Looks great so far! I would probably suggest changing the sound of your attack. It feels very weird and unrewarding. Very good game so far I look forward to see what you add!
Loving the game so far, and I'm always happy to see another metroidvania vore game. Only thing I could really suggest that hasn't already been mentioned would be a way to see the vore animations for longer without having to be in endosoma mode. Currently, the only way to see the digestion/struggle animations for longer than 5-10 seconds is to turn all digestion off. And while that's fine, I personally think it would be nice to see them for longer without having to turn the stomach sounds off.
First of all, I would like to say that I really love what you're doing here. Very few games go so in-depth about content toggles. Endosoma being an option is an instant win from me, and disabling things you don't like is always nice! I will look forward to seeing how your project evolves. Basing it on PackedRat with dialogues from the foes is a very nice touch, too!
The game didn't seem too difficult, but that is to be expected - it's the tutorial area, after all. Everything seemed straightforward and backtracking to save wasn't all that difficult to do, either. Judging by the previous replies, you do not intend to switch away from the one-tap struggle, which is alright, I respect that.
However, I do have to ask, do you plan to let the enemies swallow Graphite before all their health is depleted and they're incapacitated? Having them just hang from a grab with no progression is a little bit of a bummer - but if not, I can probably live with that.
Other than that, you have a nice game on your hands! The platforming is solid, the combat isn't clunky, and goodness does the bunny feel nice to control...
A submit button is already implemented in the dev version as of now; a brief preview of which can be found here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/59455550/
This may seem pretty basic compared to other people here but just wanted to give you a simple idea.
How about a robed monk/priest style of enemy? My initial idea was a hooded crow (flightless) that only wears a long robe and hood with the front exposed. There main attacks possibly being sudden dashes towards the player that you have to dodge or counter, and if you want them to be harder they could counter direct player attacks unless they do something to get around that. If they could fit in any style of area you already have planned, could have them as a cock vore enemy with a large sack, bonus is you could just close up the robe if you wanted different models for SFW.
This is just an idea I'm posting cause I loved seeing the demo you have already. I really liked packedrat and I'm very happy to see someone making a game like it. ^v^
This isn't too basic at all! A really good chunk of dev time for me is honestly just figuring out what each enemy will be, so things like this are greatly appreciated. Avian characters in particular are a little difficult to implement because they have a more specific place in the game's world than other species, but I like the idea and might potentially have a place I could use something similar to it.
Oh, I actually didn't realize people were dropping enemy ideas. Forgive me if I'm repeating someone, but.. Lizards. Hear me out. Kobolds, chameleons, dragons, any lizard honestly. Or amphibians like frogs and such. More feral-ish or anthro, but it'd be nice to see some representation for scaled and/or slimy creatures!
I noticed a content switch where you could turn off possession and I was wondering if there will be like a spirit enemy that will try to possess the player and take control of them I think it would kinda fun to fight against a enemy type that actively takes control away from the player and if you loose they go inside and walk off as the player possessing them
Let me just start off by saying when I heard that this was intended to be a sort of spiritual successor to packedrat, I was already intrigued. Your spritework is really really good, for whatever reason I have always enjoyed vore in a sprited pixelated medium to more 3d and realistic approaches, and you certainly do not disappoint. Of the few things that are already present its clear you have a good vision for this project, and I am very very excited to see where it goes. Now, onto my actual suggestion;
Enemy Suggestion: Rabid Squirrel - A squirrel boy afflicted by the curse whose anatomy was significantly changed by it, (has very large nuts lol), the enemy would be pretty feral, having a darting sort of behavior or lunging at the player aggressively but clumsily, upon catching the player attempting to shove them into their oversized balls via CV. I think making them appear fairly innocent outside of engagement range could be a good trick with them, the curse only fully stealing their senses from them when they see viable prey, and otherwise acting as shy and cowardly characters, until the curse makes them go practically feral at the sight of the player, or other NPC's if that's a thing you've considered. On that note actually;
Mechanic Suggestion: One of my favorite but lesser appreciated features of the original Packedrat was that enemies could and would vore each other, and sometimes even had post vore interactions with one another (EX: The Deer boy CV's the player, then a harpy lands where the Deer is, and the Deer would fuck the harpy and fill her up with your remains), and I think that would be a good thing to have here, not sure if this was something you had in mind already, but I'd be remiss not to mention it. tl;dr I think Predators should have some interactions with each other. I would suggest things like powerups or abilities for the main character, but I'm reasonably sure you probably already had something along those lines in mind.
Overall, I really like this project and can definitely see the potential here, I hope this is at all helpful.
