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imperatenor

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A member registered Jun 10, 2020 · View creator page →

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(2 edits)

Overall, much like v0.1, I really enjoyed v0.2. 

You're a very talented writer and artist and this game is really really hot and fun to play. With that said, there are some areas where the game could be improved - I want to give some constructive feedback to help with future development.

First - the good!

- New characters

Loving the new characters and really enjoying interactions with them. I'm so excited for a potential romance route (or routes, I'll date them all and all at once). Stardew valley but with weight gain? Fuck yes.

- Crafting system

The ability to craft cards and customise your own deck adds a lot more depth to the gameplay. Cannot overstate how much more interesting this made combat.

- New gameplay systems

Adding the gym, running, fishing minigames really switches things up and prevents the game from feeling too same-y. This does contribute a teeeeny bit to systems overload on the first playthrough, but overall is a good change.

- This game is POLISHED

Once more I want to give major kudos to you as a writer, artist, and game designer. This is really high quality! The descriptions are hot, the art is great, the gameplay for the most part is polished and just really fun. This at its core is an interesting card game first and a really hot TF game second - a really difficult balance to strike. Aspiring game devs take notes.

Now, before I get onto the bad, I want to give a big disclaimer. I realise that a lot of my gripes here are because this is a prototype; you wanted to prevent the game from feeling too quick, and wanted to make sure the player is incentivised to explore and do more things outside of go to the restaurant and pig out. With that said, some of the ways you did this ended up feeling too punishing. The game feeling a little bit too grindy as a result.


With that out of the way, here are the things I didn't enjoy as much, with some suggestions on how to fix them.

- Time walls. 

The game is currently full of time walls that artificially slow progression. In a game where the hottest parts and the most interesting gameplay is in sequences where you're being forced to gain weight, having the weight loss process take so long creates an unenjoyable experience. This is made worse due to the month-long deadline to wrap up the current arc - at parts CoG was more tedious time-management sim than fun card game. This was compounded upon by the next issue:

- Lockouts. 

Being locked out of locations in the game for a period of several days is frustrating, even moreso with the day/night system. If I pay for a month at the gym, I want to be able to make use of it, dammit, not be locked out of it for 3 days every time. Giving players more ability to lose weight makes it feel so much less punishing to pig out at the restaurant, or spend a day at the barbershop, or fish. 

- Currency.

It was a little bit unclear (at least to start) how some materials are obtained. They do make sense once you realise how it's done, but having some sort of hint or even just outright explanation would be great. I'd also love to be able to make money more consistently, because the current amount does leave me feeling a little starved (heh) for resources.


Now for some suggestions. I've done my best to keep 'em realistic, so that they can be implemented with very minimal additional effort or changes to the current code.

Generally speaking, I think that gameplay would be much more streamlined if the player could only really do one activity per day, instead of two. Buffing the rewards from activities and adding some sort of resource/charge system (even as just an integer) would also do wonders to make gameplay much more streamlined. So with that in mind:

1) Have the gym be MUCH more impactful for weight loss (potentially doubling or tripling the current rate) but have it take up a whole day

Having the ability to lose weight faster makes it feel much less punishing to explore the town, talk to NPCs, and pig out at the restaurant

2) Make the amount of fish you can catch reliant on an external resource (e.g. bait) that can be stockpiled, instead of requiring daily fishing

This lets the player schedule fishing days at times where they progress the story, but prevents the feeling of being starved for materials or currency

Optionally, 3) Add some way to earn money at the restaurant (e.g. washing dishes), or make pigging out free after a certain point

Pigging out feels doubly punishing because it feels like wasting money that you're going to need later in the month and also locks you out of the battle content for longer. To me, it would be really hot if pigging out was a very tempting option that challenged the player's self restraint in some way or another. Have an NPC take a shine to the player and attempt to feed them, with the promises of paying for their meal.


