Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #3 [20/02/2023] (Patreon)
Videos
-
dynamic_music_demo.mp4
Downloads
Content
First dev log since the release of v0.1.0, let's see what I've been up to!
Music!
I have some early drafts for the music that will play during battles. For now, each section is about ~1 minute long and they don't loop particularly well... it's very much work-in-progress. And you read that right, each section! I've already thrown them into the game to test out the dynamic music that'll ramp up between 3 versions as the participants gain weight! There's a lil' preview video in the attachments so you can download that and check out how it sounds. (it also features a peek at a fun new card!)
I'm quite happy with how it sounds so far, so now the goal is to actually finish composing them. Listening to a 1 minute loop in a slow-paced strategy game doesn't exactly sound like a great time, after all.
I also started working on some background music to play as you're walking about town, so give that a listen as well!
Exercise! Sick gains!
Some initial design work has started on the weight loss mechanic! For now the basic idea is this: the player will have a stat denoting Fat Burn(... or metabolism? we'll have to workshop that). This stat can range from negative to positive, and it represents the amount of activity the player does to stay in shape. When your Fat Burn is negative, it means you just stuff your face all day, which in turn causes you to gain that much at the end of the day. The opposite is self explanatory. Exercising will allow you to raise this number, meanwhile doing nothing will have it naturally deteriorate over time.
Even if the Fat Burn can go as high as 4.0 (losing 4 Weight per day, as is the plan for now) that's still somewhat slow. There's a bit of a inner conflict I've been having over this: I don't want the player to be able to just clear out all the Weight instantly, as the "permanence" of all the fat is part of what makes it exciting to me. Driving that point home by making the player have to work to lose weight is nice, but it's pretty awful from a fun, gameplay standpoint. It means there will be a lot of downtime between fights when the player is losing weight, so what do we do about that?
Oh no, another game with forced Crafting in it!
Indeed there will be crafting at some point. I'll be scattering a few materials across the town map. These materials will be used to create new cards and perhaps create consumables that temporarily increase your stats or help with weight loss. They will regenerate and spawn on the map over time with some semblance of randomization. Doing things like the aforementioned exercise will also give you some unique material.
I think this is a pretty reasonable to approach to getting new cards, since attaching each card to a single opponent is of course not very viable. I could also give each opponent several potential cards and randomize the drops, but not only do I dislike this in games, it also incentivizes grinding, which is actually quite impossible with the slow burn weight loss design right now. That is in fact one of the reasons I went for this direction, as I don't want any of the fights in the game to feel like "just another generic mob". All of the opponents you've seen so far have names, some semblance of personality or backstory, and are all intended to return at some point. Yes, even Arnold from the intro.
So back to the crafting: that'll be one of the things for you to do while you wait to get back to tip top shape. Unsurprisingly it's not enough. I'll have to come up with more activities to do and even then I'm not sure how fun this "management" aspect of the game will be. The nice part is that this isn't some big game studio where I have to churn something out quickly for the christmas season. Especially with the feedback I can get after every version release, if it doesn't pan out, we can always scrap this whole weight loss mechanic and try something else (but of course fingers crossed it won't come to that.)
That's it for this post!
As you can tell, apart from the music, I've mostly been doing design stuff and not much implementation, as the upcoming features are quite essential to determining whether the core game loop will be actually fun to play. I thought all the work I did on v0.1.0 was enough to shift the game over from a prototype to a fuller game, but unsurprisingly, there turned out to be so many more systems that still need to be done.
Just to make it clear, the upcoming updates won't necessarily include all of the things I discuss in these logs. It'll depend on if I manage to implement and polish them to be meaningful enough to include in the update.
Thank you for reading another monthly log on the game! I haven't said this explicitly yet, so to let you know: any ideas and suggestions are welcome, so feel free to post them in the comments, or you can message me on the many places! They don't even have to be particularly intricate: even something as simple as "that idea seems pretty good/bad" can be helpful!
... I would feel a little bad if I didn't include some eye candy in here, so I'll leave you with this: