Just played this newest version.
Absolutely loved it. The spritework is gorgeous, the enemies are cute and squishy, the game feels good to play (if janky in the early beta sense), and the music is nice.
Some notes:
- The burger deposit spot still mentions it refills your stims, though those are gone now. The NPC in town also still mentions pressing shift to heal.
- The scientist you crash down with has some redundant dialog. “I’ve set up a rudimentary lab in this hovel.” which is followed in the next text box by “I’ve managed to set up a rudimentary Science Research Lab in this shack.”
- Being able to do diagonal shots by shooting mid-animation is funny. Unsure if that’s intended or not but I do like it.
- When telling the scientist about the bug bullets, there’s an extra blank textbox at the end.
- Removing healing and increasing the base player HP was definitely the right call. Fits better with the sort-of “run” structure of the game. If you wanted to restore it a bit you could make burgers heal 1HP maybe. Or if you ever add HP upgrades, those could also restore HP.
- Echoing the sentiment that the bounce shot feels very awkward to use in practice. I struggled to tell what jumps I’m actually supposed to be able to make and which ones I’m wasting time with. Using it in combat is a bit silly too, but workable
- If you press Option on the menu the text stays forever, even after closing the menu, dying, or anything.
- I’m unsure if this is intended or not, but at size 4 I found it very difficult to climb 1 tile wide semisolid platforms. It was hard to climb in general, but 1 tile wide platforms were really difficult.
- The dragon boss is extremely cute. Would let flatten. You jump when advancing the textboxes after it.
- Ladder climbing speed at size 0 and size 1 feels a little too slow given the speed of other movement at those sizes.
- This jump is really difficult. The room beyond is pretty tough too but this jump took me much longer.
- A burger counter and/or general completion % for each zone would be nice in a later version.
100% completed, as far as I can tell.
Awesome work overall. Extremely excited to see more of it. Keep at it!!!
i’m on hashtag don’t-work-on-updates weekend so i’ll see what I can do on tuesday, thanks for letting me know abt the dialogue stuff and reminding me that the options menu still does nothing (i meant to change it later…) the burgers restoring health… that could be the thing that makes it important to get multiple burgers in a run… hmmmmmmm
I generally assumed the burgers would have been a way to get upgrades from the scientist.
not specifically only them, but also things you could eventually obtain the deeper you go
idk if this is planned or not, but I would love to be able to fatten more enemies/make them even fatter, maybe even bosses too, tho idk how that would tie into the gameplay.
This is pretty dang cool! Want to shout out to the art especially. Stuff like the big statues at the start are hot, and the bugs look surprisingly cute immobile.
I do want to say, while fattening up being so punishing does add a bit of a puzzle element, it’s so punishing that I mostly played by grabbing just a couple burgers at a time each run and circumventing the mobility problem entirely. Which is a bit of a shame since I’d like to want to get as fat as possible
I’ve actually been giving a lot of thought about that problem. I think intentionally making it hard to get to the places where burgers are could be a big part of it; specifically- having an area where it’s easy to grab like four burgers, but the way you get back to it is pretty hard, would incentivize the player to make as few runs as possible. You have to make the return trip easier though- since if someone is going to be punished after they grab the extra burgers that would make the already difficult challenge even more difficult, they probably won’t do it.
Another idea is to add some kind of multiplicative “bonus points” system that can be used for upgrades of some kind to make subsequent trips less of a problem- but the points earned are based on how fat you are, multiplicatively. So you’d get far more points for collecting four burgers as opposed to 3. Say if you reverted climbing speed to how it was; but then added an upgradeable stat that increases your climbing speed that becomes less and less effective the bigger you are. You could also use these points to increase your capacity- say you could start with a max of 3 burgers and upgrade to, I don’t know, six? maybe eight?
One idea meant to be paired with the previous one is, Ghost Burgers. Once a burger has already been collected, a “ghost” outline of it can be seen in the level where it was previously, which when collected increases your fat level without providing you a new burger- instead giving you significantly more bonus points when you return to the surface as a reward for choosing to take on the extra challenge at no other benefit. it also means you can still see the fat stages even after you’ve collected all of the burgers.
