I think having lower health at lower weight would be fine if enemies could be dealt with just a little more easily, with a larger margin for success when jumping on them. I think the arrows are pretty easy to avoid as it is except at the highest weight when you have health to spare.
There are also lots of check points in this demo, if there are so many in the final game it wouldn’t be so demanding to insist you make it through a short, hazardous area with only one heart. One could also attempt to balance maintaining the second weight for an extra health point for mistakes if it doesn’t impede movement too much. It also seems like some hazards like large areas of spikes are instant death anyway, making health irrelevant, but I didn’t test to see if I’d still die immediately if I jumped on some while fat.
That you’ll be at the lightest weight for 90% of the game seems like a big assumption. Some levels of the final game may require or encourage you to be heavier more of the time. And some people will just like running around fat as long as possible. Making fats is why people here are playing and they might have more fun that way.
I agree, it was kinda annoying how fast they recovered, but it wasn’t too bad. Personally, I was usually at weight 2, bc it doesn’t limit you much and lets you have a heart as back up.
I’m reviewing all the surveys (you people are amazing–I can’t believe how many have been submitted already!) and plan to make a short post tonight responding to some of the more common pieces of feedback, as well as catching up on my responses to the new posts in the thread.
In the mean time, here’s a link to the brief Devlog #5 for anyone who wants to read it. Talk to you in a bit!
What you’re making here is just super impressive. I hope that’s clear as you read people’s comments and suggestions. This is maximum effort. You could have just cleaned up the gain jam version and everyone would have been stoked. It’s a great game. Instead you decided to raise the bar. Feed the Crown is on track to be majestic.
Summitted by survey already. Forgot to mention, this is so far my most anticipated game right now, like in total, Triple AAA has let me down too many times, and currently no indie game has my interest. Can’t wait to see more!
I agree the cat knight’s controls are a little bit finnicky on a keyboard - not that it isn’t playable, mind you. I found that switching to a controller helped a lot in that regard.
Here’s hoping that keymapping will be a future feature so as to improve handling and overall accessibility to the game!
Good morning! As of this writing, the demo has been downloaded 700+ times and I’ve received 137 surveys, which is INCREDIBLE. I expect feedback to continue to roll in gradually over the next few days, but I’ve finished reading the surveys submitted so far and wanted to share some info and address some of the more frequently mentioned suggestions. Brace yourself for a lengthy post!
In terms of difficulty, the majority of players seem to find things to be reasonable. Keep in mind that this was a demo level, and you can expect the skill curve of the finished game to start a bit slower at the opening levels, and ramp up a bit more by the final levels. Hopefully this will provide a balanced challenge for the greatest number of players!
Enemies
Hitboxes: A number of people reported hitboxes not being forgiving enough when jumping on the enemy heads. I’m going to make the hitbox a bit more lenient when you are trying to stun them.
Stun Time: The enemies are currently stunned for 3 seconds at all weights. I received a lot of feedback on scaling the stun length at higher weights to compensate for the player’s decreased movement speed. This is a great suggestion, so I plan to play around with the numbers (probably making the stun times 3/3/4/5 for the respective weights)
Enemy AI: I’m pretty happy with the enemy AI, though I agree that there’s a bit of a predicament if you end up with an enemy on a ledge above you while you’re in a pit. It’s technically possible to escape without a hit, but it’s way too tricky. First I’ll see if I can work out a solution with the AI, but if that doesn’t work I’ll make alternative exits to those pits.
Platforming
Breakable Floors: A lot of comments mentioned the wooden ledges breaking instantly feeling a bit strange. This instant-breaking is intentional design that periodically forces the player to either avoid those spots while fat or change weights. The cracking stone floors that break at different speeds (and give the player a chance to move) will still exist in the game! They just weren’t shown in this demo. These platforms are intended to function differently and will be utilized in separate ways in the levels!
Wall-Sliding: I want to take a closer look at wall-sliding. Some suggested a slower sliding speed to give you more leniency with wall-jumps (some also suggested a faster speed at higher weights, but I’m less fond of that idea as it may increase difficulty too much). I’ll also look at the timing for “snapping” into a wall-slide. The way it currently works is that you cannot wall-slide until you are moving downward with your momentum. This is to prevent you from accidentally shorting a jump because you were too close to a wall (this is somewhat similar to how Mario games handle it).
Wall-Jumping: Wall-jumping is tricky, and I’ll address the controls in the next section. As for mechanics, I am able to increase the window when a player can wall-jump, but the bigger this window is, the larger the chance of the player accidentally wall-jumping when they just want to move away from a wall. I have to experiment with this one more.
Controls
Control Options: The feedback for preferred keyboard/controller layout is VERY diverse. There are a lot of unique opinions when it comes to controls. I am considering setting up a remapping feature, though I have to be cautious with how I spend my development time since I am just one person! At the very least, I can setup alternative control schemes for people who want to play using z/x vs. q/e vs. control/shift, etc. Generally speaking, people seem to be pleased with the controller button mapping though, so I don’t plan to change much there.
Cat Knight Controls: The Cat seems to be generally well-received on the controller, but kind of forces your hand into a pretzel on the keyboard due to the number of keys that have to be used to pull off the trickier movements. There were a lot of helpful suggestions for different approaches to improving this, and I’m going to experiment with them and see what I can do to make it a bit easier to manage.
Wall-Jumping Controls: This one is a bit divided. First, let’s look at the graphs.
