Alright, think I’ve pretty comprehensively played through the new build. Even got to a handful of events I missed the first time, thanks in large part to the guide you included (I’d no clue the abandoned basement had a progression to it or that there was an option to eat both Daniella and the Maid at a stomach capacity obscenely higher than should ever be reached organically)!
The inclusion of unlimited corruption to match the unlimited purification of praying as well as the Ogre in the north woods made testing significantly easier, and Anna’s event is really neat now. Everything just overall feels a lot more polished, which makes the game’s future look pretty bright.
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Before I go into anything else, I’d like to strongly recommend you re-enable the contest hall unless the last update introduced some kind of catastrophic bug, like save corruption or something. Buggy though it may be, it’s so intrinsically tied to a lot of the game’s content and characters that locking it out prematurely kills loads of questlines:
Tiana won’t befriend you at her home, Esmeralda and her sister’s quest can never even be initiated, ditto for Lady G, and Anna can never reach her final phase in any route. In the cases of the sisters and Lady G, eating them currently being locked behind their growth stages means they’re just filling up empty space in this build.
The void left by the hall’s absence is significant, and the game feels more incomplete than it did last patch despite the various additions you made. I think the guide was a fantastic inclusion and should be a sufficient patchwork solution for handling player confusion over flags and questlines. If they’re too impatient to read, I think it’s fair enough for them to lock themselves out of content.
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Now onto minor bugs and the like:
- The orc hunting quest is bugged in some way. Either the number you have to kill doesn’t match what’s on the job posting or it’s just flat-out uncompletable.
- One of the generic forest NPCs frequently spawns in front of the monument in the west forest, but for whatever reason, he’s not interactable the same way all the others are. The moment you try to interact with him, he just abruptly vanishes without even starting up a text box.
- You must have forgotten to change back some debug values, because the starting stats on all difficulties are now ludicrously high, enough to oneshot everything but the robot and queen and enough to bypass all other stat checks, like fishing and trying to swallow townspeople. I’ll admit, it made bugtesting significantly easier, but it cheapens a lot of content.
- If you help Daniella eat the Maid, then talk to her afterwards, the Maid’s head flashes in and out of her sprite
- When you do the corrupt Anna path, her engorged sprite from shortly after eating her husband isn’t properly flagged to disappear, so an uninteractable clone of her remains in the room next to the real her from that moment forward. As a tangent, it was a little sad not being able to complete the final stage of content for her mentioned in the guide since the contest hall is closed
- Also in regards to Anna, I’m not sure exactly what caused it, but when I went to visit her on a whim on a late day, despite her being on the corrupt path and already fed with three forest people and her husband, the cutscene for her husband requesting that you bring her roast pigs occurred, and another clone of her suddenly appeared at the dinner table. Granted, this was after most of my playthrough, so I’d activated the debug room contest hall clear checks to see if I could initiate any of the quests locked behind competitions, so that may have broken something.
- Following from that, for the most part it did nothing, but it DID allow me to befriend Tiana where I hadn’t been able to prior. This allowed me to discover that there is no way to consume her after eating her family like in the guide; I don’t know if that means there’s some weird flag order loophole I accidentally slipped through or if it hasn’t actually been implemented yet, but I can do nothing but chat with her about the three usual topics despite her maids and father stewing in my gut.
- You can get infinite money by dancing at the club. There’s presumably supposed to be a check in place at dance level 4 that gives you a new skill and either caps the dancing wage or prevents you from doing it anymore, but as things are now, you never get the skill and the payment gets multiplied by 6 every subsequent time. I had literally hundreds of thousands of gold coming in.
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And finally, not a bug or anything, but if you get bored troubleshooting, a quick and easy way to make the game feel a lot more immersive would be to add more custom dialogue relating to your weight. People’s commentary stays static at stage 5 right now despite there being loads of stages beyond that, so the charm from seeing people watch you grow into this hulking behemoth is lost in the midgame.
Thanks so much again for all the love you put into this project. It’s really exciting seeing it come to life!