"You gain the special cards only when you experience a growth scene." I only got them once at my theoretical level 2 when I reached level 5. I guess there is a bug when there are multiple level ups stacked on top of each other, you don't get the special cards. I got to all 4 growth scenes and never got them again, because I used the cards at levels that were not dedicated to the growth sequence.
Moustached
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A member registered Sep 01, 2021
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I like the new update, especially how it completely overhauls the UI and the little content update on top. Still, I have found some issues:
- This game has a render problem. The sprites flicker and vibrate a lot to adjust with the moving camera
- Enemies still spawn on water and shore tiles. This is even more frequent due to the more distant spawn rates.
- There is no indicator in the UI for a level up. It's easy to miss that you actually leveled up when you kill a lot of enemies on the screen.
- The level up screen and stats are only accessible through key bindings. This is very unintuitive when you already have a hand on the mouse to attack stuff. Let me click on the profile or give me an extra icon to let me level up my character or to open my stats. Same thing goes for the quest log.
- The special cards for the characters skills appear way too low. In 20 levels, I only got them once in the same except order and group as shown in the image. This isn't really random.
Content wise I would wish for a little starting area or starting ruin to mark the starting area better and to connect the world more. I would also really like it, if you would add some trees into the world generation. Taiga or Forest without trees is just different painted grass.
I really appreciate your passion about this project. Changing engines is way harder than one can think as every engine handles things differently and has a different workflow. You should first change the engine when you find one you're comfortable with. Porting the game now will be too much of a chore, except you decide to remade it for a fourth time.
I still expect that the whole Unity situation will get worse and will force you to change, but I do hope it will be after you finished this game.
Oh, that would be nice if you could add me to discord. I will send you a request when I can, I probably don't understand the language of your engine, but having someone to talk about game dev and engine stuff would be really nice for once and maybe I can help you with some stuff.
The thing I was getting at is that texture swaps are apparently really expensive. I was just naming examples to reduce them. And conveyor belts with 2 sprites are much more expensive as you build a lot more of them and are always active than just a building with 6 sprites that are only active when you place items in them.
Oh, ok. I see that the progress bars are just one colored growing rectangles. Why don't you detach it from the building, render it above it and just draw the vertices of the rectangle growing and color it with a shader something like that? That doesn't require any textures. If your engine supports shaders, you can even calculate the position of the colors of the conveyor belts with a bit of math. This would be much more faster then swapping the textures. I see that some sprites are just simple rectangles or lines. Calculating and rendering them yourself is much much faster than using a texture. You should consider that in the next update.
Ah, good to know. Why do you need to swap textures? You have a big spritesheet, so isn't it better to change the image coordinates for each render update of the sprite routine? I'm fairly new to game dev, so I ask because it sounds like you switch the whole image instead of using texture coordinates.
Is there a way to port old worlds to newer versions or does that happen automatically?
Also that's not how zoom levels should render stuff. When I have the largest view, it should be slower than the smallest view, because I'm rendering more stuff.
Other than that, you should test more how many times something renders and what renders exactly. There might be some cases you've missed, if you aren't sure about that.
I found another funny bug: You can't talk to your goddess when you're at 0%. It just says ??? with an empty box. After gaining 4 % and already having a nuclear reactor and on my way to automate basically any item I was finally able to do the tutorial.
Also, the message box system and UI is completely broken. The arrows are always greyed out when you pick a selection, it automatically scrolls to the last message of the conversation and you have to manually go back and the UI doesn't scale with the zoom level.
Performance Critical Bug:
Do not place conveyor belts off grid to filter funnels (leading out of chests).
This will cause the chest to output items infinitely because the range for the check for blocking the funnel (because there is an item in front of them) is smaller than the check to suck nearby items on to the conveyor belt. If you have spots were items coming out of a filter funnel are sucked on a full conveyor belt, fix it immediately.
I had this unnoticed for hours because I thought this was another quirky thing of the game. After a while I noticed how everything was incredibly slow (walking, crafting, conveyor belts) and thought this was because of the amount of items rendered. After finding out these spots (I had two), I had accumulated over 6000 single items on a single tile. This was because the spots were on my fuel line that automatically powers the iron and stone drills. It took me 45 minutes to put back all of the items.
