I appreciate the suggestion - You remember the wall-of-text for the conclusion of the final chapter? When I get to the “Add ~Juice~ to the game” stage, the plan is to bifurcate that wall of text and, using the same control scheme, totally change the thematics so that the (newly inserted) last level provides player engagement for the way the story ends.
As is, the last update makes the Flu and Bill dodging harder as the situation degenerates, but reverts back to a reasonable level at the “diet” level, implying the MC is getting a handle on things a bit. I’m toying with having branches to the plot that depend on whether the MC keeps a certain baseline / average energy, or making the progress bar ‘gravitate’ towards center and changing the level progression depending on whether the player tops or bottoms it out… but that would probably mean having some kind of significant impact for a ‘STARVING’ status. Maybe STARVING increases the energy drop like 800% so exercise doesn’t work anymore? I dunno, something to think about…
YUP! That’s the RAM issue from V001! “Draw” function gets called a few dozen times a second, and in the “makeBanner” sub-function I called the “bodyShape” sub-function, which (here’s my mistake) called the alpha-layered body shape outline used as the level progression bar from a PNG file. So it loaded a small picture file dozens of times a second.
Windows has a feature that pre-loads data to keep things chugging along smoothly, which is great, but if there’s a run-away cascade like I accidentally put in the initial download version it just exasperates it if the system settings aren’t PERFECT, which they almost never are.
Sorry it didn’t work for you - thank you for letting me know! If a bunch of people publicly raise their eyebrows about the active-idle game elements I’ll know to steer away from that in the future, but if nobody points it out I’m working in the dark. At a minimum your statement lets me know that I should be up-front in the initial explanation of what a game IS if there are idle elements.
The freezing / lagging should be fixed, I played the fixed version for about an hour and didn’t get a change in system usage beyond +/- 10% of the initial value. The blandness is part-and-parcel for a while now, though. “Juice” is my final, “Im going to walk away from this game after these changes” step.
Thank you for letting me know!
Thank you! I’m stuck in my own head, so what’s obvious to me (the guy who has spent hours and hours on this) isn’t always a helpful metric of what’s actually obvious.
I added a “Hey, move your mouse over here to get more data” message to the very first thing the player sees, and the corresponding pop-up should provide enough data to get started. (If you decide to give it another go, be sure to download a newer version, that first one you got has a huge RAM-draining issue)
This is a term I’m not familiar with. I am toying with the concept of accelerating an action’s effect as a function of how close to the center the mouse is - maybe up to 50%, but with a fairly sharp dropoff (halfway to the edge far less than a 25% increase from baseline)
This is an option I’ve been thinking over - initially I thought of adding a branch ~4/5ths of the way through (make the player commit to either (spoiler) Reasoning or Urge during the peak-laziness point) which would be a button click A or B option. Since then I’ve been considering making that particular branch trigger based on whether the player hits a certain energy cap before the end of that level, and if I bother to code that contingency in it wouldn’t be much to add a whole lot of similar deviations to the “Plotline Prime” play out. Maybe use them to build playable failure states? I dunno, still fiddling with the idea, it’s possible nothing will come of it.
osu! is a rhythm game that employs mouse pointer clicks & drag-and-clicks to the beat of the background music. I brought it up because I was unsure if it was part of the inspiration. Some other ideas:
Maybe you could employ click-and-drag targets which appear on a sidebar or randomly on-screen. You might use a click-and-drag motion to “throw” or “shoot” them at other actions in-game or something like that. It could be fun to try to anticipate where the action you want to target is going to be as it’s moving along the screen.
Moreover, you could add targets that “gravitate” towards the cursor. If they touch the cursor, maybe there’s some sort of penalty. But if you encircle them with your pointer and build up their inertia, you could throw them at some sort of other target to gain a bonus of some kind (perhaps based on the speed of their impact, I dunno). I’m not sure how to work them in thematically or if that’s against the spirit of the gameplay you’re going for. I like the light bullet hell elements but the gamer in me wants to ramp up the intensity I suppose.
At any rate, some sort of clicking or click-and-dragging mechanics would be really engaging imo! I love the idea you have for energy. The combo of resource management & bullet hell is really interesting; I do hope you keep developing this idea or games like it.