these are simple suggestions, but I’d like to know what you think. :3c
the ghost burgers concept has been brought up a few times and i thought about it myself some time last week, it’s likely a system like that will play a role in the final game, or some variation of such…
I’m wary of implementing something like Currency or Points and purchaseable upgrades to a game like this unless i’m really sure about it, i’d rather have upgrades and new abilities be found in the world or dropped from bosses… I feel like in a game with money a certain amount of the rewards you get from challenges is like “chest full of money”, and it’s always super lame to me to find an item chest and it just has money instead of an upgrade… I’d rather have a game where every challenge gets you a burger, a permanent upgrade, or some kind of erotic scenario, npc unlock etc. Also just I feel like i’ve played more games with neutral to bad currency systems than good, i think i just don’t like them lol
with regards to the multiplication, that runs into a problem I ran into with other similar ideas, which is that I don’t like the idea of someone grabs the zone 1 burgers in like 6 trips instead of 4, and now they’ve permanently missed out on the multiplier bonus associated with getting more at once… It might only be difficult because the current game has no reason to collect burgers anyway, other than to feed the scientist. Once I figure out what they do, I think it’ll be easier to think of how “how many you collect in a run” can be a more interesting consideration
Just spitballing while I’m thinking of it - what if burgers were more like notes from Banjo Kazooie? Which is to say, the highest you ever collect in a level is recorded, and they all reset when you die / leave? With an additional change that it takes X burgers to go up a stage instead of 1 burger = 1 fat. That would encourage going for as much as possible in a run while also making you think about routing. Of course that’s a pretty drastic change so it might be too out there
ive been trying for days to make that jump and im stuck i have no idea how to do it
ideally i want every enemy to have some puzzle-y fattening mechanic! i’m thinking of reworking the gooey turrets to be a bit more “charismatic”, to this end, and future areas will have their own sets of enemies too. I’m still not entirely sure about what you’ll be able to use burgers for! I initially imagined them being used to fatten npcs and that then unlocking new areas and previously blocked sections of areas somehow (the somehow does a lot of lifting), acting basically like mario 64 stars that let you access more parts of the planet
hmmm now i’m imagining what would be a really significant change to the game’s structure, where instead of bringing burgers back to the surface you bring them to specific places in the underground, so there could be a like Magic Burger Door (whatever) in the bottom right that you have to bring 4 burgers to at once to Activate it, and then it unlocks, uh, something…? and then you, uhhh… it doesn’t really work with the “have to get back to the surface” structure that’s there, does it…
I think “getting back to the surface” is nice as a straightforward goal for each run, something worth building around. however, the games that inspired that idea for the structure are stuff like Etrian Odyssey, Wizardry, basically: dungeon crawlers. games where the purpose that loop serves is like the incremental progress over time and feeling like “oooh i could just get a biiiiit more” and then it turns out you bit off more than you could chew, and everyone’s dead.
Those games are more about weighing the gained Progression (xp, gold, items, map area) against your dwindling resources, and your resources DO dwindle. It’s essentially impossible to go through any battle with zero damage or resource drain, so it’s more of a soft timer of judging how long you can comfortably afford to stay down here compared to the cost of getting back.
In burger dog, it’s way more binary, playing with 3/4 burgers is so much harder than playing with 1 or 2!! that and the hard part being coming back rather than getting there means there isn’t as much invested effort to consider when deciding if you should stick around getting more stuff before coming back.
Also about the resources, since it’s an action game you can totally avoid all damage by playing effectively. The only thing you can’t avoid is that you will get fatter for each burger you want to bring back! so it’s a pretty simple judgement to decide to go back to the surface once you get two burgers already, but then every other pressure in the game is encouraging you to head back even sooner than that! Everything you could possibly look at and think “hm, is it worth trying to do that?” simply isn’t, it will always be easier later, for the same payoff
I honestly think the mechanics of the burgers is fine as is.
Since it gives space to play slow and at your own pace or to trying to optimize everything and do it fast as possible.
What you could add for me would be more like optional trophies or like a scoring system, like a timer of how long it took you to get all the burgers in an area or how many trips it took you to achieve it.
But I don’t think it’s fun to make a mechanic that forces the player to play in a way they don’t want to, let alone if is their first time in the game.
hmm, you may be right…
im wondering now if it might be a good idea to more intentionally split up the current zone and future ones into chunks of 5 burgers, like “courses”? i dunno, it might feel kind limiting to do it that way… hmmm
perhaps it’s nice to just leave it as it is, with some massaging here and there, and for future areas try and make them be a bit more strict about getting multiple burgers at once
honestly hmm, im thinking about it and part of it seems fun… I wonder what a full 20-burger single run of this demo would look like?
patch v 0.2.51 is out! some graphical errors and general weirdnesses fixed, some writing alterations. biggest changes are the fact that dying before bringing back a powerup means you don’t get to keep the powerup (this was always the intention, but since I’ve never heard it brought up i worry people are used to this being how it is and might dislike this change…)
and that the climbing hitbox now scales with player size, so it should be easier to climb stuff at higher weights.
ive been stuck on this jump and i dont know how to do it also i cant shoot the charge shot heal or shoot up and down in the latest version
the healing feature was taken out i believe but otherwise yeah im having the same issues. also that jump is just a lil technical. i made it on previous versions by standing on the platform above u shooting into the wall w the charge shot and following it once it fell through the gap to time a bounce on it
somn like this… idk godspeed soldier