The Veil Commission: An SCP, Control, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill inspired Weight Gain Game

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When I read the first point you were considering, it reminded me of a video I saw that someone made about a game called Signalis - a game that takes inspiration from two of the games you have listed for inspiration - gameplay wise, they briefly went into discussion about the movement controls, the environment, and all sort of things. I’ll link it in case you want to see the video for any ideas - gameplay wise.

For the record, there’s some parts of the gameplay that are far more involved than you’d probably want to go - those are not what I’m referencing. I’m strictly talking about the generic gameplay design that goes into environments and interacting with them. Even the issue on movement is touched upon briefly.

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104

Oooh! Me gusta. I’m a big fan of game dev breakdowns. I’ll give it a watch tomorrow night.

I’m wondering if it might make sense to have running be almost free at lower weights and have it cost more and more stamina the heavier the player gets. That might be a good compromise between exploration and time to play, but it also makes being overweight that much more punishing. There’s slow in a good way and slow in a bad way.

If it wasn’t such a pain to animate and integrate the other set of running animations I might consider letting inflation be a viable way of increasing speed, but I’ve gone down that route before and it’s pretty hard to get it right.

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105

i hadn’t kept up with the thread much before posting, I did know about other people experiencing the softlock before posting (and did figure out the amnestic on my own while playing, though that just left me softlocked in the docks since the circle there wasn’t implemented yet), so sorry if a lot of this was redundant.
As far as the thing about conditions, if they’re restricted to getting big that’s probably fine since that is what we’re here for and it’s a lot more fun to wind up bigger than a house than it is to just lose health over time.
Also, if there are altered items to interact with in game I hadn’t found any- I was playing for a couple hours, but even then covering ground was kind of a pain since i hadn’t invested in stamina. I found plenty of the documents describing them, and like three flashlights but nothing else. I know there’s other stuff I missed too now I’ve read more of the thread, like the crowbar, so I might start over and look for those things.
Edit: fooled around for a while, found out I’d just been missing the non flashlight items in their rooms (might wanna make them stand out a lil more) and realised the water coolers spawn slimes if you stay near them- not infinitely, but enough to be worth a lot of exp or (if you’re lucky and two spawn in waddling distance) get to truly obscene sizes that really really don’t work with the way the model is, and reduce the animations to the extent it looks like you’re just t pose gliding around and clipping into yourself. Still dunno about anomalous items beyond those though. Also i was gonna check what happened if you amnestic while grappled by a vacuum but i was already committed to testing the huge sizes before i thought to try it, and wound up not doing that (on account of being well past softlock size.

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106

I’m feeling a bit dumb because like, how do I get bigger? I’ve let the slimes in but like. I black out before anything happens, unless I’m not waiting in the right way.

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If you want to increase your max size you need to get big but not big enough to fill the capacity bar (middle bar on your hud), then find a magic circle (they’re in some rooms in the offices) and interact with it, to spend your size on EXP.
Then, when you leave the offices you can interact with the big door near the offices door to go into a section with a computer you can interact with, which lets you spend EXP to increase the maximum of your bars, so it’ll let you reach bigger sizes without blacking out.

If your size isn’t increasing at all when you bump into slimes then i dunno what’s going wrong.

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108

There’s my problem, I have found literally 0 magic circles, haha

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Re-enter the offices multiple times if you need to. Each generation can have a chance to give you an EXP exchange circle behind a room close to the spawn door

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110

One minor suggestion. Please allow us to change the movement keys or allow use of the arrow keys for us lefties. Also some text to explain what keys are available.

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I’ll do my best. I haven’t found a good solution for remapping input, but maybe I’ll just add either arrow keys or WASD. Won’t help for folks that use IJKL, but it’s a start.

Appreciate everyone playing for so long. I figured an average session would be only five or ten minutes, not hours.

One thing I might try is making the office much smaller, perhaps even a function of the player’s stamina so that early on they can explore nearby and restart often. That will also force the players to invest in something other than max fill.

After the map hits a certain size then we can start getting into the deeper offices, where the lights are sometimes off.

I’d still like more variety in the office levels, but my skills as a map maker are very limited. Perhaps I’ll try to reuse the mess hall as a breakroom.

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112

I hope I don’t burst a bubble too much, it’s not so much a game dev breakdown, the person is more so reviewing the story and multiple endings you can get (including - spoilers - a false ending that can briefly screw with players the first time).

The gameplay stuff I mentioned is more touched upon in the beginning - they go over how certain game design concepts from separate games are used then clash slightly before it got patched in an update. The rest is mostly about its story and literary references. As well as the fucked up psychological horror mixed with questioning what the Hell is going on - and if you are in Hell.

