Lurking Lapine

Gain Jam "Lo-Cal" Gain Jam 8/2023
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Huh, surprise entry at the last 8 hour stretch, shocking.
Beyond being a “professional” shill, I guess I coded now and then, so I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring! … I say that like I didn’t try to finish in the first week to be on time for Fat Bunny Week.

Buuuut, hey, being second place isn’t too bad! You all are, I mean, but you’re still cool, I mean I spent 2 weeks of isolation as an absolute lurker to make this for you guys! I guess I should probably talk about the game before I’m speared, right.

Stealth is a good genre for testing limits, fat is good for testing the limits spacially and in terms of capability, add on a time limit and “resource limit” and you’ve got a lot of things to manage. Bring it all together though, and you can easily smash this short little demo of mine.

It WILL be buggy, but I hope it can be a fun little time. Please post a funny gif of the guards breaking, they do so in such random, wonderful, hair-pulling ways, and I’d -love- to see the ones I missed.
That came off as way more passive aggressive than I meant, so… I think I’ll end it off with a

Hi everyone! It’s nice to meet you all as, well a step up from a lurker anyways! Oh gods I ended with a greeting, I really have to get to bed. Here’s the Itch link, be sure to read it and the readme- one is decently important to playing, and the other is, mainly fun, more relevant than this.

Alright, I’m going to go, I’ve got to get back some of the 26 hours I’ve been up to crunch time this out. Good night all!

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T’was a fun little platformer, and it was interesting learning what I could and couldn’t do at various weight stages to try and map out as much weight gain as I could. The final route I settled on ended up being suprisingly involved. Enough that I think its vidworthy.

Text route & reasonings for the above 2325lb run...

Since going above 500 weight causes you to break branches/floors & be unable to use dug holes, which cuts off a number of food items & keeps an ultra-heavy Lapine from using holes to escape the cabin, my idea ended up being a sort of timed run that picks up as much weight-locked food in as short a time as possible to minimize decay.

  • Drop a hole under the floating apple immediately at game start, because once you pass 200 weight a placed hole disjoints from your sprite and no longer aligns with the ground, instead under it.
  • Pick up the out-of-the-way foods first, making sure to go for the carrot plate up top first, and the food under the building next. The carrot needs a max-height jump, and trying to get the underground pizza/apple at the weights just before floor breakage leaves you unable to get over the corner, trapping you in a softlock.
  • Set the second hole at the far right side of the map behind the pizzas for the food run later.
  • Head to the top of the building, eating the donut & isolated pizza on the way, then jump down to the 4 carrots on the crumbly floor and line up the start of the food run. If yer at 445 weight, then its go time.
  • Start the run with the carrots, grabbing but very importantly not yet eating all the food on the way to the left, fall from the floating apple to the hole for the pizzas & blueberries, detour for the other 2 tree apples then make your way to the first dinner table.
  • Still without eating your held food, eat most but not all of the rightmost dinner table, enough to hit the magic 895 number that is one wafer thin mint from crossing the 900 no-jump threshold.
  • Fall through the breakable floor & make sure you don’t also fall through the thin floor below, head left & climb all the way to the other dinner table, then shake off your pursuers before you finally start eating your saved-up food hoard. All because of one singular tile you need to jump over.
  • Once you’ve finally eaten all that you could salvage (you WILL hit at least 1 decay), empty the dinner table, then intentionally get caught by a guard. Your inability to jump leaves you no other way out.
  • Then simply haul your heft to the one blueberry bush near the cabin, then snag the pizzas on your way to the exit.

Theres optimizations to be had cleaning up the movement, and in theory if you could get a guard to cooperate you could waddle all the way down to the underground pizza and get caught there, but if they run off while yer grabbing the pizza then welcome to softlock jail. I’m okay with this as it stands.

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Oooh, this is EXACTLY what I wanted to see, I love routing and optimizations, it’s fun trying to push things in a limit focused system! The hole usage is a major deviation from what I had planned and did in testing, it’s nice. (Not as nice as 2:43, Can’t ever escape.)

Getting caught being PART of the route is a really smart idea though, I’ll hit the softlocks though, and… make eating repeatedly a biiit less painful, that amount of sound being played seems like a bit much. (Oop, and 4:00, look at im go!)

