I really liked this game! Looking forward to seeing any other characters you decide to add, and other future features!
I liked it all save for one thing, which is a bit of a nitpick. I’ll try to be vague cuz it seems you don’t want people to just tell everyone how to do this. The conditions for being able to eat the bosses I think is a little too hard. I literally could not manage it even once w/o the invulnerability cheat. Even when you get that blue moon circumstance to be able to eat the boss, you can just miss and lose out on your chance.
I’m curious to see if anyone else here has managed it with/without cheats? If so how long did it take because I cannot imagine it taking less than an hour, which IMO is a bit much.
This is probably gonna be a long one but I wanna get all my thoughts out here since this game has managed to evoke a special emotion in me: rage. I’m calm now, but I did not have a grand time with this game, which is a shame with it being one of the admittedly microscopic selection of expansion games that actually including popping as a possibility.
I’ll start with the core gameplay loop: You shoot cakes to kill them, then pick up a collectable food item to eat and get bigger. Doing this makes your hurtbox get larger making you more vulnerable to enemy projectiles, but you also get stronger by shooting a wider spray of projectiles that can shred enemy formations. Additionally, you charge up a parry move that can deflect incoming bullets and protect you, which is incredibly useful. On the surface, it’s a well made and designed balancing act of getting bigger and dealing with enemies faster as a reward for being more liable to die from a mistimed parry or unnoticed bullet. The problem is that this immediately implodes once you hit the bigger sizes for two reasons.
You do not have enough super meter at the larger size, especially during boss fights. A parry consumes 20% of your special meter, and the only way to charge it is by collecting consumables. And it does not charge supper fast unless you’re already obliterating the enemies, and none at all during a boss fight. This means that if the enemy bullet pattern forces you to parry multiple times, you can quickly run out before you’re safe. Additionally, enemies can deny you this vital defensive option with that same bullet pattern by denying you the needed food. Not to mention, since you’re eating to charge the meter, you’re getting bigger and easier to hit. Finally, this is made even more or an issue by the full meter special. Why does the full meter special make this worse, you may ask? It’s quite simple, it’s activated bu holding fire and parry at the same time. You know, the fire button you’re gonna be holding down nigh constantly because it’s a shoot 'em up. If you accidentally use your full meter special, not only do you loose any bonus potential from filling the meter again while it’s full, you lose your entire meter, meaning no parries until you get more! This killed me, multiple times.
You get slower. Now, I know this is a weight gain game and getting slower is just apart of the fetish, but slowdown + bigger hitbox is a very fatal combo anywhere. This gets especially egregious during bosses, but even standard formations can be bad with the spam. Now, you may say… You’re supposed to use parries at larger sizes. Now I want you to remember, during boss fights you have no way of regaining parries, nor can you regen it in between waves, meaning if you are either low or out at the start of any round (because you accidentally used your full meter special because you forgot to let go of shoot when you needed to parry) you are going to suffer. You can’t dodge easily, and you can’t parry often enough to blitz, so most of the time you are just grazing the boss/ hiding in a corner until you win. Now, this gets even worse, becasue one boss both has what I believe to be a bug, and demands you dodge fast with an attack you can’t parry. The chocolate boss. She has two attacks that I have encountered. A fast slam attack that shoots two projectiles after rushing you, and a slower but charge where she’ll loop and then slam, launching two projectiles. Now these projectiles are interesting, because they bounce from the bottom of the screen and travel away from the boss, with gravity. Parrying does not remove this gravity, meaning if you have the audacity, the moxie, the balls and bravado and EGO to dare use the basic defense mechanic on these projectiles, they will turn back around after you block them and hit you anyway. And since you’re likely big and slow, you aren’t able to just dodge the attack normally because of how fast it is, meaning it is a hope you’re in the right place at the right time to survive attack. This is for both of her attacks. Also, since she charges you, staying underneath her is too dangerous meaning you’re going to be just chipping away at her health with your scatter shot. Meaning the fight is going to be long, especially with how high her health is since she is a boss. This slowdown makes it way too hard to survive at the larger sizes, because you also get bigger. Not to mention you shoot slower, but that is honestly not as damning as your ability to evade being gimped.
Now, I know that this is very negative, so I wanna end it on a positive note. I appreciate that it actually allows you to pop, the art and sound design is great, and beyond my complaints it is well put together. The pixel art is hot, and the designs are expressive and stylish. It’s a good game, don’t get my anger twisted, but it does have difficulty balance issues that I feel need to be addressed because they make it unfun, and by extension act as a mood killer
We hear you. We can’t promise to fix all of these issues, but we ARE working on a new update, which includes reducing the life loss penalty from taking damage in challenge stages. We’re also working on control mapping, which will add the option to give the full GP move its own keybind rather than holding the fire button.
