Post by AnunnakiGames in New Pred in Town comments

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You hit the Lavender nail on the head there, haha. Her natural lack of confidence (despite her natural competence) is only amplified by her... unusual circumstances. No spoilers in case you haven't played her story scenes! And yeah, I definitely did my best to make characters' decks match their personalities - both at the start, and over the eventual course of their character arcs. Like all the Lyons Cubs, Lavender can become terrifying by the end of the year, haha!

Thanks for the bug reports, these were really helpful - a couple of Retain bugs have already been fixed in the dev build, which argues that I should probably move up the next public release so they don't keep hitting users.

I definitely appreciate your diligence in tracking down the tripling issue, which is very real and still present in the dev build. The simple explanation is that I forgot to include a conditional statement so when a character's AI is evaluating playing a Super Strike/Struggle/Squeeze/Massage card, it'll actually trigger that effect. Boneheaded mistake on my part, haha.

Still trying to figure out the miscellaneous calculations - would take some effort to add a "Combat Log" feature showing the nitty-gritty details of how everything was calculated, but as the game grows more complex it might be worthwhile.

ConstantErasing38 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Finally managed to track down another bug I had gotten a while ago but hadn't seen recently. It's a bug that causes attempts to save to instead load the file. First time I got it I thought maybe I was in the wrong tab, but no. Happened after getting a bug that prevented me from playing cards and reloading a previous save; subsequent save attempts just triggered a load. https://pastebin.com/hkafZvSY

Also managed to remember a couple cards that display bits of incorrect info: Let Two Loose shows the oxygen released number as scaling with grip, even though it's unaffected. And Critical Strike shows as a "strike" on the card despite acting as a "super strike" (and showing the description for super strike when mousing over the card). And Core Strength's stretch scaling also doesn't update the numbers on stretches so I'm not too sure, but it might also be bugged. It feels like subsequent stretches are getting a lot more than 1/4 of the previous one (had one 2 cost stretch nearly double in damage over the displayed value when being used after a 1 cost stretch and it was hitting into restraint so shouldn't have had anything to do with nausea multipliers or anything). Oh, and I noticed that Apex Tummy Rub is a super while Apex Hug isn't and wondered if that was intentional or not.

At some point a detailed combat log would be quite helpful, both for keeping track of battles and testing how niche stuff functions. For example, I've been wondering how stacking multiple copies of Tidal Lock functions, and whether it even does anything or not, and a combat log would make testing it way simpler. And of course would give a way to see what happened any time a number makes you go "huh?"

From just a curiosity standpoint, I'm also wondering about your philosophy towards balancing this game. Story mode especially seems tricky to balance when the number of encounters (and who is encountered) can vary wildly based on players choices, and you don't want it to be too easy for a player to get stuck in an encounter they have little to no chance of winning. My assumption from what is available so far is that there will usually be a way out of a situation, either through a yield or avoiding it all together, but that might come at some kind of narrative cost. Also wondering if there will ever be, and how likely you are to encounter, a situation where you absolutely have to win a fight against a difficult pred to advance. That might be too spoilery, though, so I don't mind if you don't want to answer.

I am also a bit curious about your take on card balance as well. Right now I'm getting the vibe that it's intended for some cards to be a bit weak and some to be pretty strong, and that some strategies are going to be extremely powerful if you can piece them together, and honestly I think it's fine that way. Finding an OP combo is a lot of fun, so long as you have to work to get it. Also, game is still in very early stages so it feels a little pointless to dig too deep into balancing.

That being said, my current feeling is that burp cards in general might be a bit on the weak side. The risk of taking extra damage feels like it outweighs the benefits for a good chunk of the extra damage cards in general. For some I'm assuming that's intentional, like with default Burp and Squeeze 'n Burp, but it feels a bit weird for Rhythm Belch and Displace Air, which have boss preds on the card art and are used by those preds. Overall, preds with burp cards feel weaker because of their use of them (except maybe Madeleine, but she has to base her strategy around it and even then I sometimes feel like they make her weaker, especially Hiccup). Which for someone like Noriko feels completely fitting, but less so for someone like Molly (for endless mode anyways, fits story just fine). It especially doesn't fit Isabel, though, who feels a little too fraudulent on the pred side after getting rekt as the wave 0 boss because she made the mistake of playing Displace Air on a turn when a double powered punch and upgraded kick were incoming. The upcoming AI update might help with that a little, but no matter how good the AI gets I don't think the card is worth using unless you know how the turn is going to play out like a normal mode player. Even then, I feel like burp cards are generally not worth having in your deck unless you have a Madeleine-esque deck or are strong enough that you can afford to run them for funsies.

