge ball jump boost” button that functions pretty much exactly like a double jump would in other metroidvanias.
Sorry for the wall, I’m just a real stickler for good game-feel.
You should probably also add foxtime. (allowing players to jump for a very short time after they’ve left the ground) so that way you can jump while walking off the side of a curved/sloped platform. It’s just a really nice quality of life feature and is seen in basically every good platformer, about 1 tenth of a second is usually generous enough to make sure it doesn’t cause any problems for anyone.
There will likely not be a double jump or a way of perfectly shooting the ball up because I’d rather work in the design space of “finding an angle that works for bouncing the ball into a place where it can make the jump”, and I personally like that feeling. I will not add coyote time since it’s just not a big deal to me personally, it’s a game where you can jump while you’re on the ground, no more, no less. I think at the end of the day you must accept the places where this interpretation of what a platformer is diverges from your expectations, or play something else
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This guy always lands on you when you enter in if you don’t react immediately. If the idea is that you use him to get back up from here once you get the burgers in the areas to the right, you still can’t jump high enough to get out if you collect more than one. And having to go here 3 or 4 times to clear it out is just tedious.
There’s no way to get back up from here if you’ve collected any burgers. Even if you can do a pixel perfect jump to arc around the wall and grab the ledges on the left, they just lead up to empty space and you fall right back down.
The spikes on the left are just bullshit. Don’t put stuff like that directly after an area transition. It’s just punishing the player for not being able to see the future.
Climbing up the ledges under these spikes throws you directly into them. That’s not good.
Trying to jump on these guys to try and get to the burger up in the middle is terrible. They float up too fast to catch up with, and they bounce way too far in random directions whenever they bump into something or when you jump on them, which pushes them out of the tunnel and then you have to leave and come back to try again. So I didn’t get that one, wasn’t worth it.
That’s all the screenshots of problem areas I’ve got, because there’s nowhere else that’s accessible without some unreasonable platforming mechanic.
The Charge Bubble basically has the same problems as the inflatable green bugs, but even worse because it’s faster and harder to catch up with, and it disappears if it touches anything other than a solid wall or floor.
Climbing is way too slow. It gets you hit by the green bullet shooters when you have to do it near them, or by the beetles walking around on top of the platform. And sitting around waiting to time the climb perfectly is boring.
Healing shouldn’t make you fatter. It’s fun from a fetish angle but in actual gameplay it’s just punishing you for using them and making you unable to pick up burgers and unable to get anywhere because you’re too fat now is not worth the healing.
Please remember that the fact that being the developer of the game means you know exactly where everything is and exactly how to accomplish everything, and that makes it significantly easier for you to do all this than it is for players. Because all this stuff is just frustrating and discouraging.
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I forgot of 1 artifact in a place before and was able to reach 20 but the one still at Girth Canal is the only one to still escape me on how to reach it, i think im done with all the content you gave and will be hoping for more content updates in the future. Also with the change you did to health kits, now you can fatten up yourself to size 3, go back in the elevator and immobolize yourself with the new health kits or just to 4 if you want to waddle around. I would say to keep it like this.
Thank you for your work, not only with the good work but also the quick patches and fixes.
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hmhmm, i want to add special dialogue for silly immobilization scenarios like that… also I want to add special dialogue for npcs in the hub depending on weight stage, that’s the whole reason you don’t just auto-cash burgers upon ending a run!
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You remind me a lot of my past self. So; in japan they have a position called a “loud American”, in which someone has the sole job of being in meetings and telling the manager off when they’re doing some stupid stuff that will negatively impact the business. I will, for this one message and this one only, fulfill this role for you, and if you do not take a liking my advice I will leave it there and bother you with it no further, however I would deeply encourage you to listen to what I am about to say.
I understand that your work here is in the attempt to create a game that is notably “hard”, and I am not under any illusion otherwise. and I deeply appreciate your sense of commitment to such an ideal- it’s rare to see someone with such a desire to create a game like this, and I will blow no smoke up your ass regarding that. However.