Wait, you made all voices yourself? Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I thought you were just some guy that paid some inexperienced ASMR VAs. With that assessment it's actually not that bad, just needs a lot more training and trying to put more emotion into it. For example Iris sounds very flat like an AI voice. You'll got this someday. :) Just a tip: Build yourself a soundproof VA booth, if you're insecure about your voice acting and just scream. Without confidence, you can't voice act. If you're insecure about asking a male VA, try researching how men can talk deeper so the filter is not so prominent.
The notification happened every time. I got the same strip scene multiple times per week. You could debug it by disabling the condition and to see if it actually shows the notification.
I see you have a lot of ideas about the DDR style mini game. I'm eager to see what things you have planned. And it makes me happy to read your passion. Always remember that incredibly fast gameplay that is easy to execute with one hand (because you know why) and requires no thought is the best when it comes to fetish games. This is one reason why Cowtastic Cafe on Itch is so popular. It's fast, easy and instantly rewarding. Weight Gain games is all about progression and testing the limits and getting motivated because you see how big they grow.
And tbh, I'm a sucker for unrealistically big sizes like making her huge and immobile in the vain of Chub Chomp Chill, if you know this game here on Itch. While it's hard to implement it narratively, you did hint the capacity remover at genesis' shop. But I'm not forcing you into anything :)
With DDR I mean: Instead of ordering 0,1, Q in each line, make three parallel lines and let them flow down simultaneously like a three line guitar hero song. You have to press left for 1, down for Q and right for 0 in the correct moment instead of holding left for 1, doing nothing for Q and holding right for 0. This would not only give the opportunity for faster gameplay, but also for more diverse patterns for each session instead of relying on pythons random number generator. For example, in the current mini game, you can get lucky and do nothing for 5 to 10 seconds, because you get 5 or 6 Qs in a row.
Some other minor things you should maybe look at again:
-> during some chapters Iris stripped multiple times and every time I got the notification that I unlocked the stripping.
-> When it's payday, you get the same text messages from Ember, even when you have to bring it to Celeste. I don't know if that's intended, but some variety in the conversation or wording would be great.
-> The ominous phone voice is absolutely pathetic and hilarious. You should pay a male voice actor with a very deep sultry voice instead. (Btw, I love the voice acting, even when it's audible that they are inexperienced. Initially I thought you used AI voices because of that.)
As a developer it sure is important, but most free content creator get a mental breakdown by the slightest criticism like a chronically online twitter user, which is why people usually don't criticize (or they simply don't know how to). Or they saw the mini game and were like "Oh hell no" and moved on forgetting about your game.
While I'm at it: I loved cowgirl casino 2 the most, because the girl got extremely big. So, don't worry about making her unrealistically big. It just adds to motivation to progress the game.
The thing is: The mini game is slow paced and too tedious. It would be better and more enjoyable to speed it up and overhaul it all together in a DDR style mini game. When you reach chapter 8, you already played it over 70 times and sorting 100 bits in one session feels like a chore.
Decreasing the upgrade prices doesn't help as the debts are still too high. In chapter 7 you have to pay 50K, but only get 7K per day because of the cryptoheist. That means you can only get 56K per week, getting 50cals costs 5K, getting an upgrade 5 to 12K. Chapter 8 has the exact same problem. You should either increase the rewards, decrease the debts or add a new thing to hack.
I see you improve from game to game, but the balancing and made it punishing to pay for anything but the debt. Otherwise it would be an amazing game. I don't care about the story, but even I see that you care about it and write it competently.
(Accidentally clicked delete instead of edit comment, lol)
I initially liked this game, but with each chapter, it becomes more and more boring. The same mini game over and over again, no money to make her grow because the debts are so incredibly high and after chapter 7 doing the mini game 8 times with no reward just so that chapter 8 is exactly the same... Yeah, no. This game is just a simple story game with mindless repetition and the fetish being an afterthought. This is just a complete waste of time.
Using hovering hands, which are incredibly expensive, for intersections and bridges is definitely not the best way. The automation line for brass and light gears is way too big.
Items can't turn when the conveyor belts are adjacent to each other. You have to partially place them on top of each other which is kinda finnicky as too much overlap due to space concerns will not work.