The ability to assign key bindings would be very appreciated, but I imagine it might be slightly harder to implement than simply adding multiple redundant keybindings. If I may suggest--
This would allow people to use the current controls, a typist's controls with their hands on the homerow keys, or a calculator's controls with their off-hand on the numpad. No need to add extra menu elements or toggle options.
PS. It works on Linux if I run it through Wine. I didn't notice any bugs.
I have no idea whether there'd be a place for this, but I'll take a shot and suggest it anyhow.
A trio of hanging bats that get alerted by player (possibly also enemy?) movement, and when startled shoot downwards in a /|\ pattern to attack the target. Could be a challenge for scenarios where the player will have to plan out a time-sensitive path to avoid other enemies whilst simultaneously making sure not to alert any bats/take advantage of their movement patterns. Which manner of vore would be involved, I'd just leave up to your discretion. Maybe splitting up various types between the three based upon whichever caught you would work.
Ok, four things:
One: I only found this game maybe a week ago, loving it already.
Two: I have a suggestion, but I don't know if it(or one similar) has already been made and responded to, and if so, I apologize for the inconvenience.
Three: My suggestion would have a fair bit of work involved, but not immediately. While I will mention as such in the suggestion itself, I already feel awkward enough as is suggesting something at all, I just wanted to make sure that it's clear I'm not blind to what what I'm asking for entails.
Four(the suggestion itself): Maybe, once the core of the game has been completed, you could go back through and add alternative v0re types to the existing enemies. There are two main reasons I suggest this: 1, every time I see the sewer rat enemy, there is a part of my brain that expects CV, and frankly it'd be very fun to see CV from them at some point. 2, right now, if you decide to turn off pretty much any v0re type in the settings, you just don't get to have the enemies that use it. My thinking for how this system would work is that, if an enemy has two+ v0re types that you have enabled, they use one at random, but if they have 2+ v0re types, but you don't have all of them enabled, they only choose from the ones you have allowed. While it would be HIGHLY impractical for all enemies to have all types, this would make it more likely that, regardless of settings, any given player has decent odds of coming across a given enemy. Once more, I don't think this is something you should be doing at this stage of the game, that'd be hellish, it's more an idea for once 90% of what you've got planned is already done, as a way to round off the game. Once more, if this is too much, I apologize in advance, I just know that if I don't suggest this idea, my brain is going to keep nagging me about it.
Once more, great game, and regardless of the path you take, I'm sure I'll enjoy the game as it gets made. for now though, farewell!
- Cartography
More than 1 ending is currently planned, but it's still loose in terms of what these will be; Moreso has to do with NPC relations than anything else, which should effectively boil down to hunting for some items around the map; This is also to incentivize going after some optional bosses and finding a hidden location or two.
A bit of feedback but when I saw in the description that the goal was to be as tailorable as possible I was like "Oh cool", because one of my biggest complaints about ratpacked that it lists as its main inspiration was that it forced me into so many vore situations with female preds. And not only was it immediately apparent upon starting the game that you don't have any control over that, but you also don't have control over the sex of your character and are forced to play as a female character. These are two of the most basic things when it comes to any degree of tailorability especially for a kink related game >_> I still gave it a look and the two male preds you DO have are really good. As a small note though, the space bar being the button to advance the scene and the same to teleport away is a bit of an issue if you're trying to see stuff in sandbox mode.
What Astrolucidity said!
For clarity, I'm like 2/3ds of the way done with the actual assembly of the first of the 2 zones that I'm adding in the next update; and a good chunk of the time up to this point was working on code stuff. My current goal is to have the next update around late June or early July, which so far seems doable, though if it ends up taking a bit longer the backup plan is to have it out as a Vore Day thing.
Fantastic project, a V1 that looks already fantastic. the gameplay by itself already feels good, gravity feels good, the little knockback seems good enough, pace of animation are perfect to me.
I have a few suggestions:
• charged attacks could add range and empower the attack (+attack visual & audio feedback when hitting enemies)
• health indication on enemy (maybe a slight sprite change indicating their exhaustion?) & I'm always a fan of having the vanquished enemies on the floor.
• having more abilities like a dash or a parry that could be mixed with a crouching feature (crouch slide?).
• multiple type attacks per enemies for multiple catch animation type would be so cool. (maybe one animation for contact grab and one for ability grab?) like the wolf that grabs you because she is at your range vs she pins you after a dash.
enemies ideas:
• fat lazy frog. ok so it's a fat frog and she doesn't move a lot but have a tongue that goes pretty far if she sees you... maybe she takes naps but opens her eyes once in a while or when you splash water around/ jump/etc.