The crazy in-depth gameplay stuff I mentioned you might not want to use is talked about much later in the video, as those gameplay elements affect what endings you can get - and the lengths you have to go to get them can be kind of crazy.

Edit: checked the video again - at 15:00 (that’s 15 minutes in) the video goes into what was originally an issue but was solved through a patch - the issue was about the game’s inventory system, as - initially - there was the issue that you were limited to 6 slots and there were two very important items that took up slots: the flashlight and the eye accessory that lets you take pictures. There’s more about the gameplay in the rest of the chapter that rant’s in, but that point and afterwards does touch upon how a gameplay mechanic and a design philosophy from different games can clash when not thought through carefully.

There’s also the fact that at one point it mentions how certain items were moved around in the patch. Objects were placed in different areas, probably thinking of the psychology of loot-goblin hoarders that we players can be (I say this as someone who is well aware of what it means to be “Over Encumbered Man/Woman”).

Also, double checked your post about the issues and I just had another brainwave - about speed specifically - remember that transformation thing I mentioned before? Why not add a quick one to turn into a ball of some kind? Basically, at a higher level you unlock an upgrade that allows you to just turn into a rolling ball, sort of like Samus Aran from Metroid. And depending on the fullness of the character, affects how big the ball is. For a bit of fun, I remember there was this comic on DeviantArt back in the olden days - sadly no longer on there - that had this concept called “Bellyfication” - basically, people who were poisoned got turned into round, fat little bellies, and the main protagonist was forced to work with a repeat sex offender (Disclaimer: I don’t think the little Max rabbit wannabe ever went after kids, wasn’t mentioned in the comic - at least I hope not) to try to track down the culprit. It ends with her failing and getting turned, along with the potential suspect being killed.

Granted, I don’t know much about what’s under the hood in programming terms, so I don’t know if it’s as simple as giving the player a simpler, smaller character model or if it’s like the shrinking mod for Fallout New Vegas: your character isn’t smaller, you’re actually in a new, freshly modeled and meshed area.

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Just updated with Alpha20260126. It has controls for left-handed (WASD+E to move and use plus arrows+middle click to move and use). There’s also an energy drink that spawns at the start to give you ten minutes of unlimited sprinting. And I added one of the altered items into the lab. Hope you found some keys.

Here’s the full changelist:

  • Added toggle-run option to inputs.
  • Added ‘emergency purgation’ ritual for when the character is too big to fit through doors.
  • Prevented slimes from spawning in offices.
  • Added left-handed controls in addition to right-handed. Arrows + middle mouse click to use.
  • Added energy drink to docks for ten minutes of sprinting.
  • Added P-Cushion to labs.
  • Office scales with player endurance.

Given the volume of people from the site I’m a little worried it’s going to go public and there will be nobody left to review. I should have had a smaller beta. :sweat_smile:

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114

Can’t access the page due to me living in the UK :frowning:

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I have the same problem with itch.io, if you use a VPN with a region selector or a Tor browser that randomises your location you can get around this issue.

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Us lefties thank you

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117

Tried out the new update.

It’s neat that the P-Balloons give a use to keys now (I’m assuming they’re gonna have more utility as more stuff gets added), though it was a little disappointing to see them just being a quick cutscene instead of letting you keep some of the bloating or even briefly float around to avoid floor based hazards or something. It IS pretty neat that if you use more than one at once it lets you get stupidly big though, and I also really like being horizontal. Overall a nice add.

Did you do something to the spawn rate of vacuums or have they always been crazy rare? I was playing for about 40 minutes (assuming energy drinks really do last 10 minutes which seems right) and I only found one. Might be I didn’t realize something was up with the spawn rate before bc I was blaming not finding them before on not exploring enough, but now the energy drink lets me cover most if not all of the map I can see the damn things just aren’t spawning.
I did manage to test out what happens when you amnestic while grappled though. It warps you back to the hub but keeps you in the helpless grappled state and doesn’t even keep inflating you, meaning you’re stuck forever.

Energy drink is a slapdash fix to the movement woes, probably gonna need reworking when there’s more stuff in the game (like entities that actually chase you more than two feet) but right now it really improves your ability to actually go out and find things so I appreciate it being here. In future I’m assuming it’ll be obtained from the vending machine in exchange for cash (or rarely in an actual map instance), and there’s room to experiment with drinks- fizzy drinks that cause you to inflate over time (maybe even ones that are disguised as energy drinks, or energy drinks that cause this in addition to their effects) would be a good way to test stuff like a status condition.

