(Future Fragments) The Great Survey Responses Post; Part 3 (Patreon)

So here's part 3 of our series! Check Part 2 before this post if you're wondering what's going on or what this series is about.

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Backer: "how about using the fragments for some sort of buffs or abilities"

Our Response: For gameplay reasons, we likely won't do this; there's already 50 powerups that'll be in the game as well as the Boss Abilities/Shots, so having the Fragments add something onthat would feel strong enough to match the power of the Fragments while not being unbalanced (or redundant) copmared to everything I just mentioned. 

For lore reasons, Talia has no idea how to even use them, and it's not like they do anything when they're separate pieces, anyways. Put together, though...

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Backer: "i would love some more backstory on female Grunts, I've been intreagued ever since i read about their special armor in one of the databanks"

Our Response: We might have a few more pieces here or there, but being that the female and male Grunts are in different facilities, there's not too much written about them in this particular facility (due to lack of crossing interaction per the WORM's policies). 

There is at least two or three NPCs planned though that will be female grunts in male armor, so keep an eye out for them!

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Backer: "I couldn't answer many of your questions. I was a late backer and was told I would get a demo, expecting one or more levels that you had finished within the last year but instead I got the latest 'demo', the final level with enemies who don't interact/attack and no objective. I would love to give some feedback about the levels and enemies you asked about. How do I get access to these levels?"

Our Response: All of the demos can be accessed on the "featured tag" on the left of the activity feed if you're in the $5 tier or above; for more on that, see this post https://www.patreon.com/posts/future-fragments-25312021 

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Backer: "Just wish the level creator wasn't so expensive so I could mess around with the game mechanics :("

Our Response: We do have plans to sell it during launch somehow (likely at a discount since development will be finished), but unfortunately the cost needs to be that high as you get all updates to it for free afterwards, so it's effectively like getting demos indefinitely without having to ever pledge again (plus all the fixes and updates and such we do for the editor backers specifically that we won't even use in our own maps). Sorry about that! 

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Backer: "The engine is still sloppy, has low framerate"

Our Response: The framerate is intentional; the game itself can run at well over 700 FPS even with a lot of enemies on screen, but we intentionally lock it to 30 FPS for two reasons. The first is aesthetics; we just prefer the 30 FPS look, having grown used to it with platformers that we grew up with. 

The second is work amounts; if the game were at 60 FPS, to make the game not look like the animations are stuttering, Triangulate would need to double the frames he does for every animation. This would basically double his workload, making the game take far longer to be completed.

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Backer: "viewing the text log history"

Our Response: We have plans to allow the player to re-watch cutscenes whenever they'd like, but we'll also be adding in a feature that lets you re-read the text in the current cutscene you're on. 

We also have plans for a "glossary" feature for terms and phrases unique to the world of Future Fragments, but that'll be something we'll talk about in a later post.

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Backer: "Skip full scene button for mini scenes, Animation filter option or way to turn off types of animations you do or do not want to see."

Our Response: This is unfortunately something we can't do, because many cutscenes have things where characters move around on the map; there also are choices you have to do which are based on those movements (and some cutscenes are even time-based), so having a skip button would cause major glitches we wouldn't be able to plan for even with many months of preparation. 

The same goes for the animation filter; trying to catalogue every single time an animation shows up and all the variations for it and then put a filter or a block for each of those would just be too time-consuming for a feature that few would likely use.

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Backer: "Maybe you could make her masturbate to gain some kind of temporary hit points"

Our Response: We don't have any plans to do this simply because of both gameplay balance/flow (having the player stop and heal is why we removed healing over time), and because it doesn't really make any sense to have you heal from sex if having sex is what drains your "arousal meter health bar" too. :P

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Backer: "Button configuration."

Our Response: You can do this in all demos from v0.27F onwards just by going to the options menu (press ESC at any time to access it) and reconfiguring them there; you can also use a controller, too!

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Backer: "An enemy with an attack that would remove(or disable until removed) one or more powerups Talia has on at the time"

Our Response: Vie does this in her boss fight, and we have plans for her to do it in more ways too; we only wanted to use it for that fight though as we feel disabling powerups is unfun to the player, and not something we'd want to use too often. 

Boss fights are the only other instance where we may nullify or disable some powerups due to them completely breaking the fight, but we'll see about that after some more testing.

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Backer: "Animating the cg sex scenes, a la Something Unlimited."

Our Response: Unfortunately we can't do this because of our animation/art style; with games like Something Unlimited, which runs in Unity (to my knowledge), and other similar engines like it, the artists for those games create a "skeleton" for their characters and "rig" them to those skeletons. 

Then, when they want to say, animate a handjob, they can just move the hand up and down using the skeleton (It's more complex than this, I'm not making light of it as this still definitely takes a lot of skill to make it look good). 

This allows them to make many animations using the same character model in similar poses by re-using the "skeleton" for those similar poses. 

With our game, Triangulate hand-animates everything, so if we wanted something to be animated, he would have to redraw parts of the picture frame by frame, taking much, much longer; it wouldn't be feasible with the number of CGs we have in the game.

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Backer: "Impregnation"

Our Response: We have nothing against games that have impregnation fetishes, but we don't have it in our game because it's a bit of an uncomfortable fetish for some given that your character disintegrates themselves to respawn, and the implications of that if they were to be pregnant. 

Additionally, respawning returns you back to how you were when you got on the respawn pad, so that would either erase the pregnancy or would have again implications that a lot of people would be disturbed by. 

(Plus, it would be hard to hand-wave given that Talia is literally a different form of human being that's incompatible biologically with the Homo Cumulatus of the future.)

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Backer: "Jumps need to be smoother/more accurate"

Our Response: Going back to the old school influences mentioned up above, we're having Talia move around much like how the physics are in a Megaman game; that said, due to the lack of acceleration in her movement/jumps and the lack of inertia in her movement, you should be able to do fairly precise jumps once you get used to it by just tapping the movement keys mid jump and getting used to the increments you move in. 

Faye's game should be more fluid however due to her particular mechanics, so you might enjoy that more once we get that going after Future Fragments is done :)

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Backer: "Another feature is perhaps like a one-shot level where you play as faye or vie, faye in particular, because she really doesn't have much character outside of "Fack you Imma get the stuff first!" and we have no idea how she fights."

Our Response: We don't have any plans for this, but we do of course have Faye's game coming after we're done with Talia's game! You'll be able to get a great idea of Faye's character in that game as well as a lot of attacks and moves from her.

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Backer: "Would it be possible to release a demo with all the current enemies and game over scenes?"

Our Response: We don't have anything like that yet because enemies are only compatible with the levels they were designed for, for now; we'll have something like that closer to launch, though.

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Backer: "If Talia loses to Vie I personally think Vie should torture Talia in a sexy way to try and get her to give up the Fragments."

Our Response: There's nothing planned for this similar to the reasons for the masturbation above (mainly plot-wise, because it would be heavily out of character for Vie to do this as she has attraction to no one but Seeber; she also knows Talia wouldn't give up the Fragments due to this as that kind of stuff doesn't really bother her.)

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That's it for now; we'll have another post though this weekend about some stuff you may find interesting, namely the Arousal System and the Glossary System, as well as other things we're currently deciding on in the meantime!

Feel free to join the Discord group as usual, too!

https://discord.gg/puXrfSm