This is an interesting idea, from the comments above, I didn’t get all that far in it, only to around 320lb. I found the gameplay fairly tedious/simple, generally it was really easy to farm a lot of money then quickly do levels by alternating food/laze. If I was to suggest how to improve it, I’d move away from singular bouncing balls, to multiple smaller balls, like a bullet-hell, which the player has to go to the correct ones while avoiding negative effects/undesirable actions. So you could then tailor the patterns/effects per level to match your story. I think that’d make this better as a game, but that might be too much of a departure from what you’ve looking towards doing.
Thanks for the input! While I could cannibalize probably 2/3rds of the program towards a game more in line with your suggestion, it would require enough of a rewrite that I’m hesitant to implement it.
Your findings re: the Nash Equilibrium (earn tons of cash, then cruise through dozens of stages) matches my own, and you’re right that it can be a pacing problem. It takes player buy-in to play sub-optimally to keep the stakes higher during any particular level, and the optimal strategy is easy enough to figure out that there’s not much of a sense of triumph in identifying it.
So while I’m not going to implement your suggestion, you have refocused me on a line of thinking I had pushed to the background - how to make it more difficult without making it unplayable for less twitch-endowed players. Current thinking, easier to code than remaking the action economy, is to add a ‘heat seeking’ element to the SICK and BILLS bullets that gets stronger the fuller the stomach/wallet is. Properly calibrated, it should make ‘moderately paced gains’ easy enough as a quasi-idle game and ‘extreme behavior’ twitch/action-play challenging but obtainable. Should be easy enough to code, but I’ll have to crank out a few playtests to get the intensity dialed in.
Thanks for getting my creative juices flowing in this direction!
So, having sank a moderate amount of time into this, I really can say the later portions feel like they drag a bit. The challenge does seem to drop off, so increasing it does seem like a good idea, but that doesnt really solve the time required. With the current set up, adding the seeking element would seem more punishment for settling into the long haul. With the current flow later into the game, its more encouraged to build up a stockpile and then ride out in the larger circles. One thing you could is divide up the bill and flu orbs an increase their speed. Moreso, you could introduce orbs that can only be ‘picked up’ from within the lazing orb. Having a payoff of increasing metabolism to increase weight gain would increase the general pace with a form of skill expression, as maintaining momentum requires staying in the lazing orb, but also jumping into the snacking orb more often to counter the higher drain of the metabolism boosts. To further double down on that, you could make it so a lighter wallet spawns more orb, meaning that adding the element of regularly sitting on lower cash and using exercise to have stuff move all the faster would further fortify the loop.
That, of course, is my own suggestion that you have 0 reason to follow lol. Like the concept of the game, and the writing is fun as well. Interested to see where it grows.
I feel like this format’s biggest strength is showing the character’s psychology. I found myself playing not just for the weight gain description, but also to see how the circles would change as the character got fatter. I feel like a lot could be done with not just changing names, but also sizes (ok that does happen lol) and maybe even adding or removing different circles over time.
For example, as the character gets greedy, there could be temporary circles that fill you up faster and cost less, or as she gets reluctant, circles for more intense exercise.
I had an issue once I got to around 300 and onwards , it gets too difficult to get energy which is a necessity for getting money again. Eventually you get bottlenecked by this and end up starving from my experience. Also, I don’t think the progression slowing down once you get to the 10 pound integers is a good idea, it made the game a bit tedious for me IMO.
But I had a lot of fun with this! I can’t wait to see what else comes along, and I really like how the changes in circles showcased the character’s changing mentality. You’re wonderful with descriptions as well!
I never really ran into an issue with energy and earning money for food. I was running 380+ as well. What specifically was making it too hard to get energy? Its small, but youbshould be able to stay in the energy orb for the few seconds it takes to get max energy for more money, which isnt even necessary, just more efficient.
This is a good game, but this is really quite a slog. Is it possible to speed up the gaining process or at least provide some info on how to edit the in-game files?
The only difficult thing about this is having the patience to advance stages at higher weights. Hovering over circles for 15 minutes or more is really boring. Also the Bills circle is too punishing. It brought me from over 3k to like 700 just by touching it once.
$3000 is waaaaaay more than you should need, I’m pretty sure you could beat the game from scratch at least three times over with that. If you’re holding more than ~$100, ~$150 you’re probably spending too much time working, which might explain the worst of the pacing issue you’re having. (BILLS takes a percentage of total savings, so that massive drop-off is anticipated behavior.)
Well what I did was I just built up a bunch of money right at the beginning of the game before gaining any weight so I could just focus on that part without having to deal with getting any money later on.
Again the only really ‘difficult’ part of the game is having the patience to wait for that extremely slow progress bar to fill up at the later stages.