I upgraded stamina to see what it was like, and it really doesn’t feel worth it. Stamina refilling at the same rate, regardless of how big the bar is, means that you’re not actually spending more time running compared to waddling at a terribly slow pace or standing completely still (standing still is still optimal btw, the faster stamina regen lets you get back to sprinting sooner and cover more ground than the “normal” walking pace and its slower stamina regen does) so you’re really not that much more mobile even if your stamina bar triples in length. I feel like using stamina as a way to reduce mobility when gaining weight would probably make more sense than the current implementation of the movement penalties as well- the heavier you are the more stamina sprinting costs and/or the slower it regenerates, then the movement speed penalties come in later, then even later comes the turning off sprinting (and going even further beyond that, maybe making waddling cost stamina). That should make the penalties for getting big still tangible while also not getting annoying as fast so it doesn’t deincentivize you to actually carry weight around and see the bigger sizes instead of burning it off ASAP.

Also, not sure what caused this but at some point the anti softlock magic circle in the hub disappeared- I did get to use it once, but unfortunately I wasn’t paying enough attention to see what exactly made it disappear, and it didn’t come back no matter what method I used to get back to the hub including quitting and reloading a previous save.

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118

I’ve been looking at this game, it’s pretty interesting, but I managed to find a crash involving inventory items. (spoilered just in case)

When you “die”, you lose the crowbar, and if it’s still selected in your inventory, you can equip it again, which crashes the game. (I’m on the Linux release of the game, if that matters at all.)

Other than that, the building blocks of the game seem pretty fun, I think it’ll make for a great game once everything is in place.

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119

Curious what is considered endurance in the game btw?

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@hailbreaker
Good catch. That should be pretty easy to replicate. Thanks for the report.

@Chall677
Stamina and endurance are synonyms to me. I believe it’s actually ‘endurance’ in some parts of the game code.

@DuelMasterK
An indirect change to the vacuums. There should only ever have been one (thought I think two could spawn in the first build). They only spawn when the map is sufficiently big and I made the map grow as a function of the player’s endurance in this build. Good find on the getting stuck while grappled. I don’t know how I want to handle that yet. Could disable using items while grappled. Could make the item not have an effect. Could reset the state after respawn.

Stamina/endurance should refill nonlinearly, but maybe I need to tweak the weights on that. I think it’s exponentially when standing still. I’ll have to scale it by the amount of stamina, too. Adjusting the point where heavy weight penalties sink in would be nice. I’m a little worried about how the player will look when they’re really overinflated but still running. The animation system interpolates from a full animation to something like an overstuffed T-pose based on how full the player is. If I move that value around based on endurance it probably won’t look good. Maybe that’s unavoidable.

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121

Played this for a couple of hours and I think I have found everything so far

I like the general idea and the character control feels smooth, it was nice to see different expansions for air and slime, I am looking forward to seeing what else might get added in the future.

QoL Feature Resuest: Could a save file also save the mouse sensitivity settings, it is annoying to have to set it again each time I load the game.

Feature Idea: Having high fill with something heavy can make you painfully slow, maybe there could be a strength stat that helps offset the speed penalty that we could invest our exp into?

Thanks for sharing your game with us :slight_smile:

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122

Yes! I need to make a separate save file that keeps volume and mouse sensitivity. I’ll put it on the list.

  • (Done, but might remove.) Stamina drink that lets you run for longer.
  • (Not done, but added purgation ritual right to the docks if you’re too big. Might remove.) Add the storage room with a purgation ritual to the end of the docks so if you get too big to go through doors you can un-softlock yourself.
  • Update the codex menu as you find new memos and altered item descriptions.
  • Need more variety of enemies in the offices. More variety of the office in general.
  • More things in the labs.
  • Intro sequence.

  • Vacuum enemy needs sound effects for moving and inflating the player. The player needs a grappled animation.

  • I need to actually integrate the discoverable videos.
  • I need to find and contract with some actors and actresses for more of the video sequences or some still shots.
  • (Done) Option to toggle sprint instead of holding.
  • Save mouse sensitivity and sprint settings.
  • Rebindable controls instead of just right + left hand modes.

I made some changes to how endurance/stamina works based on some of the feedback. Higher stamina not only lets you sprint longer but increases your rate of recovery when walking. Being heavier makes you lose stamina faster to offset that a bit. I left in the exponential exhaustion decay. It now feels like it’s possible to get around the offices without needing the sports drink, though toggle run feels like it should be the default now.

I also tweaked how the office grows. Instead of growing as the player gets more stamina, it now grows based on how often you visit it. I like this a little more because tracking the number of visits means I can do things like play with light levels when the player is more experienced or spawn more dangerous enemies.

I feel like I need to change the purgation ritual a little. It’s really easy to get super huge early in the game after only a few minutes, which isn’t bad, but I’d like it to run a little slower. I might make exp work like leveling and have added bonuses divided by the total exp gained.

I’m also considering having the player lose weight slowly. On the one hand, I hate to steal the player’s work. On the other, it would probably be useful to keep yoyoing up and down the size range. Let air run out of the player faster than fat.

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