• chameleon thing: a chameleon type creature (I'm imagining a kind of dark lizard thing with a very slick, tacticool design! maybe with magical glows like neon strips), that phases when spotting you only to reappear above you, and if you don't move fast enough, slurp, you're gone, only to reappear as a puddle of cum. a fun detail could be that this creature turns transparent under stimulus, and cant control themselves properly as it digest you.
I might come back again and suggest more things. thank you so much for sharing your game <3 please keep it up!!!
I almost agree, I never seen a dissatisfying parry in a game unless it's too free to succeed. ¯\_(ツ)_/ ¯ really depends on what Pthalo decides for future enemies as dodges/parries only fit the most paced action gameplays. depends on the reward for success and backlash for missing are too. I trust Pthalo can make good decisions
Extremely solid ideas! I might not go for those enemy designs specifically, but I like the gameplay perspective behind them, especially the stealth one. A further charged version of the strong attack is currently planned (technically sort of implemented, but there's no way to obtain it outside of the debug menu) Health indication would potentially be a good idea, though I'd probably just end up with like enemy health bars to save animation time. An i-frame dash is planned as a reward upgrade for an optional boss, and while parries aren't a consistent thing on the player end, some enemies have certain attacks that can be be interrupted by a player attack to put them in a stunned state briefly (the warden already does this in 0.1, though it's not made clear, which is something that's been changed in 0.2)
What you are describing, enemy attacks that can be interrupted by a player attack, is known as clashing, with outright interrupting an enemy's attack and getting special rewards for it is known as a counter hit. It's significantly better than an I-frame dodge or parry, though a I-frame dodge, especially when balanced properly, is always going to be better than a parry.
The fact save points are basically nonexistent, separated by huge lengths of stage populated by really, really annoying enemies that are more frustrating than fun to fight kills the game for me.
The save points being basically from Africa to New Zealand apart wouldn't be so much of a problem if the breakable items in the game actually dropped healing consistently. For some inexplicable reason, they're randomized.
Plus the player's intangibility being the same length as the enemy, AND there's no indication on a majority of the enemies that they're intangible is also extremely frustrating. I've found myself in constant grab loops over and over because of this, and it's really, really annoying.
Couple that with the fact your attack now locks you in for an annoyingly long time, and also forces you to step forward with each swing, with enemies that are either way too tanky, come at you from odd angles or have absolutely no indication of what their going to do next, and the game just feels like crap to play because you get reset back to Africa when you're two steps from New Zealand because of one of several of the jank things above.
Admittedly a lot of the reason for this is because people were complaining that the difficulty was far too easy on the first release, though I think I may have overdone the attack exit time delay a bit in an effort to slow down player DPS to a sluggish amount while the enemy behavior in the later areas more matches the old attack speed. I'm going to put out a balance patch shortly, and a more bugfix centered patch after a week or two once I've gathered bug reports.
The game is fun to play, don't get me wrong. In its current state there are frustrating mechanics, but nothing that can't be fixed. In my opinion to fix the issues I've been having:
1. Give the player intangibility after escaping a grapple, not the enemy. This will help prevent re-grab loops, and give the player a window to fix their mistake, especially against tanky enemies, or enemies who attack from odd angles. Oh, and be sure to switch the submit button to a different button than "attack" nothing feels worse than accidentally getting grabbed mid swing, when you're just about to attack again, and accidentally deleting yourself at full health with no checkpoint nearby.
2. To adjust player DPS, make it so that your attacks are a three-swing cycle, rather than an infinite loop of A→B→A→B. I've noticed you have a windup swing to deal double damage after a brief charge. Have that as part of the three-swing cycle. A→B→C! This would also leave the player open briefly, fixing the DPS problem. They can also choose to only swing twice and back off. You can still have the charged up power swing, letting players wind up to use it right away, and have powerups tied to only that type of power swing.
3. HP drops. Make canisters and breakables 100% drop for HP pickups, but have the full heals randomized. If you want to keep the random drops, make it a default that enemies drop HP unreliably.
4. Have a split between minor and major checkpoints. Ones that fully heal you, and another that just saves your progress, and current health without healing. That way you can have those midway through difficult gauntlets. It isn't about the difficulty of dealing with individual enemies, its the iteration time in doing so. Having to fight through a gauntlet after gauntlet just to get back to where you were feelsbadman :(
5. The mage enemies that you include need to have a telegraph of their spell. I know you have the icon of their spell they're casting show up when they cast, but the indicator of their spell is useless if it shows up at the same time their actual spell does. An enemy that causes that much disruption should go Telegraph → Delay → Execute. Plus, to make them less of a problem, have it so only one of those "fields" can be active at a time, but the duration of each field is shorter. This gives a gap for the player to approach, and react to the spells as they come out.
