oops last update fucked it up! should be fixed now with 0.2.52
hi, ive been lurking on this forum for a while. never really felt the need to make an account and comment until now i suppose
but i feel like all of y’all should know there’s actually 21 burgers, not just 20
not just posting this for the 100%ers to know they should check twice, but also in case this not-round number is an accidental placement of an extra burger
by coincidence, my last two were in the blood sucker room. I don’t quite remember where I got ALL of them, though, so i’ll have to go back and replay it all if you really need a list
regardless, fun game! rlly liked learning to work with the bubble gun
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I think this would work pretty well. just gotta keep the game (or each zone) small enough that the player can reasonably keep all the relevant information in their head all at once. I feel like metroidvanias could use more routing challenges like that since “orienteering” is part of the game but the player is not really tested on it.
you could even place some burgers where they are kinda hard to avoid so the player have to find a route around them because they would be to fat to get some other burger
also I think losing your equipment on death is fine. I personally was a bit surprised when I learned that I got to keep stuff when I died. it feels very exploitable if you can just die to keep whatever powers you got
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This might be a wild change, but I think making it so going immobile teleports you back with the burgers instead of losing them would be a good way to incentivize higher weight gameplay.
Right now you basically have a hard inventory limit of four burgers with the fifth serving as a neat little “death”, but when I was trying to do 3-4 burger runs I never found myself forced to take an additional burger because of a missed jump or having to take a different route to avoid a burger, and with the platforming being harder most of the time getting that fifth burger would be a challenge in of itself!
I think leaning into that challenge could work, and would not only encourage going above two burgers to begin with, but would also encourage straight up exploration at higher weights. Can’t figure out how to escape normally? Maybe there’s a burger or two around the corner that are your ticket out. It would also give a nice little risk/reward decision of whether to push further in with less mobility or taking the safe route and backtracking, whereas right now the only incentive (which to be fair is a pretty good one) is seeing the fat sprites jumping around. I also think the idea of desperately waddling around looking for just one more burger is fun.
I’m not sure what the diegetic explanation would be, maybe gathering five burgers provides enough of a power surge that the mendicant can track to find you?
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Easy way to put it is that throwaway lore line the keeper gives about the burgers representing the life force of the planet could cause the world to change as you collect more, unlocking certain pathways and such-
another mechanic could be doors that require you to be over a certain weight to open them. That way your only way to collect certain burgers could require the player to already weigh 1-2 burgers heavier than normal; and it’d be a way to ensure any challenges within are specifically fine-tuned for a fattened player to encounter.
You could include certain changes as well; perhaps beating a boss drops an item that makes you max size and you have to bring it to the surface in order to claim it’s upgrade while specifically electing to avoid ghost burgers on the path back or risk being immobilized, Or a boss that, in order to defeat it, winds up with the player being fattened as part of some kind of puzzle-fight, where you have to complete some set objectives before the boss drains your health.
Perhaps, certain enemies could even have a mechanic where they will ignore the player if they’re over a certain fat threshold, too.
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Ohhhh hmmm that’s not a bad idea
I might look into making a side version with a system like that for people to try, see how it goes.
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The weight based gateways are a fun idea, you could run with that concept and have pressure plates that need either a heavy player or a bloated enemy placed on them (with the heavy player being the more convenient choice since enemies reset on exiting the room), or a lever/pulley thing you have to hang off of that’s weight dependent.
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Mhm, theres actually weight based doors in the game already! Jist very few of them are vertical… go up to any of the blue doors and jump next to them while yure over stage 3! But yeah stuff like that is most likely coming.
One thing that scratches my head abt such systems is deciding how much is “enough weight”… so far ive considered it as being qbove stage 3, where you start sweating and the platforming really starts introducing some trouble. To me that feels inelegant that it just suddenly is enough weight, but oh well… maybe weight activated things could have a spinning scale needle on it when you interact or step on to show how far below the minimum weight you are? Hmmm
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Personally I think you could have different rooms have different amounts of required weight. Since 2 burgers seems to be the limit for most people, putting burgers behind a door that requires you to weigh at least 2 points to enter sounds justified to me. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from needing more!
I think the best way to represent it would be to have some kind of weight switch with little LED’s on it that light up the heavier you are. For 2-weight doors, it would light up one if you didn’t have any extra fat- 2 lights if you had 1 burger of weight, and 3 lights if you had 2 burgers of weight, which would open the door.
Please excuse my ASCII art representation of this:
._____.
/ o o o \
Ideally such a platform should make an audible click sound when you walk on it, maybe have a visible little “plate” that clicks down when stood on.
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i actually made something like this yesterday:
the needle goes up to max mobile weight at the end, and the green area indicates what percentage to max u need to open
in the end i’m still iffy about it, it feels like a very “puzzle game mechanic” in a way i dont find very appealing… I just think there’s gotta be a more fun way of gating stuff like this than something very binary like this… like to me not being able to jump high when heavier was more interesting and analog as a level design tool vs if there were doors that only open if you’re skinny
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I just thought something, part of what limits the game (At least in my understanding from what other people say) is having to go back to the beginning to deliver the burgers, but what if you put points to deliver them inside the dungeon (or cave or whatever it’s called XD) like save points in the metroid saga but to deliver burgers?
Just something that came to my mind, but if having to go back to the beginning to delivering them is an important part of your vision of the game I understand.
i’d like to spend design time on making the go-back-to-the-beginning structure work! thats part of what can be unique about this game to me, I like the dungeon crawler flavour of escaping.
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I do definitely think the “have to make it back to the start” structure is really unique and you should try to make it work if possible. Current setup does heavily discourage getting more than 1-2 burgers on a given run, and unfortunately I’m a bit short on ideas for that.
