On the Vine - A Blueberry Inflation Survival Game

[captainstupids]

VERY EARLY ALPHA DEBUG BUILD: On the Vine by captainstupids - itch.io (password wgforum) Will update and remove the password when it’s ready for the public.

BTC donation: 1KH826NkN9FmjLchVAcJ38Mf12X9bqnmLe

tl;dr: People are filling up like blueberries all over the world. Society has fallen apart. No zombies; just blueberries. Don’t starve. Don’t pop. Encounter bandits. Find juicing machines. See if you can find a cure, if you want to.

I tried making this game a while back and didn’t really make much progress on it, but after closing Accident in the Alchemy Lab I decided to maybe try it again. It’s inspired by Corruption of Champions and 60 Seconds!. It has some more graphical elements than CoC and is more focused on inflation.

I’ve been going back and forth on some UI concepts, since that’s most of the game. It pains me a bit, but I’m thinking I might get rid of the clickable items. Right now you can tap on the bed to sleep, the arrow to explore, and the backpack to browse inventory. These could be just UI elements, which would mean the player is the only thing in the world.

If I keep things clickable in the world, then people could “find” stuff like old adventure games. You’d need to pay attention to more than just dialog. The downside is everything has to fit in the camera and it can be a little bit unpleasant.

Most of the gameplay revolves around balancing hunger, juice-fullness, sleep, and other needs. Sure, the carrot might sate your hunger, but it will add to your infection. You’re so full that you’re having a hard time moving around? You could fill yourself with helium, which will make you lighter, but make sure you can stretch that much.

Combat mechanics are too limited right now, so I’ll probably spend a lot of time fiddling with that. I picked a reduced set of skills, intelligence, charm, and strength, for social encounters, but if combat is too basic I might add dexterity and fortitude. I’d have to backtrack and add that to the social encounters. Not loving the idea, but maybe there’s another approach to combat that’s better.

I’m putting this out as a dev log, I suppose, and will probably copy all of it to the itch page when I feel like it’s ready for people to play. I’ll probably also ask questions that I’m not sure about or lament having to remove stuff I spent a long time on because it’s not working.

My TODO list right now:

High Priority:

• [BUG] Clicking on ‘set out for the city’ doesn’t work yet and I forgot to disable it.
• [BUG] Restore menu doesn’t have user-feedback after loading is done.
• [BUG] Not all exploration events in the outlands pass time.
• [BUG] If your inventory is open you can still interact with other UI elements and maybe break stuff.
• Maybe rebalance the caravan encounter (and maybe add a new item).
• Some kind of ‘popup’ menu that gives notifications instead of the always-present pop-over? Or maybe just a new way to give popover messages for things pending display.
• Need a way to get to the next area.
• Next area: the city
• Next area: the office
• Male player’s waist diameter in meters was being miscalculated and was lower by 2-3 meters.
• Restoring a saved game doesn’t reset the player’s displayed fill until a rest or action.
• New game menu should let user pick a strength, intelligence, or charm bonus.
• Make sure all the outland bunker encounters have an ending.
• Game over should end the game.
• Male player avatar
• Exploration should have more options, like “search nearby”, “search far” so that people can choose to spend more or less time outside.

Low Priority:

• [BUG] Male player avatar’s hair disappears on mouseover sometimes.
• The wastelands look bad and I want the day/night cycle to look better.
• Player skin should tint as ‘infection’ increases.
• Male player model needs clothes and a sitting animation.
• More animations or different animations for both player avatars.

Maybe/maybe not ever:

• Change how hunger works right now because a few encounters involve stuffing and that wasn’t really planned. If the player is overstuffed it causes damage, but maybe we could refine it.
• Related: rebalance max fill for the right difficulty or make it selectable. I wanted about ten days of time for players to explore before popping, assuming they don’t starve first or get injured.
• The internal representation of messages should change and give us “priority” so we can not always display how the player is feeling.
• Maybe remove the in-scene interactables and just make them UI elements.
• Combat system to break up exploration?
• Elastinup should maybe increase max fill more than it does maybe? It’s a rare item, so maybe it’s worth decreasing a player’s stretch and making elastinup the only way to increase size.
• Can we have both a compatibility build AND a high quality build? I’d like to use the Forward+ renderer so I can do nice screen-space filters and better lights, but it sounds like people may or may not have the hardware to run that.
• The scripting language sometimes feels a little limited. Perhaps there’s a better way to handle story flow?

