Kookie's Kastle (0.0.2) (Abandoned project)

[JacoTomo]

This is what I’ve been working on for the past month or so, I was hoping to get more done before I showed it to the public, but I just haven’t been feeling motivated much to continue working on it. So here is the build I put together to show friends, didn’t get much input on it so might as well put it up here for everyone else.

It’s a snake / pac-man / crystal castles hybrid game, where you must eat fruit and bait grow longer and wider! Eat all the pellets to move onto the next level, just watch your weight… and your tail…

Currently, It has five normal levels, and four kaizo levels (Dunno if it’d actually be considered kaizo difficulty, but they are harder and require some special tech using the sprint mechanic)

There’s a little guide in game, but just in case…

Controls

Move: WASD or Arrow Keys (On default, you must press two keys at once to move in a direction, if you want single inputs only, turn on “experimental movement type”)

Sprint: HOLD Spacebar or Shift (Be careful, you can fall off the map and die while sprinting)

For UI, you use the Move and Sprint inputs to move and select

You can download and play the game here!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gyN_96HQT5A8cFI8YtXjW3dtHWmwnQe3

Like I said up there, I’ve been struggling to continue working on it, and I just want to go start another project instead. Gameplay wise, I think this game is or could be better than my previous game, Gain & Weigh, but on the kinky side, I feel like it’s really lacking. I’ve been thinking of recycling some of the code for another game, with real weight gain and not just a bunch of circles getting bigger, but yeah idk.
It could become something cool, but I just lost my drive, so now I’m wondering if it’d just be better to move on to something else instead.

This is some of the things I was hoping to add or change to the game, if I ever continue working on it:

Future additions or changes

-Only require a partial amount of pellets to be eaten to complete a level, instead of requiring ALL pellets to be eaten.
-When the required pellets are eaten, it opens an exit portal, which you must enter to beat the level.
-A dinner bell will appear after a while, if you grab it, it will refresh the entire level with new food.
-A level timer, if stay too long in a level, it will spawn a big ghost woman that will start chasing behind you.
-A few enemies and level gimmicks

[BuizelSofts]

excellent work as always!! keep it up!! <3

[Kaiser_Dragon]

Im liking that you go into these old school type of games and adding some wg element to them and that you implemented different type of controls right out of the box as i couldnt do so well with the default style.

I do feel like you hit a bit of a bump for more wg but the only idea i can throw out at a wall would be, if the wg is simple then maybe use more the environment to show the effect of the wg, something like, a bigger map with specific thinner and wider hallways that you can only traverse depending on the amount of pellets eaten, telling trough gameplay, like how you did with the snake slowing down when you eat only pellets and avoid apples, i did enjoy that detail.

Still, good that you shared it and hope you can push another delicious fun game in the future.

[JacoTomo]

Thank you! I don’t know why I always gravitate towards the retro arcade-y stuff, but I just find it fun implementing weight gain to those types of games.

Yeah, that would be a good idea if you had to worry about your width in a similar way where you have to worry about your length, like in the OG snake. It’d just be tough to implement those changes while playing mid-level I feel like, or actually maybe not, idk I’ll have to look into it. It’s a pretty good idea regardless, it’d give the fattening gimmick a lot more depth.
I thought about raising the cap for how fat Pooki can get too, but then you run into the problem where you cannot see anything and the sprites overlap each other weird at a certain size. The only fix to this would be, again, to do what you suggested.

Honestly feel like I chose a really tricky game to try and make a fetish game out of, feels like I can only do so much with it on the kinky-side. But yeah I’m glad I gave it a shot, I’m pretty happy with how it came out even with the limitations.

[mosquito]

This game goes pretty hard as-is, not gonna lie. The kaizo levels were especially enjoyable for me, even if they weren’t “kaizo hard”, simply because they’re good puzzler-style fun.

