“Congratulations and welcome to Veil. We’re a family here. Your first assignment as a hazardous materials containment and reclamation specialist is a special one. Your team is being dispatched to our state-of-the-art research compound. Please confirm with your supervisor that all nondisclosure and privacy agreements have been signed.”
Veil is everyone’s favorite megacorp. They do everything you could possible need: medicine, manufacturing, scientific research. Rumors of their involvement with the occult are unsubstantiated.
The game is narrative focused and set in a world similar to Blueberry Bushwhacking. It features weight gain, inexplicable energies that cause you to get fat, inflation, and possibly monster pregnancy.
I’ve been taking passes at this game on and off for a few months and wanted to finally start talking about the design process in the open, now that my other game is all shipped.
I have a lot of the foundations ready. Player movement feels okay. Stamina works. The player will burst if they get too filled. You can pick up and read logs, take items to unlocks paths, and so on. The story is sketched out, but I’m going to make changes depending on how a lot of things feel.
I really want weight gain to tie into the game mechanically. The plan at the start was to have the player use the Purgation Ritual sites to save and to convert their fat into energy that they can use to power assorted occult things like the lantern. This seemed like a nice way to force people to walk the razor’s edge: too bit and you’ll burst, but you still need to garner the attention of things that will fatten you so that you can get paracausal or paranormal energy from them.
I thought it would be nice to let the player hit stuff with a crowbar, too, but I’m not so sure now.
Level design is proving to be difficult, but that might just be me not having enough mechanics in the game to make them interesting.
I won’t spoiler the player’s max size, but your max weight and fat fill will increase as you advance in the game. The biggest size I have set up is several tons. There are also a few planned encounters with people who are quite big, but I haven’t made their animations yet.
Spoilers for another person you’ll encounter:
I’m still disappointed in how much time I spent on Accident in the Alchemy Lab versus the quality of the finished product.