We appreciate your notes and taking time with this game! Hopefully you enjoyed at least some aspects of your experience, haha.
Actualy after update parries became more useful on bigger forms and after some playing i discovered imo the best strategy to get high scores. After reaching max size you can pop or float away and floating away allows you to get aditional attack/defense during run and if you know how to vore bosses you can get float form that spews bubble gum instead of usual burps and thats allows to reach stages beyond 50 if you have enough skill to ger multiple “floaters” during run.
Damn this one of the best new game in recent time! Also wanted to ask if there a way to swap final form options cuz sometimes i missclick and pop instead of floating away and is there a way to skip intro tutorial?
Hi! I’ve played this somewhat extensively the past day. You know, this is really fun, but I have just two odd notes for you, really.
I feel like it’d be cool if there was a way to have a huge berry blimp(possibly even bigger than the bubblegum blimp??) floating around in the background. I don’t know what it would do; maybe contact damage with a cooldown, bouncing around the screen like the DVD logo? just a suggestion. I love huge heavy berries!
This game reminds me a lot of a game I was trying to find forever ago. I played it several years ago, I wanna say about seven to nine years ago. I found it online- here’s a
Summary.
Your main character is a white-bellied orange “gem dragon”, a rare kind of dragon that constantly swells up with energy, and hitting other gem dragons with your laser breath causes them to inflate while you deflate. It’s a shoot-em-up as well, just a single boss fight but the sprites were delicious. It kind of gave tohou vibes with the bullet patterns. By getting shot, your character gets bigger. The bigger you are, the more bullets you fire, and the faster you deflate. You fire at a boss who also gets bigger. You can hold spacebar, I think, to project a red shield around yourself to deflect most projectiles, except ones that looked a certain way.
Edit: The boss was blue/purple, I think, they were a gem dragon too.
it ultimately wasn’t balanced, or a very in-depth experience, so I can imagine it flew under a lot of people’s radars- but it was very interesting and the sprite work, as mentioned, was just divine. It’d be cool if you added something with some of the concepts from this.
I’m not sure what could be causing this. Everything uploaded is ported straight from GameMaker and nothing else. I even scanned the files myself just to be sure.
odd…! okay. I’ve allowed the program through, what’s weirder is it only tries to quarantine the file when I unzip it? it’s weird. Whelp, thanks for checking I guess.
This game is amazing! I can’t deny it’s been hard to put it down for a while and I raged a little at times, but overall my experience has been pretty great.
Some thoughts and observations:
I actually quite enjoyed the way this game handles weight; the loss of control is very notable at higher weights, especially during later stages, which can often lead to cheap-feeling deaths where you have no choice but to take a hit and lose a life (especially when you have no GP), but there are workarounds you can make use of to avoid that. Namely:
If you can save up enough GP for the special ability when a boss shows up, even at max weight it’s relatively doable to take down the boss before you inevitably get hit (especially if you already have one or more blobs floating around doing extra damage). In fact, I believe Chunky Chocolate is beatable at max weight even without any gauge - her attacks are tight to dodge but it’s doable to do if you don’t get jumped by the wraparound attack.
The special ability is pretty good overall as a last resort to rush to immobility before you get hit if you’re at the last weight stage, since it makes all cakes stop shooting and instakills sponge cakes at max kcal gain. My first instinct was to just parry shots instead and that does technically allow you to survive for longer in some instances, but you won’t be doing much damage in the meantime, so you might run out too soon and end up dying anyway.
Finally, there’s also the vore ability. By planning yourself to use it every upcoming boss stage (there’s two bubblegum cakes and one just before the boss during later stages) and intentionally keeping your weight low with antimatter cakes, you remain agile and small enough to dodge projectiles (most of the time, at least) and can still slowly build up towards a deathball as the stages progress without having to risk yourself by gaining weight normally.
That said, there’s still a couple annoyances that make the experience a little more frustrating that it should be. There’s the unskippable ability tutorial at the start of every run, the fact the damage hitbox could be maybe a little better telegraphed (maybe have it glow every once in a while?) and the fact bubblegum cakes and their drops are hard to tell apart from strawberry cakes at a glance, especially if they get hit by bubblegum projectiles (maybe give them a white glowing border and a stronger magenta color?), which sucks as they’re so important to grab.
I second irenicus’ wishes for a berry blob; I managed to gum a boss once while under the blueberry powerup and although it gave me a profound sense of achievement it did kinda suck that I couldn’t even eat the boss and just made it hard on myself when I could’ve instead just gotten hit on purpose then launched the bubble and reaped my reward. The blueberry powerup is rather lacking in general and in most cases it’s invariably better to avoid it instead as it prevents you from gaining weight, GP and collecting other powerups which are crucial for late stage play. I wish there could be more to it so its use wouldn’t be restricted to WYW mode (maybe having a shockwave blast upon powerup loss that could coat enemies in blueberry and make them give double kcal?).