Wall-Jump using the controller (1 is bad, 5 is good):
Wall-Jump using the keyboard (1 is bad, 5 is good):
Things fair a bit better with the controller (as the controls do overall). On the keyboard, the average is decreased slightly. My goal was to move away from the traditional “Press A” and switch directions to jump scheme, which I thought might be challenging. Ideally, I wanted players to feel like they could simply time the left/right control and “bounce” back and forth between walls. Some people really liked this! Others found it unusual! I think that as players get used to it, and if I can tweak the wall-sliding/jumping window a bit, that it can still work. (I’m honestly just happy to see the average is above a 3!)
That’s a long post, and there’s so much feedback I didn’t mention here! Just know that I have read every survey response and am carefully considering all of them as I continue work on the game. I’ll continue to monitor feedback and may release a small update to the demo in the near future to test out some of the tweaks mentioned above.
You all might be tired of me thanking you for all your help, but I’m not going to stop until I feel I’ve expressed the right amount of gratitude for the work you’re putting in to keep me motivated on this game–so THANK YOU!
Now that we can assume that the knight abilities are more or less established, it should be fun to think of what devious challenges and pitfalls to throw at this trio of interlopers.
Forcing players to traverse a stage whilst heavy (either through necessity for a switch at the end, or by enemies pelting them with food) would be a suitably sadistic start!
Finally got aROUND to playing this hefty new demo. It’s shaping up nicely! I love some of the little touches, that subtle screen shake when you do jumping jacks at the highest weights is super cute, I hope you manage to squeeze in more stuff like that! I also appreciated how the bow pigs are fatter than the ones who run around and chase you, I appreciate the thought put into that kinda thing. With how carefully you’ve planted hot fat stuff even into this little demo, I’m SUPER stoked to see what you’ve got cooking for the feeding scenes with the queens!
As others have said, the enemies should probably stay stunned for a LITTLE while longer. If you tie this to weight, that’d be pretty elegant. Maybe add an exaggerated squashing effect at higher weights?
I also feel like the game could be just a hair faster in general, maybe just 10-15% would make a big difference. I think others have also pointed out that the boards give out a bit too quickly, even just a few frames of a cracking effect would fix it right up. Last thing isn’t really an issue, more of an observation,the pigs are really quite tenacious when they chase you down. I actually lured one to that large vertical chamber and used it as a footstool to go up easier using the bird knight!
I only played as two of the knights so far (cat and bird) and their individual mechanics both seem to be working as intended! I couldn’t find the last bag as the bird knight, and that made me think of something. It might not be a bad idea to add a mechanic that sorta points or indicates when you’re close to an obtainable bag. Maybe have the knight’s stomach gurgle or something when you’re near a bag of apples?
While I’m at it, I thought I’d spitball a few ideas related to the weight mechanic that might be fun.
Given how being fat has some mobility drawbacks, why not include an enemy who intentionally tries to fatten you up? Maybe during a chase sequence or running to get under a bridge or even a tough platforming segment the little pigs could try to throw apples into your mouth to make you more cumbersome.
You know the bullies from Mario 64 who push you around? That seems like a natural fit for the wight mechanic here! At low weights they push you around, but get your knight nice ‘n’ hefty and you can turn the tables.
Increasing and decreasing weight is such a versatile mechanic that I could really go on, but this post is long enough already hahaha. The demo was fantastic, I’ll be patiently looking forward to the next update!
Mentioning the speed of the game is an interesting topic… I enjoy playing a lot of fast-paced indie games (Super Meat Boy, Enter the Gungeon, etc.) and while I love that style of gameplay, I think it tends to be more challenging than some players want to deal with–especially in a fetish game. Since a platformer is already outside of a lot of people’s preferred genre, I intentionally tried to keep the pace a little more akin to something like a Kirby game in attempt to keep it slightly more accessible. (Especially since I tend to err on the side of making things too unforgiving)
I like your suggestions though! Late last year I actually showed a brief glimpse of a “bully” type enemy in one of the devlogs, but they weren’t in this demo (I still need to rework them to better fit with the updated mechanics). The plan is for them to also double as a bouncy object (like the mushrooms) if you manage to knock them down.
A couple others have also talked about the idea of enemies who fatten you instead of damage you, and I definitely have plans for some modified archers who will do just that!
I could imagine that the cat and bird knight would have to bulk up to stand a chance at toppling the bully or risk being bounced away. The mouse knight would need the added impact of a mid-air dive to become a furry missile so as to topple the hulking bully!
I use GameMaker Studio 2 (GMS2). I love the engine and highly recommend it for anyone interested in game dev, even if they’re brand new to the field.
I come from a basically non-existent programming background, aside from a couple years spent tinkering around in RPG Maker MV. I made my first game, The Breakfast Chub, for the 2019 Gain Jam using RPG Maker MV and had to do all these ridiculous work-arounds because that program just really isn’t meant for things outside of the standard RPG game.
About 2 months before the 2020 Gain Jam, I started following some GMS2 tutorials and slowly learned basic coding using GML, Game Maker’s built-in language. Learning the language was definitely daunting at first, but you can make pretty significant progress when you put the work in!
How has it been almost 2 months since I last updated everyone? Where does the time go?
Quick progress note: I’ve been steadily working on things when real life lets me. Some tweaks have been made based on demo feedback (enemy AI, enemy hitboxes, stun time, and the cat’s control scheme). There are also new enemies and environmental hazards which I’m excited about! I’m getting closer to having enough content to build all of my planned levels. Then I’ll shift to queen development
And thanks for offering to help out with testing! I may quietly release a smaller demo (not a full level like before) to test some of those platforming features out.
