Just out of curiosity.
In a very generalizes sense, do you as a player enjoy the clear-cut staged changes?
Like in platformers like Tribal Hunter.
Or the more granular experiences in most text based stories (like Tramp and noone’s text adventure)
I understand that these two options serve specific goals.
But im personally curious to hear what you have to say about these two distinct ways these changes in weight can take place.
In my experience, the staged weight changes have their benefit of being clear, obvious and convey more easily how size affects you.
But gradual changes leave more vagueness and grow more anticipation and reward when the feedback of weight is significant enough with different kind of milestones.
Please, if you vote or not, don’t even hesitate sharing on what you enjoy, when and why.
Or if i even missed an option to put in the poll that you think i should really consider!
I’m nowhere near making an actual full fledged game yet, but laying the groundworks for it and a lot of it is thinking ahead.
Honestly I think the difference is more of an engine/coding limitation than anything else. The only way to (practically) have gradual changes is code that parametrically handles the outcomes of weight, which is much harder when the character is visually represented, and multiply that difficulty if they’re animated! Unless the engine you’re using is set up to handle that, it pretty much forces stepped weight gain instead of gradual.
Personally from a dev perspective I like the stepped approach more because it gives more control over how each weight stage works, but I won’t deny that most of my attempts at gradual gain haven’t really gone anywhere, so I’m a bit biased in that regard.
From a player perspective I don’t know if I can pick a favorite! They both have a lot to offer, and I’ve never found myself playing a game with one type and wishing it was the other.
assuming the gameplay doesn’t benefit from one or the other I think I would prefer gradual but it is hard to say considering there aren’t that many examples to look at. we probably haven’t seen them much because you can basically only do them (visually) with 3d models
I do think that most games would gain more from the stepped approach tho. it is easier to balance a game with say 3 distinct weight states and since there aren’t that many you can make them play more different without much issues.
in a gradual game you would mostly do something like at x weight y gets a x% buff and z gets a x% nerf, so the player character plays the same in broad strokes. you could still do stuff like after weight x you unlock some special ability but then you are just doing stepped changes without the clarity of changing the look of the player drastically (sometimes you might want it to be ambiguous but generally not)
IMO staged changes work well for these types of games. It is much easier to make visually different artwork, you can create different dialog for different stages, and as a reader you can skip over content until you get to the new wording of a new stage. That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a gradual one, but I think it is hard to convey it as well in a game.
Overall, I prefer somewhat gradual changes. Every little increment is exciting to see, especially when they start adding up.
With that being said, if they’re too gradual, it starts to backfire. Tainted Elysium, for example, has such a smooth visual transition that it’s often difficult to pick out the differences until they’ve added up considerably.
Additionally, while stages aren’t as fun, it’s still hard to go wrong with them. The biggest issue I’ve ever run into is stages being irregularly sized or improperly scaled. I’ve encountered games where you have to work your butt off to get to one stage, only to whiz through the next 2-3 effortlessly, or where some size increases are dramatic and impressive while others are barely visible. But those are just technical flaws; the overall concept is good regardless.
IMO, though, the most enjoyable games use both. I have to shout-out Abducted++ as one of the best examples - not only is it well-balanced, but it provides both a gradual measurement in the form of the PC’s weight, and a staged one in the mirror descriptions, giving you both a sense of continual progress and a reward for reaching certain milestones. This is an especially good compromise when it isn’t practical to do full granularity, e.g. when you have to provide a visual representation of the PC’s size in a pixel game.