Cool to see that you're putting out balance updates already, be interesting to replay this in a few weeks.
With playing a bunch of biopunk/meatpunk genre games lately I have been struck with some minor inspiration so I did a quick rough clatterbleg sketch.
Going to make it an imgur link due to the obvious body horror / NSFW:
This kind of stuff is basically the opposite of my genre (e.g. pretty anime ladies) but it was an interesting exercise.
Ran through the main gameplay, was nice to see how many branches of ending there is. Still got plenty of endings I haven't found which is cool.
Few more thoughts for your ongoing development:
- Since you're following a roguelike style design, maybe remove saving or make it progress only (delete on death). When I got low on HP there were Noita-style decisionss to make about pushing one more room (where the wrong kind of encounter would be fatal), but if you're only risking progress since last save it doesn't feel as significant.
- HP management is good except for hearts, they are too easy to get and work as renewable full heals. Maybe change them to a finite resource (cannot be renewed) which leaves you at 1hp so it's only life insurance? The fountain giving a finite number of full heals per day feels like enough as it is. This plays into a lot because there's less of an incentive to stack AGI to avoid trap damage when you can just face tank it, for example.
- Stacked food buffs are gamebreaking, maybe limit each item to 1 stock or make them non-stacking, Monster Hunter style? All other balance considerations feel secondary when the player might have 500att if they stack food.
Little bug for you too, Natalie's day 5 NPC is still present in her office in the normal ending while her end sequence NPC is present in the staff room.
Managed to get through with the catalyst fight ending and I had a pretty good time -
I think it would be good if there could be a save point added right before the boss fight as I ended up losing my progress on that day - still want to play the other endings.
Otherwise, gameplay wise I think I found:
- Length of the combat being aimed for 2-3 turns makes status effect items a bit harder to get a benefit from - since it will usually take the same number of turns to end a combat
- Energy management might be a bit easy with every buff item also restoring energy, as it's possible to bruteforce all the gold chests etc with them
- Ambush attacks combined with ATT stacking is pretty overpowered as you can generally beat every combat in the first turn with the ninja chainsaw and its rip and tear attack (including the final boss)
Has been entertaining though - I'll be going back for a normal non-endboss playthrough later.
Hey dude, been following your dev on this one off and on so keen to give it a try. I think you might have missed a file out in the game files though - whatever "Haato.png" is meant to be. I had to create a filler file for it in the pictures dir as it was throwing a bunch of error messages otherwise.
Couldn't keep well enough away - the final steps were kind of captivating my mind a bit but I couldn't seem to put them together - hope you don't mind but I ended up file diving/editing to get the blood key. Having gone through the endings now I figured I'd write out some more questions/comments:
I was wondering if the bug with the organ also applied to the song from the nun, as it seems like it wasn't triggering whatever event is associated with getting you the key. Do Re and Mi correspond to the left, middle and right of the organ, correct?
Also, the vending machine - where is the code for this actually provided? I dived this in the end to get the ending there, but I imagine I overlooked it somewhere.
The storybook seemed useless at first, but is it intended to hint to how each ending is achieved? This was my first thought of how to get the code for the vending machine but it ran dry.
In the underground, I interpreted three of the text pieces ("ocean springs forest", "end as we began", "twins apart") to be a start and end of yellow with blue then green in between, which gives you the monster eye. This seems like intended progression, but is this what you intended? I also did not find a use for the other two - something like "shining sun turns the sky blue", and "no red". Are these just red herrings that are meant to be mixed in with the real clues? I guess a full read of this could be "start matches end, with two progressions of yellow->blue and blue->green, where two separate parts of the code are both yellow and none of them are red"?
Earlier when I was still figuring things out I brute forced the Knight Outfit code by accident. Is this shown anywhere in the game? I will admit I did a lot of unnecessary reading-into just about ever set of four colored items I could find which was kind of fun when I realized where you had placed some of these in the town.
It was interesting tracking down the NPC that triggers the night 'betrayal' sequence - and making sense when they appear in that ending and appear to the be the same one with the diary in the mole key room.
There is an NPC that seemingly shows up at the bar in town to talk about the red faceless guide NPC - he isn't in every game, this is random or triggered specifically? Just like the 'flash of memories' as you enter the cave sometimes appearing.
Either way I think I ended up spending far more hours that I ever really expected to on this game and do hope you'll pick it up again in future - it reminds me a lot of a certain genre of DOS adventure games (Defender of Boston, etc) where the mechanics of the game can only be discovered through extensively investigating all aspects of the game to exhaustion, and each step I figured along this process felt rewarding due to it being 'just out of reach' until I managed to put enough things together.
Cool, I think I have hit a wall with figuring out the remaining stuff so I'm going to check out a few of your other games later this week.
I noticed some events like the sequence where you 'break the clock' don't always occur - are these random or do they have specific flags in the game?
I also thought I had figured out that the prisoner outfit triggers the day change, but it doesn't seem to do that this time round - something more to it?
That's cool, I've spent a bit more time on it and I like the way that repeated playthroughs are showing up seemingly innocuous text/sequences in the game as secret codes and so on.
Just wondering - in the monster church I seem to have opened the door by using the organ, but stepping on the tile doesn't do anything - is this intentional?
Happened on your games after re-reading the Princess series you posted on SA forever ago. Been playing this one and got to the point of finding a handful of combinations to enter but haven't figured out all of the paths yet.
Are the endings mentioned in the description for this all achieveable in the demo?
Going off your twitter I guess this is shelved for future development at the moment too?
Cool to see the sense of exploration that was in your writing seems to come across in the your games too.
I played your demo a while ago through the PS1 Demo Disc compilation and was randomly compelled to give it another go today.
Was interesting to give it another playthrough though I think I will need to wait for you to develop it a bit more before I can get a real feel for the gameplay - looking forward to seeing some more. I have a bit of nostalgia for the 32 bit era aesthetic which I think is coming across nicely so far.
I understand from your comments on the Vinesauce stream that the release was a bit hurried to get out in time for the compilation - it'll be interesting to see how things come along given more time for development and polishing in future.