Spoilers for Areas, Events, Etc:

General progression and planned areas:

The Player starts in the outlands. If you encounter the caravan and are charming enough they’ll tell you about the city. You might still discover it yourself but knowing about it will help. I’m thinking that to prevent people from just rushing to the end I should make a soft boundary where it takes a few days of walking and might pop the player if they haven’t stretched enough. This means they need to find at least one elastinup and a battery. The city challenges should be harder(?) because it makes sense, but there’s not really a combat system. Speaking of the city…

The city has fresh water. One of the recurring themes in the game so far has been “infection LOVES freshwater”. You’ve probably noticed that if you’ve gotten stuck in the rain. Well there are creatures which like that, too. I like tentacles, so encountering these in the city instead of bandits might be good. I still don’t know how I feel about bandit encounters in the outlands.

If you get lucky, you’ll find an access card which will get you into the office park.

The office park is one gigantic building with a central atrium that extends deep below the bedrock of the city. The first floors are access control, public offices, transit. The lower floors are, in order of increasing depth, polymer lab and material science, pharmaceutical lab, security stop, bioscience and genetics lab, parapsychology lab, anomalous materials lab.

Each of those deeper sections has a bit that might help with the expansion theme/blueberry theme. Polymer and materials lab gives a two-part expanding compound. Pharmaceutical lab has elastinup and more experimental stuff. Bioscience and genetic engineering is the source of the tentacle monsters. Parapsychology is a hold-over area from an earlier version of this game where you could mind control people and make them ingest the two part compound and things like that. Anomalous materials has things that are just plainly supernatural. A big finale and spoiler-spoiler would be the infection isn’t human-made at all, but was paranormal in nature like the mold from Control.

But all that is secondary to the real gameplay and I’m still figuring out content for the city and the office.

I’m still figuring out how to add difficulty other than random chance. The careful allocation of resources and gambling is working out nicely and I still find myself playing the game, but I’d like there to be an “easier” way to rank up the difficulty and make it less slot-machine gambly.

[SexualStalin]

Happy to see another blueberry expansion game pop up here, can’t wait to see the results

[titanxkillerxhunter]

sorry for the pun but this looks quite berriable (sorry if it not spelled right kinda hard to do it on top of my head)

[sans89]

[captainstupids]

I’m thinking about combat this morning.

I’ve made the game to be played with mouse (or touch, but primarily mouse) and, ideally, one handed.

I don’t like the combat systems where a person just mashes ‘attack’ until the enemy falls over.

I also don’t want combat to distract from the player’s appearance. If the player gets inflated or fattened in combat I want them to be visible.

(Maybe) I would like the player to be able to also fill up enemies. It might not work well on other infected creatures, but if your infection is high enough, being able to squeeze yourself and take damage to force feed an enemy would be cool. I’d have to do more modeling on enemies, then, so maybe this is lower priority.

I don’t want the combat to mess with the pacing of the game. If a combat event takes five minutes and you get a combat event 25% of the time you explore, then there’s a lot of whiplash. A player that isn’t at all stretched out and doesn’t try to deflate can generally last about 10 days of in game time. That would be two explorations and a full night of sleep. Thirty choices. Maybe it’s not as big a deal.

Something real time like Undertale’s bullet-hell mechanic might be too fast paced, but if it worked for Undertale… In my head, the player might have to navigate a bullet hell and pick between taking physical damage, adding infection, and getting filled up. Problem with this is if I did animate an enemy filling the player’s avatar, the player’s attention might be too focused on the gameplay instead of the animation.