You should specify the default mode in the description, because after testing the other mode, it does indeed work. Maybe the soft mode should be the default mode as its much more common.
Ok, I forgot about the shift hot key for the logic gates.
This game is way too addicting when you finally automate something, I love that, but even getting to this part is extremely hard. I got stuck because I couldn't find any grain, had to travel thousands of pixels just to find it, because the world is so barren.
After I got to automate something, I got some ideas;
1. Add a funnel for intersections. It's kinda messy doing that with logic gates and simple funnels. If you add a filter funnel, it does funnel, but the items stack endlessly when the line comes to a halt if you want to split a single item line.
2. Add an evenly distributor funnel. Splitter stop working when one line is completely occupied. Chests do work if you want to split a line of single items, but they don't fit in tight spaces.
3. Add chests for multiple items. This would allow for easy multi splitting.
4. Add a filter for each splitter path. You can currently only add one filter.
5. Add a fuse funnel. This would act as fusing splitter paths together. It's kinda messy doing that with conveyor belts.
6. Add conveyor belt curves. I don't understand how they aren't even in the game yet.
7. Show the logic gates coordinates when you hover over them.
8. Have different slots for items and fuel for furnace. Stopping the item input just causes too much headache and flow problems.
I don't know Godot, but you should apply some rules for off-screen enemies, like: "Don't render, don't move, don't have AI". Also you should increase the radius of spawning and add a minimum spawning range. I strongly recommend to look what other hack & slay games (PoE, Titan Quest, even Diablo 2) have in their main UI, how they explain stuff in the main UI and basically copy stuff until you can add your own flavor to it.
It's a great progress in such a short time, but still, the gameplay has some problems.
- there are no predefined enemies. The world is empty and can be reduced to "walk in a circle, because the enemies only spawn near you". There are hardly any enemies that spawn outside the view of the character.
- the enemies can spawn next to you and immediately hurt you.
- enemies can sometimes spawn on water.
- with more enemies, you have to do more fighting and since levels are cheap, you easily level up mid fight. The problem is: There is no indicator for the level up in the main UI (where is the experience bar while playing?), there is no sound for the level up and there is no confirmation of what perk to choose. It's extremely easy to level-up and badly skill your character without even noticing.
- the sounds and music balance is off the charts. The music is incredibly quiet while sounds are so loud it hurts your ears. Please use a volume normalization tool like MP3Gain or something like that.
This is what I meant by focusing on enemy spawns and enemy variations. This will entice players to keep playing until they encounter the stronger enemies. I would recommend experimenting with what types of slimes you could add before adding new enemies like goblins or the like. Larger ones, smaller ones, even changes to the color palette would be beneficial as I've seen you need help with sprites. This will be a good base for new enemies.
I must say that it shows that you have improved as a developer. Both with the engine and in the gameplay. It's a neat foundation for later updates. I especially like the sliding as it gives a faster gameplay than most of the RPG Maker games I see around here. And fast gameplay is good gameplay.
The only problem is that this game is still too empty. Not because of the barren landscape, that there is only one enemy type or that it doesn't have an objective yet, but because the enemy spawn rate is way too low. After you reach level 5 or 6, the spawn rate for constant leveling is so slow that you have to run 30 or 45 seconds to find a slime that you can take down in one shot after training strength twice for 10 % of a level.
I would strongly recommend that you should work on keeping the player hooked on grinding to see the growth before you add anything else. A little algorithm for enemy groups or stronger enemy versions would highly benefit the gameplay.
Overall, I'm excited to see how this game will develop as it is much better than your previous game.2. There is a secret button on the menu
3. Yes, they are cumulative. If you go to the achievements, you can see your stats.
4. I only unlocked two. You can find hints here https://itch.io/t/2940214/halp-im-drowning
Just completed this game in one sitting and I'm already hyped for the level 8 girls.
I must say that this game is much more accessible and easier to play than your last game. It really shows how much you have grown as a developer. Although things are still stiff, I can see that you have great potential and I look forward to more great updates and games.
Not just the camera, all the maps need to be reworked for this because when you reach a very high level (5000+), the bosses get so big that you either can't hit them or they are bigger than the arena and you can't see anything.
I basically play the game with the size multiplier turned off because I get kicked out of the caves.