The custom sprites feature is a good start to something great. I like it when games include the opportunity to customize themselves to such a personal level and although I’m sure you are planning to expand it in the future, I’m voicing this thought anyway to serve as extra encouragement. I’m not sure how far you’re planning on taking this, or how much customizability is feasible with a game such as this, but the inclusion of a decently powerful custom character support base would be a great thing and I’d definitely whip something up in the future once the feature is more fleshed out. (…also custom bosses maybe? (: )
Other additions I’d like to see are more powerup-oriented cakes (fire rate boosts, piercing projectiles, etc what-have-yous), and perhaps even a campaign mode with a story where you fight levels and bosses in order and can actually reach an end to the game (bonus points if you can get permanent or semi-permanent powerups that carry through levels, like most classic shmups).
Finally, I’d like to praise the character design. The game exudes plenty of personality already and I’m sure this will improve even more with time, especially once level music is added. I find the heart motif pretty endearing as well, especially with how it breaks on immobility.
My suggestion if you’re having a hard time is to keep your weight low and grab the bubblegum drop as late as possible. Of course, be careful not to miss it when it drops, and try to have at least about half of your GP meter full so you have a good amount of leeway when trying to deplete the rest of the boss’ HP. One thing that’s also not immediately obvious is that the bubble deflects projectiles as it inflates, but it also bounces Chunky Chocolate away from you, so you’re perfectly safe to stand directly under the boss (a bit further ahead in the cases of Vibrant Vanilla and Sightly Strawberry) with complete and utter disregard for any projectiles or impending danger in the way.
All things considered, I’m excited to see how this project develops further. There’s also the issue with waves sometimes ending early and stacking on top of each other, but someone’s brought that up on the itch page so I believe you’re aware of it already. Best of luck in development!
Yeah, this seems to be a game that seems obsessed with committing as many cardinal sins of Shmup design as possible, even down to the resolution of the game. The UI takes up as much space as Sally!
I feel like you made a self-defeating project with the current design.
You’re supposed to finish off a boss with the gum attack to be able to eat them, allegedly.
Never worked for me, I’ll have to try it the next time I play again and see if I can get it to work.
Horizontal aspect ratio despite being a vertical shmup.
Your hitbox gets too big too fast.
Burp-parrying is mandatory after a certain size. (Side note: burping repetitively is grating, the game needs like five more burp sounds to help fight against repetition.)
Enemies dropping to a shooting position stop mere pixels away from your head. (See #1)
Your gun and your hitbox are really far apart, making it hard to track what you’re protecting without actually looking right at your character.
Certain bullet patterns + a big enough hitbox + the low speed of being so big = automatic unwinnable death, and it happens a lot more often than in most other shmups / bullet hells.
Firing speed and movement speed gets so nerfed at the bigger size that ironically the best gameplay in the game is right around the middle sizes, not big or small.
Both rewards for hitting max size are kinda weak. One’s RNG on how useful it is (and isn’t useful until you’ve got like 5), and the other you just hope you get when the screen’s full of enemies.
At minimum weight, you straight-up don’t have enough DPS to beat any of the bosses (AFAIK).
The food that makes you sick looks about the same as any other food at a glance.
Sucks that the burp works off your “special” gauge, as it means you’re punished for not keeping the meter at least half-full at all times because of #6 and #3 mentioned above.
Only one character, and that one character only has one weapon, and that one weapon’s upgrades over time is just a wider fan of shots, which is kinda boring.
Custom characters are just reskins as far as I know, I don’t think we’ve got options for different weapons or mechanics, I think it’s just visual for now.
Next time I play the game, I’ll try to keep tabs on any other concerns that pop up, but I’ve mostly been waiting for another handful of updates before I’d want to try to play the game again, I think I’ll wait until the second character before I give it another go, I got bored of playing the same character the whole time. Cool game for how early in development it is, but I just don’t have any interest in playing it anymore.
We’re sorry the game hasn’t been what you might’ve hoped for. Just keep in mind that while your criticisms are absolutely valid, we are a very small dev group that seeks to make what we want to make. This is also our first project working with a new engine. We will listen to what you have to say, but every concern may not be properly resolved, and you might end up disappointed. Even if this game does not meet your expectations, however, the lessons learned from it will be applied in future projects.
That being said, I do hope you found some fun from this project, and there’s a good chance this won’t be our last.
I did it on rainbow mode, so i could get gum on the first boss fight. after that, its incredibly easy to gum the boss as they all have dodgeable patterns no matter your weight, (though to be fair i havent quite got the vanilla boss down yet) and getting the gummed boss should be super easy since you have to be under them to gum them in the first place.