Post by J. Collins in Bellagarth's Quest Demo comments

Viewing post in Bellagarth's Quest Demo comments

You know, I honestly went into this thinking "Oh, great, an platformer that proudly promotes its fetish…" Turns out, this game's "fetish" (inflation) is presented in a way that's far more comedic than kinky! I'm sure it's still naughty to some, and there is some legitimately Soft-R content, but to me? It's all played for laughs and very endearing! The art style is absolutely adorable, too. I'm particularly fond of the Froblins and the Huffhop. So cute!

As for the game? The first book / demo alone has a good 4 hours of charming content! This was very fun to get the full 51% on! It plays very well, doesn't get repetitive, and it has a reasonable amount of distractions and collectables. Challenging Difficulty was also pretty reasonable and added a touch of extra spice to my playthrough.

Technical questions about the demo (some spoilers ahead):

What's the story with the mysterious "fileD" save game? There's only three save slots on the menu.
Is there a way to legitimate unlock Vera's caravan sprites in the Gallery?
I think Journal Entries #8 and maybe even #9 are supposed to trigger, as they have to do with the end of Book 1, but they never popped for me.
(I also found Journal Entry #0, which is just a template, and Journal Entries up to like #26. Kinda spoiled the game-to-come for myself… Ah, well.)
What's going on with the "oMedal" flag in the "rmSwamp6_2" stage? I've collected every medal, but these two won't flip. (It doesn't seem to impact anything, though.)
Edit: Never mind, I figured this one out. Chapter 6 doesn't officially have any collectables, but since it shares maps with Chapter 8, the medals in Chapter 6's "Room 2" are inaccessible.
What is the "medalsCollectedSave" flag about? I didn't notice anything change when I flipped them to "true".
On a related note, what about "embersCollectedSave"?
Is it possible to defeat the congratulatory character on Round 62 of Vera's Bigtop Battlers? She's very fast and very tanky.
Edit: Probably not. She's either invincible, or she has far more HP than even 999,999 energy's worth of Goo Traps can handle with this group of figurines.
Is it possible to enable the save-only Easter Eggs flags (like "growl") in-game?
Do you plan to add encryption / redundant checks to the save data files, or will they always be easily editable? (I'm a scamp.)
Edit: Judging by the Easter Eggs in Lilith's Lair's save file? Likely not.

Thank you for all you and your team for putting so much love into this game. It could have just been "another weird game" in the 'net, but it's way better than that! I'm excited to buy the full game!

Burger Kurger13 days ago (1 edit)

Thank you very much! I'm glad to hear you liked it and had a good time!

To answer your questions:

"FileD" is the default fallback save file, since while I'm debugging/playtesting I will instantly spawn into rooms and I don't want to accidentally save over actual active save files when doing that. It's basically a safety net
As of right now there is no way to unlock the Vera sprites, but that's entirely because I just forgot to put in the code to have them unlock! Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
The next journal entry is intended to activate at the very start of the next book, and the following after a specific sequence of events. Sorry ya spoiled it for yourself! Though it's likely some of those things will be tweaked as the game is developed
"medalsCollectedSave" is a holdover from back when you could quit the game in the middle of a level and load your save right back into the level, I got rid of that and made loading your save always put you back at the world map because it just lead to too many potential complications for not much benefit since the levels are all fairly short. embersCollectedSave is the same thing
People have beaten the congratulatory wave by glitching it, but it's not intentional and only leads to a crash, the congratulatory wave is just there to prevent that from happening by forcing you to lose
All of the flags like "growl" are just integers (minor correction, they're floats even though I never use the decimals, curse you dynamically typed GML) that track how far along you are on storyline progress. The "growl" flag for example tracks if you've already talked to Growl or not, which will turn off the cutscene collider box that forces you to talk to him, and will trigger different dialogue with Gnash if you go back and talk to her. Most storyline flags will reset when you re-enter a level so you can play them fresh, but there's some that persist like the one that tracks when you talk to Bambi, hence why they're in the save file
I don't have much desire to protect against save file editing since majority of players won't know how to properly edit them, and those who do could easily find other ways to do so if they really wanted to. The only reason I encrypt the dialogue CSV is I don't want all of the dialogue to be easily accessible to the average player

Thank you for your interest! The game is a true labor of love and I'm very motivated and excited to get the full thing into player's hands!

J. Collins13 days ago (5 edits)

Ya know, I'm really glad you didn't mind the inquiry. I'm one of those types who likes poking around, as you can tell, so I'm really happy that you don't mind people doing just that (as long as they don't spoil everything, anyway).

On the topic of spoilers, though — and specifically flags…

[Secrets spoiler (?) spacer]

—

I noticed two "unlockable" flags that seems persistent, and they're the ones I was actually curious about when I brought the topic up:

"green" (written at game start) - When set to 1, Bellagarth is hued dark green for most of her animations. (Not shared animations, like being grabbed by the Chelnok watchmen.) Also lowers the speed of her voice by 49% (except her "guard broken" squeal).
"fart" (written after 1-1) - When set to 1, Bellagarth occasionally farts when jumping.

I don't recall these flags being relevant anywhere, and they seem to stay set once written into the save, so it feels like they were Easter Eggs.

As for the "growl" flag? That was my mistake. I thought having that enabled modulated Bellagarth's voice.

Once again, thanks for all the answers! Looking forward to the next book!

Burger Kurger12 days ago(+1)

Both of those flags are flipped depending on what you name your save file, one being "Greenagarth" and the other "Bellafart", entirely just as jokes that originated from my patreon discord. There are a few other names as of right now that will have effects, though most of them just change the sound that plays when your new game starts (at the "Onward, brave and noble [playername]" part)

J. Collins12 days ago

I figured it was something like that. Very Shovel Knight-esque!

Once again, thanks for answering my questions! I'm good for now, heh heh. Take care!

itch.io

Viewing post in Bellagarth's Quest Demo comments