I still think the term applies, though. Here's why:

In case you’re wondering, “kaizō” technically just means “rebuilt/modified” and is used to refer to any sort of game mod or ROM hack in Japanese-speaking communities, from what I can gather; when applied as a level design term (in the vein of Kaizo Mario World and other hacks in that style) it generally refers to challenges designed around following a strict path/series of actions with very little room for deviation, and usually make heavy use of obscure game interactions and mechanics/glitches.
In this regard, Kaizo Mario World is so hard because platformers are very open-ended and granular in respect to player actions and timings, but I personally think the concept can also be applied to games with less freedom of movement (and thus, making execution easier) such as this if the puzzle aspect is greatly enhanced compared to “normal” or “intended” play, and I personally think this game’s kaizo levels fit the criteria.

Giivng your list of planned additions a quick glance, it looks like your vision for the game is a more arcade-style level progression focused on increasing time pressure on the player gradually as a limiting factor, which I don’t think is half bad, but it’s also kind of a shame, because I think this could make a killer puzzle game too, doubly so if a level editor was added and people could share their custom levels, but that’s probably way too complex a coding challenge than you’re willing to put up with for this, IDK.

Either way, there’s a problem with the kaizo level sets in the sense that since you have unlimited lives, you can technically die and keep racking up score ad nauseam and just get however many points you want. There’s no real point or reward for doing so, but I felt like mentioning it just in case.

[Compass]

I feel like the taking too long ghost woman addition could be mitigated by either becoming too fat to snek, or simply too large to enter the portal.

[JacoTomo]

Thanks, I definitely feel like it’s one of the better games I’ve made so far, and that I could do some really cool stuff with it if I continued working on it.

Also that’s super interesting getting to read all of that, I didn’t know it was more of a general term in Japan. Almost all of the tech used in the kaizo levels were created completely on accident, and I just left it in cause I thought it was cool, so I guess it could almost be considered as glitches.
Thank you for thist, it was really cool getting to learn all that! ^w^

Yeah, that was the idea, but if people end up thinking it’d be better without being timed, I may end up not doing it. Or like the person below suggested, maybe mitigate the severity of the ghost in a more fun way. Also I feel like with all the enemies, special tiles, etc, I want to add, it’d work better in a more puzzle-like game anyways. I’ve also thought of how cool it’d be if it had a level creator too, it might be a little over my skill level though.

I kinda knew that that was a problem, this build was simply to try to get it out there to show to people, so I wasn’t so worried about it at the time, definitely a problem though. I just didn’t want to have limited lives on the kaizo world cause I was worried people might have too much trouble with it.

[JacoTomo]

I was going to have the ghost grow larger the fatter you get, but that was just a visual thing, I never thought of having the ghost activate or be influenced by the players weight on a gameplay level. Might end up being better to do something like this rather than have it soley be a time thing.

[JacoTomo]

I’ve been meaning to come back and say that, I’ve jumped back onto working on this game a little, and I managed to implement what you were kinda talking about!! The snake-creature can now grow into different ‘weight stages’, where you switch from moving on 1x1 tiles to 2x2 or even 3x3 tiles.
It needs some tweaking still, but I got the majority of it down and working.

The snake can get MUUUCH larger now, and I feel like it also helps add a lot more depth into the fattening mechanic too. Thank you for this idea, and for pushing me to try even though I didn’t have much confidence in my ability to implement it.
(and thanks to everyone else for helping me realize that my original plans might have been a little too ambitious, and that I should focus more on the puzzler aspect of the game)

I’m trying to add a couple other things into the game, and then I need to make some levels showcasing all the new stuff I added. Hopefully I can get another build slapped together in the future to show.

[floativerse]

loving the concept of the game so far!!! the only thing i could really see as a problem is the control scheme. it doesn’t feel natural, and i frequently feel out of control which isn’t great. i love the art and the general concept though, excited to see the next build!!!

[wtf]

For some reason, the pellets will just phase right through, without being eaten

[JacoTomo]

Thank you! For that are you talking about the keyboard inputs, or the whole sprint mechanic?

