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Pawperty Damage

Smash, kick, stomp and chomp your way through a fully destructible city! Go to town in this cathartic action sandbox. · By Dare Looks

Lots of Great Details, but...

A topic by Kemui52 created Jun 06, 2023 Views: 2,619 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Overall, I'd say this game has a lot of great things going for it, but its current state misses something very important for my very specific preferences. Basically, I want to walk around and trample buildings, and that's not possible at any size less than maximum (and that's way too big). It's a real shame, too, because the general feel of the game is amazing and it gets a lot of details right, but the way things are I can only enjoy stomping cars and trees, which is less than half the expected gameplay.

I'm gonna list a whole swath of things beyond that, though, and I don't expect everything to be addressed, but I do want to gather up all the thoughts I have that I feel are worth sharing. I hope it's not too much at once.

Things That Bother Me:

Buildings can block you all the way up to 1000ft tall, even as they're collapsing. This is the biggest flaw in my eyes and ruins a lot of fun I might have been having. At the very least, buildings really need to lose all collision the instant it loses all its health. I would really love the way building destruction looks, too, if they stopped blocking my movement in some way.

Going in hand with that biggest flaw, there's no way to set the Damage Scale high enough to trample buildings at "small" sizes. According to my preferences, no building should survive any kind of damage at around 175ft. Similarly, I feel no tree or pole should survive at 50ft. It seems like a scale of 1000 would do the trick, but maybe it'd be better just having a one-hit kills checkbox.

The trample damage radius is generally too small and I frequently see buildings take no damage for a whole step. I've seen this happen at any size, especially when nudging against a building at an angle. But, I've also seen buildings not take damage because the foot was too far in front of the character while the building still halted movement directly below them.

Collision with trees and poles is too precise. It's rather difficult to stomp a specific tree since trample damage is handled per-step even though you can see the character's body go right through the object. Maybe there could be a short "sub-step" that happens between each real step to catch any stragglers? Or, maybe just have poles and buildings get damaged on contact while walking; cars work fine with the per-step system as is, but everything else kinda doesn't.

Little Things I Suggest:

I'd appreciate an option to adjust sound travel distance so I can hear the destruction more clearly. Even at a few hundred feet tall, things start to get muffled fast.

You can't pick up cars after around 200ft. This means your growth options get fewer and eventually impossible when set to Eating mode.

It'd be nice if we could disable VIPs or adjust their frequency in Sandbox and Custom modes. The sound is really loud compared to the rest of the sounds, and sometimes I don't want to see those pop-ups while still wanting to see the destruction costs.

Chromatic Aberration should be a regular graphics option. I don't mind it here, but I hear other people do a lot. Actually, a number of Photo mode settings could be full settings. Camera height, depth of field, bloom, vignette... I'd have made those regular game options.

Could there perhaps be a Photo camera type that follows the character, but allows free camera placement and rotation? This could allow for things like a low-angle view, a top-down view, a camera on the shoulder, or a pretend first-person view.

That pose the character enters after attacking? It'd be cool to have a button to toggle that in the Sandbox modes.

Shadows have a maximum distance, which doesn't look very good in a growth game. If possible, they should keep going on at a lower resolution, or maybe an advanced option could increase the distance further. Otherwise, the shadows look very nice and have good smoothing.

I was a little disappointed I couldn't go out of the city and stomp the farms. Not a big deal, but, heh... Aw...

Maybe everyone can get a shirtless outfit? Hahaha, just kidding! Unless...?

Things I Really Like:

Tree destruction looks beautiful. They collapse in just the right way at just the right moment!

The screen shake scales really satisfyingly and I greatly enjoy it. The character speed scales nice, as well; never feels too fast, never feels too slow.

I very much like how tame the physics have been. I've always believed controlled destruction works better than fully-simulated destruction, and this game exemplifies that very well.

I wasn't crazy about the style of car-crushing in previews, but it feels a lot better when I'm the one stomping car after car. Excellent work there.

Last, but not least... I loooooooove eating cars!!!


So, yeah. There's a lot here to like, but I'm missing out on a lot due to the building thing, so I hope that can be addressed. Thank you for the game regardless, though. I can't say I wasted my money.

Developer

Thanks for the detailed feedback—definitely a few things in here I can look into—just can't make any promises, I'm afraid!

Looking how increasing the damage scales goes should be fairly simple, for example. Otherwise, I could always add cheats for some of the things I can't fit in the game options, hah

(2 edits)

Hi, there. I tried the game out again since the last updates, so I figured I'd comment on the building collision stuff. In short, it doesn't alleviate much of the issues. I know I said "at the least", but it seems I misunderstood how much they block you before even being destroyed. The character still gets blocked at very large sizes and frequently walks in place, unable to reach the very building that's in the way. I'd say there needs to be some size threshold that prevents building collision entirely, but I don't know how much work you want to put into this kind of request on top of everything else you're doing. Might be easier to make no collision a cheat option, if you're planning those.

(Uh oh, l made the thread look weird and disorganized)

Developer

There are (tiered) size thresholds for building collisions; buildings getting in the way is by design, generally, but a cheat to turn of collisions all together could be an option

I did notice such a thing at the maximum size, but that was such an extreme condition I had thought it was happening by accident. So as far as I can tell, it effectively doesn't come into play, meanwhile as early as 200ft the character's punches start missing buildings. And as I test the collision tier thing now, I see it starts at around 900ft for the lowest tier of building. Ultimately, I think the gap there is too large. Game design-wise, I'd bring the thresholds a little closer to the 200ft size where punches miss at (compromise at 500ft?). Personally-wise, I'd just be happy with the cheat option.

On a bug reporting note, I noticed during testing that the police station can still block at max size. I can't tell if it's a certain side, certain damage model, or what, but it's certainly the police station.

I also noticed the character's collision is different between walking and standing. You can walk into and be blocked by a building, but if you stop walking you'll get closer to it. Hm, this is tricky to describe. Basically, the walking collision is bigger than the standing collision, which is an odd thing to see.

Hi, me again. Congrats on your move to the big city. Already been a year, huh?

I don't wanna be a bother, so I just wanna quickly say my previous concerns are still in play and ask which ones you have plans to look into, if any. I feel a little pretentious asking that, but I'm just a weirdo who likes having closure to these things. Whether it's anything or nothing, I'm fine with whatever.

Thanks for the game and continued updates!

Developer

Heya!

No worries! And it's been an incremental thing; stuff like the different collision during walking and standing is slightly better than before, Atro City has more tall buildings, and characters also stop colliding with smaller buildings faster than before.

So there isn't going to change to much still on those fronts, realistically, I think; in terms of gameplay it feels acceptable to me—although balancing for the new city is going to change still.

Also there is a cheat to disable all character-building collision: I'm out of town at the moment, but iirc it's "dontstopmenow"

Ah, so you did implement cheat codes! All the way back in 1.1? Ahhhh, I see, announced it on the Patreon. Fair enough, I only keep up with this game on Steam announcements. I don't see a Steam guide for the cheats, maybe I'll make one if I can find where they are.

After reading over my original post, I see more things were addressed than I gave you credit for. My apologies for any of that. I guess the only things left bugging me are the damage radius for walking around being too precise and the inability to eat stuff after a certain height. None of that's too pressing, though.

Thanks again, for the game and for putting up with me!

Thank you for the consideration and reply. Best of luck to you.

(Oh yeah, l also think it important to compliment the game's performance. I tried out a few new games this week and it reminded me how significant it is when a game looks great and runs superbly)