So, I might make a dedicated thread for this project if it actually comes into the real building stage, but for now it’s just an idea that I’m trying to flesh out. I want to do a vampire stealth gain, very sexy, very burp focused, you get the idea. The idea is that as you play, you suck the blood of vampire hunters entering your castle and obviously weight gain ensues as you bloat from the blood. My question is, in vampire lore, especially Stoker’s Dracula, drinking blood makes a vampire more powerful, enhancing their abilities, making them faster, etc. This idea feels somewhat at odds though with a weight gain game where you might expect to get slower and more labored (and thus the difficulty raises naturally the longer one plays) as you fill up. I’m curious what you guys think and what might make the better game experience, getting faster or slower (getting fatter is a given though). I was also thinking about the possibility of having walk speed slow down but other powers (which I haven’t flesh out) like maybe a teleport/quick dash ability or turning into fog that can pass through walls or something like that get more powerful as an alternative form of speed. What do you guys think and suggest?
it could be cool if when you drink blood you temporarily get faster, stronger, etc. but permanently gain weight which makes you slower and bigger so easier to see, meaning you have to constantly drink to remain mobile as you are also getting bigger from drinking
I think that’d be a cool idea. Mobility gets worse but your powers get stronger and/or have more blood to fuel them.
To elaborate on what’s been said, what I’m picturing is that gaining weight is both necessary and inevitable, and so “levelling up” will tank your mobility and damage by default, so the way you approach progression will require you to decide how to offset this weakness with a skill tree. Perhaps you lose the ability to use physical attacks to defend yourself, you can’t fit in as many hiding places, and you slow down. So, as you get fatter, you could perhaps choose some combination of:
- Teleportation or high-speed levitation to run away from enemies or close the gap more easily
- Invisibility magic, which lets you use any location as a temporary hiding place
- Minions which can soak up enemy attention or hurt them from afar for you, maybe harvesting blood before bringing it back
- Long-range magical damage, with which you can suck the blood out of enemies or pull them right to you from a safe distance
- Defense and healing to negate the need to hide from foes
Basically, you’d get physically weaker and slower, but you could gain powerful magic that alters your playstyle. Or, if you’d prefer, you start out playing a stealth game, but eventually you become strong enough to confront foes in the open.
If you don’t wanna do skill trees, you could have a handful of playable vampires that all start with one playstyle, but end with a radically different one. Maybe one starts out as a beefy physical fighter who can hold her own if she gets caught out of stealth, but has to become more of a floaty mage as she gets fat. Maybe you have another that begins as a squishy, mobile character who ends up becoming a tank that just flattens enemies; and maybe yet another starts with a ranged weapon but loses her ability to shoot, forcing her to yank enemies to her, a la Scorpion.
Depends on the engine.
Not a bad idea although what you could also do is have your vampire be able to kidnap or capture humans even hunters if their lucky, and have the vampire fatten the humans up in a way to get them to not only make more fattening blood but also produce more blood becoming a permanent source of it so they do not need to hunt more humans and keep a lower profile.
The fun part about vampire lore is that its so loose and there is so many ways to reimagine it that really you dont have to feel beholden to any specific idea if you don’t want to
As for from a game design perspective, ultimately it depends largely on the scope of the project.
If you want the game to be a smaller shorter affair I’d recomend just getting slower the bigger they get.
but if you want a bigger longer game adding new abilities as time goes on or otherwise increasing the games complexity as our bloodsucker bloats would probably be the best way to keep the game from getting stale
This is the perfect place to put this link:
You mean like a vampire harem?
This reminds me:
not really like that their was a Interactive story on writting.com in legends of Yndre? (Pretty sure i got the name wrong) About a vampire who fattens her victims up and then bites them to not only make sure they can survive been drained on but also make them last a lot longer and only sucking them dry at big gala events they host
Thanks for reminding of that website’s deletion of dirty content…
I myself wouldn’t know, this whole fat vampire obsession’s a recent thing for me (I used to to use that site to read inflation involved in a certain fandom; the day I couldn’t find my favorite works to read is the day I realized they decided to be a “clean” site).