Another idea was something like pattern recognition or simon says. An enemy has a pattern of moves they use, grab, attack, defend. Defend beats attack. Attack beats grab. Grab beats defend. If you miss, you take damage of some kind depending on whether it’s an attack or a defend. Combat gets harder by having longer sequences. Could even be more of a rhythm game, and I’m not sure if this would work for offense.

There are probably some deck-building mechanic options, but the UI for that would be way too much of a lift, I think.

Some games like Resident Evil will have quicktime and button-mash events, but I really don’t want to do that, even if it would work well for resisting getting filled up. Fast mouse/touch scribbling would work, too, but I’m not sure how nice that would feel for people with RSI.

[MuckMage]

Was very interested in Accident in the Alchemy Lab, and now I’m very interested in this! Excited to see more on it!

[Glass]

The ideia about the bullet hell could be interesting maybe make it turn based and the damage only happens at the end of the turn so you can see the animations. This can allow the player to focus on the combat without worrying about missing stuff. Also you can expand the combat system with new mechanics depending on items, equipment, and stage of infection, for example when you are at stage 3/5 of infection blue dots begin appearing on the combat field and when you get them you can deal bonus damage when your turn comes back, adding a risk/reward felling where the dots might be in a particularly dagerous spot and the players has to consider wheter to get damage or get defense.

[captainstupids]

@Glass

maybe make it turn based and the damage only happens at the end of the turn so you can see the animations

That’s a good idea. I like it.

I haven’t decided how I want to deal with items in combat yet. There are a few in the game and it’s easy enough to add more, but I’ll want to do more of the system first.

[captainstupids]

Can’t upload videos here, but I did an Undertale-ish thing where an attack is a series of shapes you need to dodge. An attack can add fill or damage. I also added those animations to the player, which I’d hoped not to, since I’ll need to make animations for every new character.

Placeholder graphics for the minigame. This will be rendered in front of the enemies and player.

I’m a little dumb tonight, so I’m going to take the time to write events and make items, since those are all pretty easy. Items are the easiest things to make, really.

[captainstupids]

There’s a bunker you can find in the outlands with a character in them. I finished writing the scene and modeled a character for it. Need to do the skin, hair, and animation. Have a teaser:

I’m avoiding going back to combat stuff because it feels like it would be good to do more content instead of combat.

[zenzach]

boo why tell us now it ruins surprise lol
so will we get stuck in said cave?

[captainstupids]

Still have to find them and make the right choices.

If the player is above a certain size, yes, they will get stuck. I liked the model enough that I rendered out a sequence. Going to find some sound effects and make it a full video.

[zenzach]

nice well ill be trying to find that when its out

[captainstupids]

No place to upload this video so I’m just going to zip it. This is an animation I did with the above character model. Working on more events.

No Bursting:
OnTheVine_LowQuality.zip (1.3 MB)

Bursting:
OnTheVine_BadEnd_LowQuality.zip (1.3 MB)

Free to redistribute.

[captainstupids]

It’s functional. I’ve got a lot of work left to do, but if people are really eager to give it a try for how it feels I’ve uploaded it to On the Vine by captainstupids - itch.io . It’s too big to play in the browser, so it’s Windows and Linux only right now. Use the password ‘wgforum’ without quotes to access the page.

I want to reiterate how early this is. I’m only uploading to show progress and to try and pick out bits that are confusing early on.

[captainstupids]

Started working on the male player avatar. I need to do all the animations and then build genitalia then build clothes.

[titanxkillerxhunter]

just tried out the one you put on itch and it’s nice it did had a crashing point after resting at a random moment but other than that it’s good

[Somchu]

I’m assuming that the “random crash” is currently what happens when your character gets too big and bursts

[titanxkillerxhunter]

from what i looked into for that i do believe so it kinda hard to tell since it crashes on the dismiss part

[captainstupids]

Dang. Yup. I think I see what’s up. I’m trying to pop up a UI at the same time as the burst. I thought I fixed that. I’ll clean it up for the next version. Thanks for the feedback, all. Anyone get weird graphical glitches?