All in all, I had a great time playing. The issues I encountered were quite minor and I have faith that they were mainly due to trying to motivate players to explore instead of getting stuck on one thing. I'm very excited to see how the game keeps growing and developing.

(2 edits)

Yes, it is. Beat him with a full offence deck focusing on card draw to abuse Raid The Pantry, and adding weight to yourself for more energy. At 20+ weight with some decent luck you can pull your entire deck in a single turn, and at 45+ weight you do it extremely consistently. Need some luck against Cedric to end the fight in 2 turns, but Tom isn't impossible. 

Deck used: 3x Feed, 3x You Want More?, 1x Drink It All Up, 1x Seconds?, 2x Indulgent Stuffing, 1x Mutual Gaining, 1x Menu for Two, 1x Fit Feeder, 1x Lazy Day (can discard after 45+), 1x Raid The Pantry.

You can drop several You Want More? if you want a semi-infinite, but you the burst you gain makes it more difficult to pick up the combo if you get unlucky pulling from GY.

Hey BerylForge, I've found a bug when Atomity and Depilation are applied to Mark at the same time. Mark's description shows him having a beard despite the Depilation transformation having taken place. I checked the passage in SugarCube and noticed the variable checked by the if statements is $p1.hair rather than $p3.hair. Hope this helps!

Had a ton of fun with this game. Played through each of the modes and think debt is my favourite. I know you're working on more content and I'm really excited to see what's coming, and I thought I'd leave a couple of QoL suggestions that shouldn't take too much extra work to implement and make the game feel smoother.

- Allow the player character to enter the "order food" menu at the restaurant. This reduces the amount of menus you need to navigate through once you're working out at the gym or junkyard.

- Add a list of non-consumable shop specials. This lets you see if you're missing anything important - it took me a couple of playthroughs to realise you could get the key and lock.

Looking forward to future updates!

Oh baby. As an avid roguelike and deckbuilder fan this was very fun to play. The theme is also really hot, though I do wish there was some way for the fitness transformations to be represented as well on the character models.

Some gameplay specific suggestions:

- Only drawing a limited amount of cards per turn cuts down on the combos that you're able to play and frontloads most of the transformations into the beginning of the game rather than spacing things out more evenly. 

- This is further compounded by the shuffling mechanic only occuring on turn end rather than upon reaching an empty deck, because it means that on some turns you have to play more slowly in order to get the full potential of drawing cards.

- The maximum hand size is also a factor here. 7 is quite small (compared to Slay the Spire's 10, for example) and cuts down on a lot of potential card draw strategies, especially in combination with the shuffling mechanic. Rather than being able to set up a combo with Drink It All Up following a massive card draw (say using Body Positivity at 40 weight to turn the tables on your opponent), the card is limited at a conditional +3 and takes a significant effort to set up, which kinda sucks for a card that costs energy. 

Overall this was super fun and really well done for a prototype, and it definitely achieves the goal of being a hot transformation game. It just doesn't quite feel like a fluid card game yet.

Hi Sombreve, as someone currently working in design you are absolutely correct. You continue iterating and gathering feedback to fix pain points and emphasise the game's unique features. You're doing great work. 

Hi Sombreve,

Wanted to give some feedback and suggestions!

Due to the way that damage is calculated at the moment, it becomes really frustrating to use the different sigils. Beginning a fight with 4 sigils of Growth/Vitality  and then layering 8 sigils of Pain makes no difference to the strength of the "initial hit", which Growth/Vitality seem to calculate their values off of. So even with a final hit of 300+ damage you can still get trivial healing/growth values. 

This results in the Sigil of Vitality being terrible for either burst or sustained healing since it's incredibly RNG dependent, and makes Growth feel terrible to use in actual fights unless you're grinding on super weak enemies that don't hurt you. It's less the feeling of suddenly growing bigger and overpowering someone that was larger than you only moments before, and more the redrawing cards over and over so that you can stack 5 perception -> 8 pain -> 4 growth and then get an insane boost when it crits for high damage.

