no for the graphics part but imma also add that crashing moment also happens without bursting sometimes but that harder to recreate
New Release!
Changelist:
- Added Male Player Character
- Getting caught in the rain now has consequences
- Fixed the crash on game over
Get it at the link above, or On the Vine by captainstupids - itch.io with password “wgforum”.
This is a DEBUG build, so if there are crashes it will spit out error messages.
New Release!
Changelist:
- You can now forage nearby for essentials
- Finished the environment for the abandoned(?) shelter
- Day/night cycle is a little more even and there’s more daylight
- A bunch of new items
- Slight difficulty change, which I’ll talk about in a bit
- Finished a new secret and extremely rare encounter
There’s still a lot of difficulty to rebalance and one of the things I’m trying to get right is hunger. Right now, if you’re really infected it makes you starving all of the time. If you’re not very infected you don’t get as hungry. Previously you were most likely to just pop from not finding enough batteries and juicing machines. This update is more balanced towards either starving or bursting, but I might have gone a little too far on the starving side. IDK.
Story wise, it makes most sense for people who are extremely infected to just never starve (but always be hungry). Gameplay wise I’m not sure what I want to do. If you are extremely infected you’ll always seem to be hungry and every bit of food you eat will go straight to your growth, but it’s possible to starve still. I think I might rebalance things so that more infected means less hungry but more in need of juicing. That makes two food items a little unnecessary, but perhaps there’s a way to work it in.
I haven’t started making the city yet, but I really should. The game needs another level.
I haven’t figured out how I want combat to work yet, either, and I’m not happy with any solution I’ve made so far. Might continue to ignore all combat and just make events.
Do folks think this is ready enough now to show the public?
3 Likes
I rebalanced hunger a little so it’s more of a balance between infection and hunger. If you’re less infected you’ll get hungrier faster. If you’re more infected you’ll fill with juice faster but get hungry less quickly. It means the player only has to really worry about one thing at a time, but it’s still challenging. I started working on the city and have ideas for two encounters, one in the outland and the other in the city. Still don’t really have a formal combat system, but I’m increasingly okay with dialog only. I do wish I had something more to offer than just hitting buttons, but not many ideas.
New Release!
Changelist:
- See above for rebalanced hunger/infection.
- New encounter in the wilderness - can encounter male bandits and I’ll be doing a matching female encounter soon.
- A bunch of new items that I forgot to add to the spawn list. ._.
Would be good to know how people are dying (starvation vs bursting vs injury), as whom people are playing (male/female), and if people have found any of the “super rare” events.
1 Like
I am normally playing male and mostly dying by bursting (didn’t even know there was an injury ending). Just one thing about the dialogue, after a while i just started spamming through everything, though it might be that there are not that many events yet. If you want something more to do you could put minigames for some rare events, such as “you find a supply bag in the middle of a bush use your hand and don’t touch the spikes or risk getting infected”, “oh no you just entered a room in the sewers and the door locked behind you also the air is tasting quite blueberrish find the key/valve/crowbar and get outta there (there would be a image of a room filled with stuff and you had to find the object with the screen getting progressevely bluer until you couldn’t see a thing and the “POP” Game Over”, and one last one “you find a survivor that is offering some rare supplies in exchange for some money though you feel like he is trying to cheat you somehow barter with him to get a better price and don’t get him to angry or you might leave with nothing except another enemy in these dangerous times”.
1 Like
Good recommendations all around. Appreciate the feedback.
:nod: There are two ultra rare events like this, but no minigames yet. I keep trying them but I’m not finding any that I like. I was thinking maybe a “look around in the dark” or in the fog and click on stuff to pick it up, but the others I tried didn’t “feel” great.
This is planned! Originally the player was going to have to trade batteries like currency, but I haven’t made them yet.
EDIT: One other thing that’s planned is being able to combine items. Finding recipes or just experimenting really appeals to me because of the prospects of hidden content.
EDIT 2: That “reach into a bush to grab something” minigame sounds like it might work. Reminds me of Surgeon Simulator. x)
I got rid of a bunch of dialogs that were saying things like, “You return to your shelter…” and the game does feel better. I will play some more tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to rest.
Also based on feedback, I got rid of most dialog notices and instead put the data inside the player status area. It’s messy now but I can make a real UI for it later.
One other change that made sense was to get rid of foraging nearby and instead let the person enter how much time they want to spend outside looking around. I haven’t done anything but add the UI component and need to figure out what balance will mean, but this seems like a better choice than just foraging nearby or exploring. Presumably if one is out longer you’ll find more things and better things, but there’s also more risk of attack and you’ll get more tired.
2 Likes
Some ideas I’m kicking around:
Maybe the juicer should be portable and battery operated. STALKER did the thing where bullets were both currency and ammunition. I was hoping to do the same thing with batteries, but having to seek out the juicing machine doesn’t make much sense, then. Just being able to hit “door → go to juicer” or even being able to pick one up and bring it to your place makes sense.
I had imagined outlands → city → office → labs, but perhaps it makes more sense to just be able to go from the outlands to wherever and back quickly and easily, like CoC. That is, “explore outlands”, “explore X”, “explore Y”. This would mean I don’t have to spend as much time building a separate shelter for each new zone and the player could have just one base.
Grabbing stuff in a bush as a minigame is a really good idea (props to Glass), but it’s a little hard for touch pads, touch screens, and roller-ball mice. I imagine it’s hard with gamepads, but haven’t tried. I want to try and keep the game as accessible as possible and so I’m trying my best to stick with JUST touch input.
You could make an option carry it on you but loose on carrying space or risk damaging it or leaving it at base and risk it being stolen
Trash Panda Simulator Confirmed
This doesn’t have a good feel to it yet. Maybe it makes sense to only grab one item at a time and use a different approach.
It does make foraging for stuff more interactive, especially if time is connected to real time. I’m also thinking about how to make exploration less of a “click and wait” fest. Doing something like picking one of four cardinal directions and then having random encounters from there might work, but that’s a lot of effort and is maybe going in a direction I don’t want it to. Even just going through the trash for items might be a wrong turn since this game really should be narrative first.
Maybe people clicking through dialogs is inevitable and I just need more unique encounters and less time spent trying other systems. Or maybe I should play more CoC to critique how they do it.
Guess It’s true. Narrative is definitely a good option, and if you feel like this new system doesn’t aline with your vision for the game you should srap or reporpose it in another way. But the problem here that we have I believe is infinity or more specifically there being no end goal. The game as it currently stands is an infinite text box where your choices always lead to the same results making it repetitive. While there are many games that take care of this problem by either adding new systems, I see that that is not what you really want. Therefore if you want to focus on dialogue i suggested goind the route that the game “60 seconds” took where there are many events which might lead to consequeces for other events, plus and this is really just something that you should only add if you are sure of it, make the game progressively harder with resources getting scarcer and scarcer until you either pop, starve or finish the game (though for this last one you would have to create one or multiple endings)(cause it stands that there is no really risk if you play your cards right). Ok I went quite a bit on a tagent, but last but not least the most important thing, just have fun and know that you are doing a good job.
1 Like
I’m really enjoying the inflation aspects, and there’s plenty of it to go around. I’ll need to do some more runs of the game to see more of what it has to offer, but I’m definitely interested to see how this evolves.
However, there’s something about the artstyle that just rubs me the wrong way. The player model just looks slightly… unsettling. Personally a more stylized visual style would work better for a topic as unrealistic as blueberry inflation.
Despite that, I’ve got high hopes for this game. I’m looking forward to seeing it grow (heh)!
Fun game so far! Though the small max size and lack of color change does throw me a tad off, can’t wait to see what comes next thought!
Oh! There’s definitely an end-goal planned. See spoilers in the first post. I still have at least two regions and (maybe) a craft system to put together.
Thanks for the kind words. For size, see if you can find some more eslastinup. 
I’m still trying to figure out the color change. -_-
New Release!
Has it really been two weeks since the last release? Wow.
Changelist:
- Removed a bunch of the dialog that says “You’re feeling X,” or “You’re hungry.” The player needs to check their status proactively now, which should lead to less wild dialog click-throughs.
- Added a rough “graphical” display in the character panel for the different features.
- If you’ve been to the juicer enough times now, you can memorize the way, meaning you only need to worry about keeping enough batteries on hand.
- Added a new encounter – the female bandit!
- There’s always a 10% chance of success now, even if you’ve completely burnt out a stat.
- The player’s weight and fill will change less quickly, so now you can see the effects of taking things which thin you out (or blimp you up).
Next:
- The uninfected caravan will likely get converted to a trading caravan.
I’m still trying to balance hunger and the physical systems. More infected means you won’t get as hungry, but you’re more likely to burst. Let me know what you think of the difficulty change and if the new UI makes sense.
5 Likes
Small Release!
Was hoping to have more done for this but decided to stop waiting and just get something out of the door.
Changelist:
- Players will turn more blue as they become more infected. This can be disabled in the pause menu under settings. I’m having some issues with making it stick across saves.
- The caravan encounter is turned off while I rework it.
- Small balance tweaks and (hopefully) some bugfixes to weird animation things.
Next:
- Still fixing the caravan into trading post.
- A new person from whom you can barter.
- Diegetic UI – Going to have to break and make this happen, much as I wanted everything to happen in-world.
BUG: If you have a game over, ‘load game’ from the title menu is doing something odd. Closing and restarting the game will make load work correctly.
I’m still not super happy with how it plays, but I can’t think of any mechanics that don’t really distract from the nature of things.
3 Likes
Something about the non-diegetic UI that I like is that it takes out the disconnect between using items and their effects. Being able to see basically real time what they do is more helpful than I expected. I knew feedback was important, but even here…
It makes me wonder if perhaps it’s worth getting rid of the home base entirely and just having people click screen to screen. That would help with agency, though it’s still a lot of clicking. If this change feels good I might have to change how dialog works.
to be honest it’s up to you on how you want to take things
This definitely has a lot of potential. Personally, I’d like to see a ‘non-bursting’ setting, where the bursting outcomes are replaced with ‘immobile’ or something.
Also, I’ve never encountered this trader you mentioned, probably because the RNG for events and the stuff you find is kinda frustrating. The items that make you not explode like the infection-reducer and capacity-increaser should show up more often if you want runs to last longer than five minutes.
3 Likes
New Release
Lots of systems changes to make it easier for me to add new events, so let me know about weird bugs. A bunch of new items and new encounters are available, plus some drop-rate changes.
Changelist:
- Caravan is still disabled, but there are two new events and one new encounter.
- New UI that somehow changes how the game feels a lot. It’s still possible to click on things in the world and I’m considering removing that interactability.
Next:
- There’s a code split between “events” and “scenes” that I think might not make sense. I was going to get rid of it this release but I’m going to push it back to think about it more.
- I might maybe change the encounter rate of two ultra-rare encounters and just make it so that they can’t be encountered in the same playthrough.
- Need to find a new “next phase”, but that would be somewhat predecated on the event/scene change above.
- Changes to caravan.
2 Likes