Ohh, that’s an interesting one. I’ll have to see why, you should be getting more height than the heaviest weights. But hey, keep me updated, if the routing is worse/less fulfilling, I’ll see what I can do from there.
Edit:
Found the issue and fix, the third weight stage, and exclusively the third weight stage had a value in the EXACT range that would skip over the top of the ladder, so you’d just end up not going high enough to clear.
I edited it, and am posting the one line fix now.
Stealth mechanics was an interesting touch, have yet to 100% run but I like how the sprite looks at larger weights, especially with the cellulite, interesting to see how it was represented in pixel graphics, also liked the way her whole body seemed to jiggle and I liked the rear view you get when climbing ladders
This was honestly meant to be a stealth game in full, but time + issues with the guards AI made it less so.
Currently? It starts with you powertripping, way too fast for the guards to catch you and can scout, survey and use the world as your oyster. Maybe I shouldn’t disable the stealth mechanics at higher weights? Let you use them when you’d need them? Thoughts on that?
Also, I did try to go in on the graphics. It’s just generally super important in a weight gain game to see that progression, even if I’m not the best. Multiple views for when you’re doing things to see that weight at different angles is big too. I’m glad it turned out well! For the player. The guards have their own set but…
Either way, I’m happy to hear you liked some pieces of it!
Now that i’m awake again to poke at the new map, some findings in the new 5.3.2 version…
Routing around the terrain is no longer a problem… that honor now goes to the guards themselves. They’ve gotten good enough at reaching & staying on you that getting noticed by one above 580 is going to force you to lose potential weight somewhere. You’ve become too slow to outrun them if they full-sight you, you were too big to hide from them 80lbs ago, and the few that you can try to ladder-juke are going to take ~half your catch timer while you do so. Either they boot you out and the 2 floor-level guards outside keep you from getting back inside, or you burn 30lbs of gain per guard to send them into a food coma. You can probably do some small tunnel-escapes up until you hit the 750lb lockout on that… but either way, they’re a new wall to plan around.
Speaking of hiding, If yer hiding they can’t see you but they still drain catch time while overlapping you. If it hits 0 while hiding, you aren’t sent back to start but you do lose half your held food. On top of that, the sprite while attempting to hide seems to not update properly during the 500-580 weight zone. Instead of being either the can-hide or can’t-hide version of the sprites, its just the Lapine’s standing idle frame. This variant of hiding seems to have you unable to escape their sight, but still in the not-sent-back version of sneaking.
Looks like our plundering protagonist isn’t a believer in crouching except to hide. One of the new pizzas near what i’m calling the longjump donuts is in a 1-tile-tall hole, and the bunny is 1.5 tiles tall. She won’t stop slamming her nose on the corner trying to grab it!
Later edit: Think i have a route… It involves an alteration of the food blitz for the roof table, and since I still lose food to decay anyways, some of the food i would have had in the new route should instead be used early to KO the guards. Especially pizzas… since food is munched at a static rate, pizza slices give less relative bonus time in a chain than the smaller foodstuffs. Donuts actually don’t give any at all!
I. Actually over buffed the guards? Never thought I’d see the day those guys would be overwhelming, I’ve done some battering and a bit of buffing to the 4th weight stage, hopefully it should help. (You’re now only s l i g h t l y slower, but they have proper ranges, you should be able to outrun them or make use of the next change)
I’ve made a beta system for hiding while fat, after a certain amount of time, a guard’ll see you but it should be enough for them to get off your buried tail. There’s the issue of noise, but there’s a fix to THAT too.
I made the mechanic I forgot to even MENTION in the prior readmes, sneaking by using shift, useful- as it now cancels all movement based noise. Which is big, since that’s the fastest way for guards to notice you. Along with adding more hiding spots for a few of the guards who just, didn’t have any good ones, each one should have a reasonable way to get around them besides cramming them full.
In the future? I was thinking of maybe giving the guards a traditional sight-cone, adding in different forms of hiding (like those foreground trees by the exit, if those hid you without even pressing W!) or the possibility of a mechanic only available while big to offset your loss of options.
Given the setting, maybe an appeal/flaunt? I could see it being lengthy time-wise though, or decrease movement speed for a time, in exchange for basically zeroing out alert and sending guards back to their post. Thoughts on that?
Crouching! That’s uh. Something that sneak should be all things considered. I’ll have to get to work on making sprites for that. I’ve moved that Pizza for now though.
I’ve also done more than location moving for Pizzas and such though. Since, I straight up didn’t know that Donuts gave less chain, I decided to just- go all in and make each food have unique properties. (This is essentially a buff to everything, as they had roughly 20 food and 200 decay)
Donuts now give 50! food, and 150 to your decay, making them big goals for starting a chain, but not extending it. Short term but rewarding if you can fit them in
Pizza: 35 food and 250 decay, A heavier middle, but all around buff from it’s base
Carrot: 20 food and 300 Decay, the absolute middle (Up from 200 decay)
Apple: 15 food and 450 Decay, the lighter middle, slight nerf for food, but just two of them massively increases your decay timer… but not as massively as
Berry: 5 food and 600 Decay. They’re rare, but dang are they good.
(Healthier foods last longer, fattier foods give more food, since I’m not going to do an inventory while remaining sane.)
I hope that this addresses the issues, and more. (5.2 will still be up, since this is a decently big change.) I’m grateful for the feedback! It’s been pivotal in finding the flaws I missed, and keeping me on track to get this game to not be the worst one submitted all year. Big thanks!
Its not that they give less chain, but that everything was giving +200 decay… and ~200 decay also happens to be just as long as it takes to eat 30 units of food. Exactly what a Donut gives. Net neutral.
Of course, the proposed changes to foods are going to be interesting… Just at first thinkings, decay will happen much much slower as a whole (it was only ever super relevant for an extended foodrun like I do or when stuffing guards), and it’ll likely be worth changing my tunnel pathing to account for how much more weight is pre-floorbuster.
Foods a maxweight can’t theoretically reach in 0.5.3 ultimately include 23 apples, 3(+1) pizzas, 5 donuts, 6 carrots, and 2 berries… with the proposed changes the total value will be slightly less, but some of the food will need to be moved to the rush to still be able to clean the place out before becoming a floorbuster. Probably still gonna end up with better end weight overall, given almost all the apples & berries are taken on one run in my routing. The total decay will likely be double what i’d had before (or more) by the time i reach the roof table!
Well, thinking mechanically at least, high/max weight is where the vast majority of the sneaking would be needed. If yer small enough to hide properly, yer fast enough to jump circles around them for fun, or otherwise bypass them entirely.
I’m guessing the proposed idea would, say, take the place of the tunnels when yer too big to fit? A maxweight method to zero the alert would probably end up pretty binary in usefulness… either it lets you get rid of a tail reactively, or its so slow your catch timer ends before it procs. In the former case it’d at least help getting away from a guard’s patrol position, but you’d still need to chuck food at ones you need to get past.
With the other stealth improvements (I didn’t realize shift was a thing!), maybe the number i’ll need to disable will be less than it was before, which was ~6 of them to safely access both the 3rd-floor table & ceiling drop. I’ll have to toy around with the new new version and see how my ideas pan out.
Its been quite fun testing the game’s limits even as I push my own trying to optimize weight routing!
Ahhh. Alright, that… makes a lot more sense with the Doughnuts. Now they’re actually a net LOSS in time to eat. Huh… I’ll have to look into that if it proves problematic, especially since they were meant to be bonuses. I may have to swap a few out for berries or add more apples around the cabin if it does actually come up and make them worse.
Oh, that’s a good bit. Is that for exclusively max weight, or just stage 3/4? If I’m not wrong, you should be able to get past non-consecutive cracked floors at any non5 stage, but branches are a hard lock. I’ll try to move some more of it into places you can reach at 5th level though. I think that makes sense.
The routing having more wiggle room though, sounds like quite the good thing! I look forward to see what you’re able to come up with.