Gameplay critique out of the way, now for suggestions:
I love the fact you include melty digestion in the preferences, it's probably one of my all-time favorite kinks. If there's any way you could draw out the animation of her melting, it'd be even better. Right now it feels a bit too quick. If anything, it should go through multiple stages of the stomach window closing in, then opening up again, her getting progressively more melty, repeat a few times, before dissolving completely. This, of course, is skipped entirely if someone turns off the preference.
I feel like it might be a good idea to move the first tanuki gaurding the lever slightly to the right so that the lever is visible, otherwise some players might be low on health and choose not to fight thus missing out on the shortcut.
Also (I'm aware it's probrably a glitch but) it would be kinda nice if the thing where you could jump just before charging an attack to air strafe and get some additional movement while charging was added back since I felt like it made the combat a bit more interesting 👉👈 (ofc it's fair enough if that's not the direction you want to go)
Also also it might be a good idea to require a charged attack to parry the tanukis (or at least reduce the parry window) since currently it's possible to just hit them repeatedly and can't attack back most of the time.
Super solid suggestions all around; The charge attack to parry in particular is potentially a really good solution to the main issue that's making combat balance so difficult to figure out right now. I wouldn't have to arbitrarily slow regular attacks, but it also wouldn't be a spam-to-win thing if they can just smack you if you're not paying attention (that plus like a stamina system might be good). I'd probably have to lower the charge time somewhat, but I can also just slightly lower the damage along with it. I actually wasn't aware that you could do a charge jump for extra movement previously, but I'll look into adding that in as well. (might be a little hacky for the balance patch, but I'll try and make that more of a deliberate thing when I do the ground up attack system rework for the next update.)
1: some way to rebind controls would be nice, something about the current control scheme just feels wrong to me personally
2: I understand why you put all the 'niche' vore types in one option, but I would appreciate some sort of additional option to enable/disable each different type independently (such as, for my personal preference, enabling absorption and tail vore but disabling bladder vore)
Not something I'd expect to get added, but with that one npc who is on the table nearby the beginning; could there ever possibly be a vore scene for jumping on them too much or interacting with them too much? I would get it if not, but it would be cool to see you get oral vored because you jumped on them too much and upset them or unbirthed because of them becoming to in need to unbirth you(or optionally, you willingly could crawl in) and so on. I'd get if you wouldn't, as this would require alot of sprite making and new interactions just for a secret scene with an npc. but it would be cool.
Hiya! I wanted to say, this project looks VERY promising so far - it's unpolished, but the art is gorgeous and you seem to have a strong idea of where you want to go with the game.
I want to try and avoid giving feedback that I've seen so far, or questions i've seen asked/answered, so:
I think that's all I have to say for now. I'm not holding my breath just in case, but this project looks very feasible and very promising, and I'm looking forward to see where it goes. Wishing you luck!!
Hey, no idea if this has already been suggested or if you said something about it, but what's your opinion on shrinking? Like a higher tier mage making you smaller, which makes dodging harder and gives them (and maybe even local enemies) have a different animation for it? It might be too much work or just not to your taste but it's the kind of stuff I personally love in that kind of games
Hey! So I discovered this game last week, and found it really interesting, so I looked more into your devlog, you said you aim to have about 60+ enemies, aren't you worried you might find it complicated in the later development to find new defeat animations? Other than that this game is looking good so far!
Hello :3 to everyone and especially to PThalo ^^ I really loved your game, it's glorious, I love it ^^ only for me XD it bugs or well it gets stuck when I get to the next phase, I mean XD after defeating the bear boss XD but from there everything is great :3 I love it and hey, you know, couldn't you add vaporeon? Or some pokemon and also I would like the character we use to be able to devour those it has defeated if you understand me? I would like to be able to do that, I mean to regenerate life, I say please ^^ could you do that :3
So a suggestion I had was based around certain death animations interacting with multiple enemies. For example if the corrupted male CV's Graphite and a lesser mage is nearby, she has a chance to join in by sucking off or having the male screw her in order to receive you. Obviously other interactions could be possible with enemies but its just the one I wanted to suggest.
I would suggest allowing digestion sounds to be turned off while still allowing Graphite to be digested instead of one being required for the other. I don't see the harm in allowing a player to see Graphite getting digested without hearing the noise if some players happen to find the noise to be unpleasant. Sometimes I just want to hear the sloshing and blooping without the strained groaning.