The other main outlier for me is Controlled Panic, which is probably too good for how easy it is to obtain and play (at least in endless when in normal mode). The fact that its permanent buff stacks, but that panic doesn't stack, is also probably too good but....tbh, I like it being like that. It's hella fun to mad stack focus and see how hard you can overkill your pred. My current record is 32,772 nausea on Jess (tbh, I'm not entirely sure how that happened though. Crush got the tripling bug so she was taking 4x damage, and I had like 100 focus and some weak point and enrage plus numerous multi-hit cards, but even then the damage seems excessive). Would probably be fine to make the upgrade an apex, at least in endless mode, so that it's harder to obtain but we can keep the focus stacking shenanigans.

Overall I think you did a great job with the Cubs decks having a personality to them that in some ways compliments their character. But more than that, I really like it when their deck also in some way contradicts their character (at least on the surface). Lavender of course was a standout, but honestly everyone except Luna does that pretty well.

Isabel has a deck that seems to be built around being hard hitting while also being a bit of a jack-of all trades that is effective in every scenario. It contrasts with her kinda vapid influencer persona, but more interesting to me was that she's notably stronger as prey than predator.

Madeleine on the pred side has a deck that toys with the prey, similar to her persona, but on the prey side she's sheer brute force.

Sophie on the pred side is......yeah. As an aside, the idea of her getting stronger is pretty scary (she's borderline boss difficulty as a pred), but I'm curious how you'll do it, especially since her cards have no upgrades and there's nothing atm that has a notable synergy with pleasure strats. Though I do think, outside of maybe having an unusual number of shakes that make her take extra damage, that prey side Sophie is kinda lackluster. There's something to be said for her prey side being so much weaker than her pred side as a character point, but the deck itself doesn't have as strong of an identity.

Jess talks a big game but her decks lowkey suck ass. On the pred side she has a number of unique cards with some solid potential synergy, but said synergy basically falls apart if her prey just doesn't play shakes or has no distracted. Meanwhile her cards are overall pretty weak and I don't think she has any massages, and isn't good at controlling prey direction. Really gives the impression that she might be all talk and is using aggression to hide her inexperience and insecurities. Meanwhile on the prey side her deck is a bit of a jumbled mess with a few medicore, but kinda mutually exclusive, synergies. I haven't seen all the library scenes yet, but wondering if maybe she was the lamb of the group.

With Luna though most of what I got from her deck, on both sides really, was competence and a couple moon puns. I guess there is a bit of a contrast of her being a lot more aggressive on the pred side, with her high acid level/rapid digestion strats, compared to her easy going personality, but it didn't stand out to me as much. I think it's largely because she is very clearly shown to be a competent pred, and seemingly a strong paragon, so having a more brutal pred strategy doesn't feel out of place. Also the fact that she shares a pressure point strat with Lavender, and that her pred strat isn't as unique as one like Sophie's, doesn't help. She's not bad by any stretch, still has personality to her deck and upgrades, but just compared to the other Cubs I wasn't getting as much from her. Kinda feels like Mia, where there's something unique there but I just don't quite feel like I'm getting it.

A couple quick closing thoughts before I forget them again: 1) Your buffs, especially on pred side, can very easily wind up going behind other bits of the UI, making it impossible to see all the buffs/debuffs you have. Not a huge problem but a little annoying. 2) I'm currently thinking Molly could be demoted from a Dangerous Predator in endless mode to a normal one. I've yet to face her in wave 0, but she doesn't have any particularly scary synergies or overly powerful cards/stats, and her use of cards that increase her nausea damage taken make her kinda easy to deal with. 3) Idk if Allison is also considered a Dangerous Pred or not, but I feel like her appearance rate is similarly low alongside Molly and Sophie. If she is then honestly I think she deserves that status less than Molly. Edit: right after posting this, when I went into a new wave before closing the game, Allison was one of the choices for the first battle. Guess she was just shy, but that timing is wild.

AnunnakiGames37 days ago

Hot damn, wish we got this kind of player feedback at my day job! =P

The load/save bug has been frustratingly elusive. You're not the first player to report it, but you're the first to give a player.log - so definitely thanks for that. Bad news is, I don't see any errors besides the original softlock (which is a known bug I've fixed in my development version - one of the reasons I'm prioritizing a stable public release in June). Did the issue occur in a scene that directly followed an anal scene? Have you encountered it in a session where you didn't run into the softlock bug?

Will definitely look into the wording/mechanics of the cards you mentioned. You're not the only one bothered by the Apex Hug/Apex Tummy Rub asymmetry, haha - at the time I added Apex cards, there were fewer sources of Grip than there are now, but that might warrant a change.

Finding more and more reasons to finally bite the bullet and build that combat log, haha. It'll delay the bugfix update a bit but feels like a good long-term play, in terms of finding more bugs to squash.