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so here’s the thing about it tho right? fat reduces your abilities and increases none of them (to my knowledge) meaning without literally making an object that straight up denies the player access unless they’re overweight, there is no way to lock any given area (and therefore the spoils within) behind size, other than being light enough to get there. Which means you have to find other avenues to encourage players to get more than 2 burgers per trip.
Or you have to make fat have some kind of benefit so that you can use that leverage to access new areas.
Edit:
Here’s a thought: what about water? the player could sink in water unless they’re fat enough to float despite the added weight of their space suit.
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Oddly enough, the idea of doors that can only be open at large weights and the idea of other ways to exit to the hub might work decently if used together. Just having ways out other than the main exit would definitely go against the route planning core concept, but if those alternative exits could only be entered at an extra large size then the player would still need to plan out how they’d route to the door near the 3rd or 4th burger, resulting in something very similar to the core gameplay loop but flipped on its head.
Mostly works as an idea for variety later on, rather than a change to the core gameplay loop as well.
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Yea definitely agree. For being bigger to really be worth it I feel like there needs to be some things that it helps with while still retaining the low mobility.
The main thing that really stuck out to me playing with a lot of burgers was enemies being exponentially more dangerous when big (bigger hitbox and can’t really maneuver) so being bigger making you tankier for instance would be cool.
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i guess the core of my design hangups here is in some design principles i would like to follow for weight stuff if I can, which are
- I would rather weight be treated as a physical property rather than a Stat, and the effect should be very visible, or at least not mystified into behind the scenes stats, something like tankier at higher weight or a special door that unlocks at X fat size to me is more on the “stat” side, the “tanky at higher weight” thing tbh i wonder if the average player probably would even notice that’s happening when all the damage is on the scale of 1 or 2. I’d rather something like grabbing a burger restores HP, that’s something you can plan around and it’s very noticeable that’s what it’s doing cuz of the heal number popup
- I would rather weight effects be organic/analog rather than binary (the mechanic applies at all levels of weight rather than suddenly activating at a benchmark of ‘enough weight’. this is the principle i can most easily imagine breaking, since if that arbitrary weight is ‘maximum’ that kind of makes sense right)
- the weight effects/mechanics should have multiple ramifications rather than just being a progression gate
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The only thing I can can think of for gating at higher weights with those requirements would be a seesaw of some sort.
i guess to explain what i mean more i’ll just throw out some ideas of the kind of stuff i’m thinking abt, not that these are like guaranteed to go in the game, just what I think of
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for gates that block the players progress at low weights what comes to mind is like rickety platforms that bend a certain amount when the player walks on them, bending more the higher the weight. maybe you can time the bend so you can like trampoline double-bounce yourself upward, a higher bounce the higher your weight since the platform bends further. at max weight, the platform just snaps, allowing you to access what’s underneath it. I had an idea too of maybe max weight allowing you to destroy ANY climbable/semi-solid platform by jumping on it repeatedly, that could be funny. The water could be neat, i’m not sure how it would work with enemies and the like, and how different stages would work with it… i think it’d be a lot to figure out and for the player to deal with so i think if there’s a water system like that there will be a particular water-filled area for its impact on the physics system to shine. Honestly im quite liking the idea of a scary water dungeon now… maybe it could have an air limit… you go down slim and have to grab up burgers, and then float back up to the surface before oxygen runs out… it’s a different kind of tension from usual, so I like it…
To the end of Organic stuff it’s also a design principle here that I want Creatures to be a big focus, more than they already are… If possible I think it’d be good to try to solve problems first with creatures and physical phenomena than overtly puzzle-game tools. Maybe something like a half life 2 barnacle that only likes eating really fat things, so it pulls you up, or any overlarge critters under it… It’s possible a seesaw might be funny too, I might try that out -
with the barnacle and the rickety platform i think those illustrate another design concept I like the idea of, which is that every benefit of weight should be kind of a downside, or framed as such, like being too fat for this platform or fat enough to be a morsel for this barnacle. The barnacle, one problem with that is it’d have to be pretty damn big right… where the hell would I put that… oh well
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being bigger making combat harder is something I would like to flesh out more, it’s something core to what I imagined this game could be. But ideally it wouldn’t be that being bigger makes combat just harder, but that it makes it more technical too. I like the idea of an encounter you could just blast through at a lower weight being something you have to really plan out at high weight, like a one-screen heist. To that end I think focusing more on level design might be useful, and tying more mechanics to weight. I’ve thought about adding something like falling on enemies deals damage the fatter you are, and just flattens them completely at max weight, I think a scenario like sneaking around to get the drop on an enemy and squash could be fun.
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there is the possibility of something like making it so the player just cannot complete a run unless they have four burgers, but I’d rather do that in conjunction with significant level design and game structure changes. Right now that’d just be softlock city, since you can get any combination of burgers you want. A game with that restriction would be a lot more linear I feel, with discrete ‘courses’ that contain four burgers each and cannot be left until each is acquired, so more like a puzzle platformer with discrete levels than a search-action. I’d like to preserve and accentuate the feelings of exploration and experimentation, that’s more “unknown planet adventure” to me
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unsure of how big a benefit this would be, but ideally talking to npcs at higher weights would have them comment on it, and you can only be fat in the hub by collecting the burgers, so that would kinda be a benefit that isn’t there yet.
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I think the core loop is just fundamentally flawed, due to it not being necessary to engage with the burgers in their totality, and also bc the burgers don’t really know what they are yet? they’re kind of like mario 64 power stars in them being given out for special platforming objectives, but they’re also collected under increasing restrictions… hmm