I will definitely try to make things more obvious in the future, I’m sorry that it’s just not working for you rn
I am looking to tweak the balance of the deflation minigame to be a bit easier as well as make it so that it will go down exponentially faster the longer it’s left.
Technically it’s possible to charge the jump in the air and then release it right when/just after hitting the ground, but I am trying to make things less stressful at least when it comes to general surviving
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Hey, while this is a great game you got here and I while have ended up playing it a lot, there are a lot of notable issues that I found with the game that I’d like to address, some of them can be fixed with some added or changed mechanics, while some others are bugs.
Suggestions:
- As someone who really enjoyed V2, one thing that I’m not the biggest fan of is the change to the deflation minigame. It can be frustrating at times, being inflated for entire minutes at a time with little else to do, whereas in V2, you still had more control over the minigame result. Another thing that sort bothered me, although this one is more understandable, is no longer having any way of controlling what kind of body inflation you get. My suggestion here would be to perhaps add a shop that has options that would allow you to deflate without needing the minigame, and also able to inflate while choosing what kind you get (for a price, obviously). As a example, a potion shop could work for this.
- A map, or maybe even a compass. Sure, V2 didn’t have one, but V2 pointed you in the direction of where you pick up the job items, so this generally wasn’t needed. In V3 however, the game doesn’t tell you the item locations, so during work hours, you’re pretty much just wandering around until you find one (which for me just ended up going to the castle every time because it had so many possible spots in a condensed area that it was going to have something), as well as the Castle District in general being much bigger and more confusing than in V2. Even the hub world that you start in can be confusing to navigate at times.
- Sometimes it feels like eating food sometimes raises inflation potential more than it feels like it should. Sometimes, I can buy and eat some food (and not even an expensive kind of food at that) after having just successfully deflated after winning the minigame, and going straight into Full Spherical.
- Approval Rating is very difficult to maintain, and pretty much just luck dependent. This is due to the rating pretty much just relying on the item spawn points, and the item drop-off points, both of which are random. I’ve only ever gotten the max payout of $100 once, and even then, I got Extremely lucky.
- According to the Readme.txt, it says that having an inflated butt slightly increases jump height and allows you to dive slightly further, and when it says “slightly”, it’s not joking, as the effects of having an inflated butt are hardly noticeable, especially when compared to the other body types.
- The Camera seems to try and follow Ebony from behind, especially when moving left and right. This is especially annoying, as the camera is usually fighting against the player more often than not. My suggestion here would be to simply remove this automated camera, and leave the player controlled one, as the automated camera is sort of just unnecessary, and more often than not just gets in the way.
Possible Glitches/Bugs:
- The Race minigame in the hub world that you first spawn in is ludicrously easy. The 3 checkpoints always spawn right next to each other, and also spawn very close to the guy you talk to in order to start the race. This makes money very easy to obtain, since you can use this to double your cash (up to $100 at a time).
- When your bust is inflated, diving onto one of the bounce platforms attached to some of the buildings (I don’t recall what the actual term is, but I hope my description works well enough to give a good enough idea of what I mean) can you some absolutely insane height. Actually not very practical due to the limited places you can do this in, but still noteworthy.
- This might be intentional, but just in case, interacting with the yellow exclamation (!) marks for whatever reason increases approval, even though the Readme.txt says nothing of this.
- Inflating when fully spherical can get you stuck tight areas very easily if not careful, when this happens, your not able to move at all, and the only way to continue is to restart the game or win the deflation minigame, which as previously stated, can be very annoying at times.
- The approval rating doesn’t reset upon going to sleep, remaining the exact same as it was the previous day when work ended.
- Sometimes (albeit rarely), Ebony would just deflate randomly, despite me not doing anything at all to warrant it. No I didn’t win the minigame when this deflation happened. Even happened to me during a race once. I have no idea what causes this, and just seems to be random to me.
- Again, this might be intentional, but I’m not as sure with this one, and is still very much worth mentioning. When you are Full Spherical, you can hold the spacebar to ‘charge’ a jump of sorts. What I found is that if you charge a jump while midair, and release it right after you hit the ground, you’ll bounce up higher than before. This can be chained multiple times to gain way more height than you would otherwise be able to, and able to reach so many more places that you straight up wouldn’t be able to in this form otherwise. This honestly makes being Full Spherical way more useful than I feel like it’s supposed to be, especially considering the window for this is pretty generous for what it does.
- I may not have been fully sure if my last point was a glitch necessarily, but this one no doubt is. For WHATEVER reason, when you are Partial Spherical, you can cancel a dive by jumping or pressing the dive button again, and then (while still midair) immediately follow it up by diving again. And this process can be chained. Infinitely. Considering how pretty much all you have to do is mash the dive button, this allows you to actually gain infinite height and distance, and basically fly forever. What’s even weirder about this to me, is that the only form that can do this is Partial Spherical, Partial Spherical being the form that isn’t even supposed to be able to dive midair in the first place, and yet somehow, it can in this one instance, and this isn’t even hard to pull off, just mashing.
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Thanks for the feedback!
In response to your suggestions, a lot of these are balance issues which I am aware of, though I’m holding off on doing finer balance changes right now, since I’m still in the process of creating/completing the larger secondary gameplay loop, and finer balance can only really be achieved in relative to that. I probably shouldn’t have released this version of the game as early as I did, because I’ve now ended up changing a number of things about how the secondary game loop works (such as making it more quest-based like I mentioned in an earlier post). I apologies if I end up making everyone wait for these refinements ^^;
As for the bugs, I am aware of all of them and intend to fix them at some point. Some of the bugs are intentional features (bouncing off awnings with breast/belly, yellow exclamation marks, Ebony deflating when the inflation potential is zero, the spherical charge jump and chaining bouncing). The infinite dive glitch with partial spherical was not intended, though I am looking into potentially turning it into a feature (of course, with limitations on it so you can’t fly indefinitely)
Once again, thank you for the feedback, it definitely helps me know how people actually feel about the game and what’s most commonly noticed! ^^
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That’s not exactly what I meant. For further detail, My inflation potential would suddenly just drop to zero for no apparent reason even when the potential was like 3/4 full.
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How frequently does this happen? There aren’t really many instances in the code where the deflation function is called, so there really isn’t anything attached to that that’s got any form of randomness attached to it
Not often. I’d say it’s only happened about 4 or 5 times to me, over the course of roughly 7-8 hours.
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Well, I’ll still keep a lookout for it ^^
It was fun to see a new version of this pop up. The new map is a nice change of pace, and the randomized inflation is nice as well. There’s still work to be done, obviously, but I don’t really have any particular feedback on the game that hasn’t already been said by others.
Keep up the good work!
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Friendly bump in case some people here haven’t been made aware already, but V3.1.0 is publicly available with new improvements/fleshing out of the gameplay core as well as an improved model ^^
More info in an edit to the main post as well as itch link
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