Regarding story mode balancing - once Liz has earned the trust of other characters, she can train with them to gain/upgrade certain cards. Basically, investing in relationships rather than rampantly eating people is still a valid strategy - it won't entirely keep up with the power curve of a Liz who leans into predation, but it's close enough to eke out victories when she needs them. Same applies on the prey side. And yeah, most situations can be avoided by a clever word or a humiliating yield, but there will also be timelines that are gated by a particularly difficult fight.

Regarding card balance... Endless Mode is basically my testbed for that, haha. As applies to the deckbuilder genre in general, the goal is to give the player a lot of little pieces that come together to form powerful combos - while managing the risk that you might not draw the card you need on a particular turn. I'm glad it seems to be coming together, even partially, at this point in development!

I agree that Burps in general seem underpowered. Been experimenting with allowing Grip to affect their Oxygen loss, as well as simply cranking down the added vulnerability, or capping the amount of excess Nausea it can cause. Similarly, I'll play around with capping the total amount of Focus that Controlled Panic can generate - so that it'll eventually be worn down and degrade into Panic unless the character has another source of Focus.

Really interesting analysis of the Lyons Cubs' decks, and I agree with most of it. Curious to see how it'll be affected by the devbuild's library scenes - shoot me a DM on Discord (anunnakigames) and I'll add you to the server, your bug reports are worth way more than a $5 SubscribeStar payment. =P

Buff UI overflow, that's been a thorn in my side for a while - think I can roll that into the Combat Log update. Regarding preds marked as "dangerous" - the real issue there is that Liz's starting deck is pretty weak, so even though Molly is a marginal member of that group, she can definitely still nip a run in the bud. Might deal with this by moving Molly back to neutral, reserve "dangerous" for Sydney and Sophie and so on, and add a third category of "starter opponents."

ConstantErasing36 days ago (1 edit)

So my memory isn't perfect but I'm pretty sure the save/load bug in this case basically went down like: complete anal scene>softlock at start of next scene>reload save at start of anal scene and try again (might have quit to title first, can't remember for this one)>softlock on next scene again and quit to title>clear anal scene and try to save only to get loaded. From there I played around a bit with seeing if quickloading then going back would work and eventually just closed the game. I don't remember the details of how it was in the past strongly but I'm pretty confident that at least most of the cases happened after loading a save after encountering some kind of softlock. At the very least I don't specifically remember any cases where I got the save/load bug that didn't happen in close proximity to encountering some kind of bug, but I'm not sure if it was the same bug in each case or even if it was a softlock.

Having high relationships be a way of obtaining cards is smart. I was thinking maybe it'd be tied to money at some point, like you could join the local vore gym as a degen or find someone to give lessons otherwise, but I like the relationship idea more.

Having a limit to the number of focus you gain passively from Controlled Panic seems like a good solution. It'll probably still be a pretty strong card but won't be quite as ridiculous, but I can't deny that I'll miss the silly amounts of damage stacking a ton of them and waiting could enable. For burps, though my gut feeling is that the nausea increase will have to be tuned down for sure. Buffing them with grip is interesting. On the one hand, using a bunch of early grip to quickly deprive the prey of oxygen sounds pretty scary, but on the other it also sounds hard to pull off, especially for the AI, so it'll mostly just be another way for the player to exploit grip strats. I'm not too fond of the idea of capping excess nausea, though, mostly because I think the risk of getting hit really hard is interesting. For balance purposes I could see it being useful just to prevent the AI from screwing themselves over too hard, but from a player perspective exploiting a cocky pred shooting accidently shooting themselves in the foot is fun and satisfying.

A "starter" class of preds sounds like a good idea to me, but I'd like there to be at least a modest chance of the neutral preds appearing in early rounds still. Early challenges can be fun as long as they feel possible, and the only preds that I currently think can be feel basically impossible with the starter deck are Sophie and Lavender. It's also more interesting to have to make decisions about whether you feel like you might be able to take down a tougher pred in the first couple rounds or if you want to go for an easier route at the cost of maybe getting something like a 2 prey encounter as the pred that you are certain to lose. And hell, if you get good enough inspirations off the first round you can even have a pretty good shot at taking out a tough foe in the second. That is, of course, from the perspective of an experienced player, and I can still remember getting rekt a few times in my initial forays into endless mode, but that's part of the fun and it's easy to jump back in after an early loss.

And wow, thanks for the discord offer. I'm really just having fun playing around and reporting on issues I encounter, but I'm glad it was of help. I sent a discord friend request, since I'm not a prolific enough discord user to know if there's a way to DM someone without one. For any future feedback would you prefer I post it here or on discord?

itch.io

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