Give me your input on creating my first fat game

[mushy_mime]

Hello, I’ve been learning Godot for a bit and decided on a whim to make a weight gain game, called Hungry Holly.

Hungry Holly is a single-arena wave survival game, sort of like Vampire Survivors. You play as Holly, a post-apocalyptic scavenger who unearths an ancient curse of boundless gluttony. This causes zombies and mutants to swarm (who all happen to be cute girls of course), and leaves Holly with an insatiable appetite.

Instead of XP, you gain weight to level up. Eating food dropped by enemies advances Holly through weight stages, with a choice of perk at every new stage. Each weight stage will increase Holly’s max health and ammo capacity, but slightly reduce top speed. Enemies will be zombies, mutant slime girls, and the occasional human bandit.

At max weight level the boss will spawn. It will be the physical incarnation of greed and corpulence, the fattest spirit I can fit on the screen.

I’m prototyping a system so you can feed enemies instead of killing them, which pleases the curse spirit, giving you buffs that are separate from the weight level buffs. what this means is if you can hold back on stuffing your face for a bit and stuff some zombie girls instead, you may gain some extra perks before the boss encounter.

Currently it’s all controlled with the mouse. Holly follows the cursor and attacks in a wide arc with left click, and when right mouse is held, she aims her shotgun, then left click fires.

And here’s an early idle sprite for Holly. it’s not great, so if anyone has any art advice or wants to lend a hand with the art lemme know.

So what features would you like to see in this game? Do you have any questions? It’s my first project of this nature, so I’m open to any suggestions, feedback, and criticism.

[bodopc]

Maybe a stomach capacity feature, need time to digest to earn XP. Occasionally enemy is capable of forcefeeding the player, and eating over capacity cause stomach to stretch, too much may cause damage.

[mushy_mime]

This is an interesting idea, I like it

[coldsteelj]

It is hard to suggest something since there is no information about visual details of characters. According to main character sprite it is pretty detailed which lead to significant effort/time on making her running animations or other planned animations. The question is how much weight stages planned for main character and other enemy sprites? If a lot, then drawing additional sprites just to show belly stuffing may be out of question.

[mushy_mime]

I would have added more images but it wouldn’t let me. The main character will likely have somewhere around 10 weight stages ultimately, while (most) enemies will only have one, they are either skinny or fattened.

It shouldn’t be too intensive to draw since I’m not doing back sprites and I’m keeping the frame counts low for animations. That could change if I get better or pixel art or find an artist though

Here’s a WIP sketch of a later weight stage

[mushy_mime]

And here’s a screenshot from an earlier build, to give an idea of how the game will function

[JakobY]

Questions :

• “Perfect knowledge” AI, where the enemies always know where Holly is, or Line Of Sight / Auditory Awareness system? Does the player see to the edges of the screen, or is there a fog of war / line of sight thing for them?
• How do the different enemies vary in the threats they pose?
• What are the in-the-moment gameplay loops the player is juggling?
• On a scale from “Chess” to “Slap Hands”, how strategic vs twitchy are you aiming?

Suggestions:

• “Radar Sweep” point of aim for the ranged weapon. The actual center of damage hits along a red(?) line that projects out from the end of the weapon to the mouse’s location, but sweeps back and forth between black(?) lines showing the potential deflection.The red line is the actual center of damage (if it’s a shotgun maybe damage scales down for targets not directly on the red line but still in the cone). Some advancements tighten the deflection range, making the shotgun more accurate and faster to aim.

[Rwby]

I like the idea of the weight being an increasing physical determent (like as you mentioned with slowing down) while she gains more abilities with her levels. She is affected by a curse of boundless gluttony, I feel like it would be good to have more physical consequences. Maybe she has a stamina bar for short dashes or dodges and it depletes faster at higher weights, she could have to pause and catch her breath when it fully empties like a self stun.

[mushy_mime]

1. The first one, they’ll basically always chase you, except when distracted by food.

2. Basic zombies will mostly jam you with numbers, slimes/mutants are the bulkier enemies that will linger around the arena, and bandits will be the fastest/most agressive, killing other enemies to get to you.

3. The basic gameplay loop is similar to other “survivor-likes:” kill, get xp, level up, kill better. Except it’s food in my game. And then there will be the element of feeding enemies, and actually delaying your weight gain intentionally to gain more perks before the boss spawns.

4. Hmm, maybe like a 6?

That radar aiming mechanic sounds interesting, I’ll remember that when I get to updating the gun. Currently it just shoots a slread of projectiles towards the cursor

[mushy_mime]

Her hurtbox will also get bigger, which can be a big deal in a game like this. But I will try to strike a balance with making the player “feel” the weight, but not make it too annoying to actually level up.

If I added a dash, do you think it should have invincibility frames, or just be for movement?