On default, you have to press two WASD keys at the same time to move in the diagonal direction you want to go, if you don’t like this, you can switch it to single inputs only, by toggling the ‘experimental movement type’ switch in the menu.

As far as the sprint mechanic goes, it’s kinda wonky, and more so of just a happy accident. The idea in my head is that it lets you move faster but is risky to use, as you can fall off the level, as well as not being able to make sharp turns. It’s not ideal but I feel like it gets the job done, maybe I’ll tweak it a little later on if it becomes too much of a problem, but I’m happy with it as of now.

[JacoTomo]

Huh, that’s really odd, does this occur the entire game or is it just some glitch that popped up in the middle of your playthrough? Did it look like the snake was offset from the tiles, enough to miss the hitboxes of the pellets?

[echumxbiaoef]

I tried the experimental movement type, but I’m confused how it works. From the picture I thought it was just a two button control with the snake turning either clockwise or counter clockwise based on whether you pushed a or d but it seems to just turn whichever way it feels like or not at all.

[wtf]

yep. there’s like no alignment?

[JacoTomo]

I’ve thought about also including a movement type that does go clockwise, but I felt like it’d be too easy to get spun around and confused using it.

It is just two buttons, but the up and down buttons also work for this too, but yeah you just use two keys. In this control scheme, the snake turns towards the direction of the key you pressed.

So if you press D, the snake will either go down-right or up-right depending on the snake’s position, but never-the-less, pressing D will always turn you towards the right side of the screen. Same goes for A and turning left.

[JacoTomo]

Ah yeah, that makes sense, that’s a problem I’ve been fighting this whole time. I thought I squashed this bug out but it seems not, thanks for making me aware of this again, I’ll look into it!!

[MrGoodluck1017]

The snake remind me of this one caterpillar that I found a long time ago, he was a hairless but have a stinger type, and oh boy was he a really really fat one, normally his species only grow a little over an inch but somehow he was manage to grow to almost four inches, you see in front of my house there is a plant that has giant leaves about 20 inches in length for each leaf, and one day I noticed that one the leaves has been eaten clean , at the time I thought it was eaten by multiple caterpillar but when I check there is only one extremely fat caterpillar eating this giant leaf all by himself, I don’t really know how he manage to grow so fat way back then, but now I might have an idea as to why

You see scientist has conducted an experiment involving mouse’s gene POMC and AgRP
see full article: Full, but still feasting: Mouse study reveals how urge to eat overpowers a signal to stop | ScienceDaily

To summarize POMC is responsible for making you feel full so you would stop eating.
On the other hand AgRP is responsible for making you feel hungry as if you are starving to death
As for the result, well you can imagine it for yourself

On that note let’s back to why the caterpillar that I found so fat, so a few months ago I find something online, apparently there is a hormone in caterpillar called the Juvenile hormone (JH), caterpillar produce this hormone but the amount of production will continue to decline, once caterpillar run out of Juvenile hormone (JH) they will start metamorphosing

Now, considering that caterpillar is always on eating mode, if one is able to continuously produce Juvenile hormone (JH) or someone supply them with Juvenile hormone (JH) via injection, that caterpillar will never start metamorphosing and will always be on eating mode.
Thank you for reading. It’s a great game and hope to see the future build.

[JacoTomo]

That’s really cool! I love caterpillars myself, I’ve always been fascinated by them. We’d always find these huge ones destroying our tomato plants, they had a huge ‘horn’ or curved spike on their butt end. Also the snake design was actually more based off a caterpillar, and I plan on not having the snake be an actual snake but something more like that. (I only keep using the term ‘snake’ for gameplay reasons, since it works very similarly to a classic game of the same name, people get a decent idea of how the player controls.)

Also, that’s super interesting about POMC and AgRP, great things to know, cause I feel like you could do some really interesting things with that info in a weight gain/feed game. Probably also why the snake can’t quit eating, got too much JH >w>

[Leonard]

What about numpad? You know, that 7913 control, where it goes diagonally