There is a very distinct line between “absolutely no quality of life features” and “hard game”. The path of pain in hollow knight is hard. But it’s full of quality of life features. Benches, infinite SOUL totems, extremely abundant and forgiving return points if you fall on the spikes- throughout the entire place, the only time I had felt like I’d been cheated was during a segment with a split-second timing window to fall through multiple holes in a row without being impaled by retracting spikes that didn’t have any return points between any of them. Hollow Knight’s Path of Pain is a remarkably well done challenge, but it isn’t frustrating. You know when you mess up, and it’s entirely your fault when you get sent back somewhere, all the mechanics used are cleanly implemented and 100% within your control. Hollow knight features elements like fox time and double jumps, and it’s sequel is one of the most looked forward to games of all time despite it’s seven long years in development. To say that hollow knight’s success, despite being a hard game, is in great part to the cleanness and gravity of the player’s actions making sure that the player NEVER feels as though they are cheated out of a victory due to how incredibly satisfying it is to control The Knight would be a significant understatement. Let’s take a look at another game.
Celeste, a game I would like to personally give the crown of “most difficult platformer of all time”, specifically in later B-sides and (I would assume the entirety of) C-sides, is an incredibly difficult platformer. It, once again, features foxtime, and double-jumps (in the form of Madeline’s Dash ability) as well as many other incredibly well-designed features that fit like a glove and I have never had an issue with using (except for the clouds, which, I got used to after a certain amount of time) alongside many of my friends who are super-fans of the game that have 100% completed it and swear by the game’s incredible nature for being a feat in both difficulty and fairness; and once again is an incredibly well-made game held in the highest of honor and praise amongst it’s fans.
These games I both brought up to highlight that- The double jump is a gold-standard for a very good reason. That is because it is incredibly Clean and doesn’t warrant programming your brain for a new mechanic with 17 different nuances to keep track of, excluding the player’s timing and positioning, and in some cases, velocity, it works off of your already established idea of “jumping” to get the job done. Additionally, to highlight that cleanness and quality of life features are not enemies of difficulty. I will now provide that rant I mentioned earlier:
If you continue with this mechanic without any form of quality of life feature instead of implementing a proper double-jump, you will run into a very large problem: People will not want to use it. And any content you put behind it will be seen as optional, and if it so happens to not be the case, and a main story area is locked behind this mechanic, the chances are that you’re going to alienate every player who has difficulty using that mechanic, Especially considering that you don’t have save points while in the dungeon, and death means having to do every parkour challenge again to get back to where you were.
A good game that is forced to use this mechanic would use it only for optional side content, if it is absolutely required. Using this mechanic in any other way than optional side-content for players looking for the extra challenge would cross that line, and this game will alienate every single player that dares to pick it up and doesn’t immediately fall in love with how the charge bubble works. Additionally, foxtime is a developer oversight patch that fixes a lot of problems, such as not being able to jump off of sloped surfaces while moving, because you’re constantly moving one pixel downwards every pixel right/left you move, it’s genuinely not something added to make bad players better; it’s something to make it so that good players that miss the proper timing by a fraction of a second one time aren’t shunt into the bottomless pit of fuck you go back to the start of the dungeon. Foxtime and double-jumps are both widely used and widely accepted because of how incredibly well-rounded they are as mechanics, not just because they’re easy to implement.
Besides, i’m not even asking for it for free- You could put as many stipulations on it as you want; I’m easily thinking it would be an option you’d have to enable that only works if you have the charge beam active, charged, and haven’t used it since touching the ground last, at which point you’d simply have the ability to jump again while in the air, and it’d consume your charge instantly. There are ways to make this work, even if what you want players to do is to use the charge bubble. Hell, it could be it’s own special upgrade that requires that you do some bullshit with the charge bubble to get it to prove that the player using it knows how to do the charge bubble jump first. Game design is art, and as such there’s a thousand different ways to carve this turkey.
Ultimately, I am not asking you to forsake your vision, or your work to make the game more accessible, I simply am asking for a way to achieve this double-jump without abusing glitches or having to break my brain over the course of more than an hour for a platforming challenge that I will undoubtedly have to do many times if it is ever used in a frequently trafficed area, or that it’s use should be relegated to exclusively difficult side-challenges that offer the player nothing than maybe extra score/maybe a secret ending if you get all of the burgers in the game.