I’ll get the unobtainable foods and softlocks fixed up though, maybe see about changing the little bridge section.

Outside of optimization and testing though, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for using the time to not only try to learn as much as possible about the game, but post about it too!

(Edit as I work on fixing the issues mentioned. Do you think with a few less restriction on holes or “inbetween foods” that the route could cut out the single decay?)

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Made a, quite literally last minute update.
Fixed the softlocks that were reported and the ones I could find, holes spawning in the floor above 200 weight, food just being in the floor, and made sounds and the AI a little more bearable. (Not the AI, they’re a little more threatening now though!)

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Which is the most recent build? 5.2 or 5.12? Like is it supposed to be twelve or one point 2?

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not sure but i think 5.12 is the most recent

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5.2 is the most recent, I’ll be sure to specify that, my mistake!
I must’ve missed the . between the 1 and 2 there, sorry for the confusion!

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Yooo really thought the 5.12 is the most recent one, shit here we go again

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It looked like it WOULD be, yeah, I messed up on the numbering- so sorry for the inconvenience! But hey, hopefully the game working a little more solidly and the guards being a twinge less sentient and hating me’ll be a fun time!

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It’s ok, and yep the game is way more better now.
(nice game btw)

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Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
I really wanted to do much more with it, but two weeks is two weeks. I have a lot that I could add here, so hopefully I make it an even better one.

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Ah, yes, the classic janky as f game jam platformer. I always have a soft spot for these. Mechanics are fairly obtuse, the description says there’s a readme but it’s not in the zip. I don’t know what the timer is for, the enemies don’t appear to do anything when they touch you and I keep having to look at the itch page for all the controls.

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Only just now noticed this… thinking about the route, and checking the few map/weight tweaks in the new version, I don’t think you can shave nearly enough time to not hit it at all, only mitigate it. I don’t know exactly what you mean by inbetween foods, but the central part of the route that must be worked around to maximize food is that same floor tile the 4:00 guard got stuck on being an insurmountable one-way gate for a 900+ Lapine that can’t jump. Once yer past it you can get out, but you can’t ever get back up. Combine this with a single dinner table being 500lbs all on its own and the vast majority of the food being locked behind the breakable tree branches, and it all becomes based around 2 sections…

  1. What foods can a max-sized bunny collect without jumping, from the upper dinner table? These include the ground-level pizzas/berries you can get after being caught and a few other specific foods in the cabin if you want to risk a situation where you still softlock from the bridge guard running off.

  2. With most of the other foods being locked behind breakable branches, how much of every other food can be collected in as short a window as possible? This is all to try and stack the decay timer’s increase with each food picked up so that it lingers past the 50s to 1m+ it takes to clean out the rightmost table to the 895 threshold, waddle your way up past the jump gate, then lose LoS on the guards so that you don’t get booted out early.

The route in the video would need to have been completed about 36 seconds faster to prevent decay, and with current knowledge thats… not really possible. Some different routing may lower the number a bit, but unless theres a big gamebreaker glitch to be had, i’m not seeing it going away. I am seeing if i can get a run that uses the softlock-threat foods for even more, but i can’t be quite as dismissive of the guards as I was before so actually getting to them at maxweight’s speed is proving tricky.

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But it’s not in the Zip.
Oh god oh fuck Oh god oh fuck
One second.

Just checked, it’s in all the older ones but not the most recent. I’ll re-enable the older ones to keep the jam version as it was.

For the guards, they don’t instantly send you back, a timer de-increments before they send you back to the start and take some food. I didn’t quite have the energy left to animate it, but I will do so post haste.

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I’m currently working on a few fixes, the guards are throwing me for a loop, but I actually am going to make sure I get 99.9% of the softlocks at the very least. My sincere apologies for releasing this as it was.

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There we go… after realizing the cause of (and promptly weaponizing) a particular glitch, i’ve got a run that gets a decent bit more weight.

More notes explaining the tweaks

  • So the glitch i’m abusing doesn’t actually make things that much faster, but it absolutely makes it safer and means i don’t have to worry about the guards on the top level. Turns out if a guard touches one of the thin breakable floors, they stop having any amount of downward momentum applied to them. They functionally have antigravity until they hit a ceiling, and will then hover at that height until you manage to get above them, at which case this repeats. And if there’s no ceiling to stop them… they ain’t coming back.