The "infinite" actions Focus now offers (after some setup) is super busted in tandem with Codex's Passion. This has now become an immensely powerful healing tool at maximum lust given with good play you can sustain 60hp heals every turn - this becomes incredibly consistent with the new corruption moves and you can still produce crazy high damage numbers without having an attack in your move slots by amplifying Stomp or Deluge of Seed. This also trivialises stamina - you don't care about stamina regen at all when you regularly play 20+ Focus/Sigil cards before you even make your first attack.

Because Focus now grants an action slot, the level up ability that grants action slots is now horrendously weak. 

Finally I've noticed 2 issues that seem to happen recurringly. Corrupted strength stacks don't reset between battles sometimes, and Focused stacks don't reset between battles sometimes. This seems to happen intermittently. Maybe the flag to reset them is only targeting one at a time?

I also have a pretty big suggestion:

Separate "Sigil" builds from "All Out Attack" builds.

Right now Sigil of Vitality doesn't seem to vibe with the sigil playstyle. The idea is to stack multiple sigils into one enormously strong attack, but if you want to use Sigil of Vitality you have to interrupt your stacking process whenever your life goes low. Which is often.

If you're playing a Sigil focused build then your best bet is always Codex's Passion, since the act of stacking sigils heals you instead of attacking. It makes it so you're able to stack sigils indefinitely instead of interrupting yourself over and over or risk death. 

The strength of sigils means that despite having multiple attacks in the game you're always encouraged to only have 1 attacking move in your deck, so that you get maximum Focus and Sigil cards to use. You only really need to attack once every 5+ turns after all.

Rather than make sigils less powerful, I'd argue that the best bet is to show regular attacks some love. Examples:

- Have an ability that scales on using multiple attacks in a single turn, making them exponentially stronger the more you hit. First attack does 1x damage, second 1.5, third 2.25, and so on. This would be nuts when combined with sigil stacking, so you could make it only affect attacks that hit without being amplified by sigils.

- Change sigil of vitality so that you use it as you hit an enemy, instead of stacking it before you hit.  Maybe have it scale off of the total damage of attacks that have been used in that same turn and that turn alone. This would let builds that use multiple attacks still get big heals, and would mean sigil stacking builds have to lock in to using Codex's Passion for sustained heals if they don't want to use attacks. 

Last thing I want to say is that I love the corruption-locked moves, and I would love if 0-corruption builds were also able to get certain moves at certain levels. Maybe through talking to Abel?

Love the game. Keep it up.

Hi Beryl. Been playing this game since approx version 0.4.0 and have been obsessively keeping track of updates. You've turned what could have been an extremely repetitive TF lootbox into a high stakes contest of wit and skill. Unlike some other TF games it's pretty difficult, too! I admit that the first couple playthroughs I had to resort to savescumming to figure out how to get some endings without being transformed in ways I didn't want - which is exactly what the game is designed to do to all the characters playing it.

This has been suggested before, and I know it's on your to-do list, but I'd still like to echo my support for the Experience or some sort of age progression transformation. Could create some sort of paired mental transformations to go with it, e.g. Longanimity, making the characters inwardly more mentally mature, struggling to use technology, more stoic and grumpier.

Another suggestion would be a physical transformation for conventional attractiveness, and with it a mental transformation of vanity or narcissism, e.g. Majesty for sharper jawlines, striking features, statuesque beauty; and Ostentation for an obsession with the current physical form of the character, making them more resistant to change and reacting much more strongly to any physical transformation but very quickly becoming used to their new form and becoming self-obsessed once more.

Finally to round out the list, would love some sort of himbo combination with Fatuity + Muscle + another transformation. Dumb, good natured, buff, horny. Need I say more.

I write on the GSS as imperatenor. Would love to contribute some writing for endings or transformation sequences if you feel my style is appropriate!