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Youve thought about it a lot, so ill respect that and sleep on what youve said. I do have a vision, but theres plenty still to go in achieving it, im still working out what i want to exist in this game. There may be future changes that address some of your concerns and troubles with the project, but they will not take the form of a double jump and coyote time! These mechanics are things from the outset i decided i would not be implementing.
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Small thing to note- beyond the fact that, before having played the newer updates with the changes to the ball charge shot/fat being less impeding and loving the difficulty-
The game isn’t idiot proofed, I ran the stupid test with the spikes in “First Steps” just to see if there was a fallback for players deciding to die, and-
Null indeed.
I’m definitely going to go and do a repeat playthrough before testing out the new changes of aiming up and all, I thought the game was in a neat spot with a few tweaks to the width of the ball. Possibly making it’s hitbox for bouncing off of larger than what it is for enemies. Keeping it’s balance in check and making it more accessible without allowing for new jumps/skips or straying from the concept with something like shooting the bubble for the midair hop instead.
Great work on this though- I loved every moment- how it rewards sequencing- planning out a route, delving it, and then trying to execute it. I had a very fun time trying to figure out how to sneak a fourth burger past that rightmost spike. With hints of knowledgable game design like the square designating the falling bat? It’s just enjoyable all around. The fact that the hard parts are so easily accessible to try again and again helps matters- especially the rightmost burger that needs a charge-shot jump over spikes. The game bleeds charm, love, and thought in each room for how the players should approach/solve them.
Oh- edit- I will say, the light lore that’s in use is something I’m very much anticipating getting more of. Post apocalyptic settings being explored again- especially with rumination as to what their purpose was or even the reasons of existence for the burgers in their density? That’s enticing.
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Oh- found another small bug on a repeat playthrough- if you’re hit off of a climbable surface during a textbox, you can move mid cutscene.
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oh nah the dragon boss’ dialogue just doesn’t freeze the player! it’s on my softer to-do list since there’s not much you can really do with that anyway
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I see in some screenshots people have burgers ‘used’. Do I need to get all 20 burgers before I can use them somehow or have I missed something?
I’ve played through it and I think I got all the burgers (edit: 21 I thought the used ones were deducted from the burger counter) and found 2 secret areas. I don’t think it is to hard (it’s kinda average I would say), if you are gonna nerf the difficulty then please make it an option. also having rebind-able controls would also be nice
some damage sources is a bit cheaply placed where you enter a room and just take damage. like the spikes in In-N-Out and the bat thing in Load-Bearing Frame.
I appreciate that you didn’t put in a double jump like every metroidvania ever since most of the time it just makes it so all jumps have to be twice as large, just bloating up the areas in size and making stuff take longer than it needs to. the bubble is way more interesting and fun to use. it is a bit finicky though. if the bounce trigger thing was a bit lower I think it would be easier to use.
btw is it intended that the bubble bounces on the little flies? I can see that it might just be a bug because of the fattening them thing when you shoot them
the ledge climbing thing I’m not a big fan of as is. it takes way longer to climb stuff than feels necessary, especially since there are very few places where enemies attack you while you need to climb to get to them or something like that. it just slows the game down unnecessarily. the times when I get the little jump (glitch?) thing where the character just instantly jumps feels so much better
I really like the shooting. stuff takes knockback, you can shoot as fast as you can press the button and the gun swing thing when you aim up lets you shoot at an angle.
I never really used the healing outside of getting out of a spot when I thought I was stuck. it feels like shooting yourself in the foot. also limiting the amount of times you can use it feels a bit unnecessary since you will get max fat and “die” if you use it to much
the biggest problem the game has right now is that the optimal play is to grab one burger and then cash it in, rather than getting multiple ones. not sure how you can do anything about that outside of having some sort of optional challenge/ending behind a low save count though.
this is probably my biggest gripe with the entire genera as a whole, it encourages you to run back and save whenever you do any sort of progress because you don’t know what might be around the next corner. I don’t think I have ever seen a game that has managed to do anything about it.
I liked this game and hope to see more of it in the future
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