  • I intentionally get caught early by the guard under the bridge, and specifically on the right side of said bridge, so that he doesn’t get stuck on the left ladder. Keeps me from being softlocked. Not even by the ladder areas, but… well, theres at least 7 different blocks i’d need to jump up, and by that point I can’t!

  • I realized that i can sort of “prime” the table by eating some of it early before starting the dining dash. Even if a route were to eat the entire table in one sitting, you can shave ~2.5-3 seconds by eating until just before you would gain weight.

  • With all the extra food i’m not having to eat early, I can take 2 of the 10 table bites before heading to the starting spot. It may be very slightly faster to not do so and start in the weight zone under this, just for the slight movespeed bonus, but i’m not entirely sure.

  • I technically have a low-enough weight to take another apple before the dash starts, but it gives me a better decay buffer to grab it during the run instead, and eat both an apple’s worth of held food & the first dinner table at the same time. I get all 4 starting carrots instead of just 2 for similar reasons, despite a maxweight Lapine being able to reach 2 of them after the dash is complete.

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Oh my goodness, that strat is actually hilarious. I already got to fixing the platform causing 0 gravity but I never considered luring the guards all into one spot! That’s quite the idea, neat!

With the changes I’m making, there should be a way back to the start from every area while being unable to jump, just to ensure there aren’t any softlocks left in the game. So that, coupled with increased food that doesn’t rely on branches, maybe we can get that weight number even higher, break a ton and a half?

I did know about the table exploit though, but it’s a small thing. I don’t think it’s harmful to the game in the same way the softlocks or nograv is.

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Heh… potentially! If the decay were managed to be bypassed, the current hard cap would be 2725. 3k+ would mean the new area(s?) have some mix equating ~5 donuts, 6 pizzas, or 7 carrots/apples, as well as a line between the two tables that doesn’t require a near minute’s worth of decay to not render the top table unreachable.

On the offchance it’d help, these are the various spots I can think of that’d lock a no-jumps Lapine without guard assistance.

Click-reveal for screenshot size sanity reasons

Large Lapine Lockouts
Large Lapine Lockouts883×784 11.5 KB

  • The shack on the right being a step up from ground floor locks you if you end up going overweight on the 2 pizzas/3 berries and their total +160lbs.
  • Both sides of the bridge are their own mutually-exclusive lockout thanks to the breakable floor above each edge. If the guards get stuck on the wrong ladder and you can’t get their attention, welcome to your life as a bunny troll.
  • An oversized Lapine can move through most of the cabin, but these 4 areas each lock off a different section of access to what i’d call the ceiling drop. The top tile gets bonus points for being the cause of the decay time-attack as well, being so close to the upper table. …and if its difficult to parse, the lowest one is the landing point of the ceiling drop.
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Well! Perhaps the decay can be bypassed with a few of the new food additions in the new update on Itch. (No it’s not that major, I just wanted to put it in italics.)
I tried to ensure it was less reliant on the branches, and I adjusted just how much weight a feasting table gives, just so it didn’t just automatically jump you so high. I originally intended for there to be one, but. Hey, may as well work with what it is… although there is a new one somewhere on the map, I don’t think it’ll be too helpful to route into, but it’s just an extra.

But those spots you pointed out are indeed the only jumps required to get out. There’s actually also one needed to get INTO the cabin, but since you have access to the exit, I don’t think that one was a big deal. But, all of those in the image, I did manage to hit. (I actually missed the third one in the shack, but that’s what 0.5.3.1 is for)
Thanks for your help and especially your interest though! It’s illuminating to have another perspective on the game and how it can be optimized, I appreciate it a lot.

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…Unfortunately, having just doublechecked, it looks like one of the more buggy softlock culprits is still around. Ladders that don’t extend past the lip of a corner are still quite dangerous at middleweights!

In the meantime, the new routing is gonna take a good while. Now that the (old) upper table is no longer so strictly weightlocked and tables aren’t a waistline wasteland waiting to happen, the pathing is gonna be quite different since a food run may not be strictly necessary… should be fun to figure out.