But for the Survival Option, it’d probably pause Catch Timer at the very least. Maybe slow down the timer for decay as well. Since you just currently… run out of options. Having less was meant to be the point, but as you said, you even really lose tunnels, there being a sort of tradeoff would help lessen the blow.
(For ones you need to get past, I think the best case would be moving the first guy in some manner, or having him in particular, walk slower. He causes a lot of issues since you’d only have bushes to deal with him at higher weights. With the others, I tried to make sure you have other methods, like throwing a rock, to at least move their attention.)
But hey! I’m glad you’ve been having such a grand time, I hope I can continue to supply you updates to help get the game into a super solid spot! Thanks for the help!
A net loss only if you’re trying to pick up a bunch of food at once. Starting fresh from 0 (or even chucking your last 15-20 units of food on the floor to pick back up yourself!) gets you the 900 base decay to work with plus whatever the food gives in chain decay, so even a lone 3-pack of 50-unit donuts can be eaten as long as you start eating before the decay timer hits triple digits. However i get the feeling that’d be a bit strict for someone playing more casually and just foodin’ & lootin’ as they go.
If you mean my mention of what a maxweight can’t get, thats purely ones you can’t reach at stage 5 (900+). All but one of those foods requires various amounts of jump to access, and the one carrot thats in that list anyways is the one stuffed under the apple in the bridge; Can’t pick up the apple without also grabbing the carrot, and aren’t quite tall enough to get the apple if you can’t jump, so they’s glued together.
Been distracted from 0.5.3 routing, i’ll try to get something together soon so you can have a visual of what my current concepts look like in motion instead of in theory. As a fun teaser, the route currently involves a bloated bunny crashing through the ceiling, filching 3 donuts, and digging a tunnel out right under the poor guard’s nose!
There we go. A bit sloppy in execution before and after the food run, and its a somewhat longer vid because of it, but well over 3000lbs of hare has been achieved. Poor escape-bird.
The main thing that makes the post-run looting possible in this version is that though they no longer can get launched into orbit, the thin floor on the way to the roof does prevent you or anyone else from going back down until the floor is broken. Lure 4 of the nearby guards up that ladder and they’re mostly stuck up there if you don’t lure them to the roof itself. This lines them up to all be taken care of mostly at the same time later.
Grab some of the food that can’t be obtained at weight 5, go up and head right while grabbing the attention of the guards that’re willing to move, wait for the right-side ladder patrol to join in, and condense them as best you can into the same spot as they’re trying to catch you. Doing this lets you hit multiple guards at once with your foodstuffs and reduce how much you can’t eat yourself… as long as you don’t mess up and get caught while you still have food left on you. …though on second thought, i should see what it looks like if you do lure them to the roof. If they aren’t a threat to the table up there, thats a lot of saved food.
Though i no longer dig under a guard’s nose because i need the nearby carrots at maxweight, I do still use the new hole route here. The order of placing tunnels is important, because placing a new one overwrites the oldest one… and i need that tunnel on top of the roof to reach the table in an appreciable amount of time while still cutting off at least some of the map-wide run. Lots of nothing from the first tunnel use, but better to do it from the left while you’ve still got something resembling mobility in weight 3 than to make the same trek at a slower weight 4 from the right post-table.
3 guards survive unstuffed. The right-side cabin guard who i never have reason to go near again, the floor-level guard who is too claustrophobic for the ladder-climb area to be a threat, and the bridge guard who i’m pretty sure was bribed beforehand to have that poorly-timed smoke break. Hears something happening to the west, keeps on going and doesn’t stop.
Bonus points for the outside guard who loves tree-climbing and WILL disrupt you during the food dash if you don’t lure him out of the branches. Sure he may not catch you directly, but he’ll make it easier for the eastern shack guard to shackle you.
Had a try of the game, what engine is it made in btw?
I’ve. Been away for a long time, but.
Gamemaker Studio 2, it was a fun time learning it to make the game!
Thank you for playing it and releasing this video, I’ll be sure to watch it in a short while.