Cards of Gluttony Dev Log #9 [06/09/2023] (Patreon)

[First off, the minor update, v0.3.1 is now out, so you can let that download while you read through this.]

Alright, I've finally gotten around to writing this up. Since v0.3.0 has been out for a bit, I can now talk a bit more in-depth about everything I've added without worrying about keeping quiet about certain things. This post also refers to a few things added in the 0.3.1 minor update.

You know, I now realize that this post is very long, so buckle up.

The art department

The most time-intensive part of the game is probably all of the art assets it requires, from the many sprites required for all of the characters, to card art, and of course: background art.

I am personally not much of a fan of drawing interiors, and especially with the amount of art that has to be made alongside all of the other work on the game, I am in fact working smart instead of hard. Take a look:

Here's an interesting shot from development. Do you recognize what it is? Probably yes, because the answer is quite literally right below this text...

It's the bakery background used during the Russell plotline! What you just saw above was a simple 3D scene made in Blender, used to lay out the room and various pieces of furniture, as well as setting the perspective. You'll notice it lacks a lot of the detail and props that appear in the illustration, since there's very little reason for me to model something that won't be seen in the final piece.

This isn't actually the first time I've used this workflow. I've made models for the Player's Room, Gordon's Room, Pub, Bar and even the Stout Group badge.

Well... this one wasn't a necessity as much as it was me just messing around and having fun with 3D modelling.

We're already doing balancing changes

Stepping away from the art and looking at the gameplay now: this is the first update that has made changes to some of the cards! There is actually quite an interesting story behind this.

(Some of the cards that received changes.)

Probably the most notable one is all of the ENERGY cards. I've increased the numbers so that you now gain 2 Energy, instead of the old 1. Now, I don't know if anyone even used these cards before... I definitely didn't myself.

However, I would often try to put them in the opponent's decks. I could never it to use them properly... Now a big part of that is probably the AI code, which simply tries to check if the extra energy would allow it to play additional cards it wants. Honestly the entire opponent AI code is a big mess, but I won't bore you with the details.

In retrospect, it turns out the reason they never used them was because... they were just plain bad. Well, I won't deny that the AI code is still badly written, but in this case it made me realize that the reason the AI avoided using the cards is because it almost never made a difference - the numbers weren't worth it. Which was quite an awesome moment of realization for me: this program I wrote highlighted a short-coming that I wasn't able to notice by myself.

Aside from ENERGY cards...

Another interesting change was done to the 'Unfit' card, which used to cost a whopping 2 Energy for a measly output of -2 Fitness. At that point, you might as well just use 'Menu for two' which would remove the 2 Fitness while only costing 1 Energy. Not anymore! The new values are Cost 0 for -1 Fitness, essentially making this the DEBUFF equivalent of the 0 Cost 'Feed' card. Frankly, looking back on it, I have no idea why I made it so inefficient.

And finally 'This hand sucks' has been changed to have a completely different effect. While it used to shuffle your hand into the Deck and draw 4 cards afterwards, it now draws back the same amount you had in your hand, basically shuffling out your entire hand. I feel this is more in line with the presentation on the card, as well as making it more useful.

I initially wanted to avoid this effect because I thought that it would be too powerful. Now that I've had some more time to play around with the intricacies of the battle system, I continue to find that small decks are far too powerful compared to big ones, which have to heavily rely on luck and inconsistency. This card barely had an influence on small decks anyway, since they tend to draw the same 5 cards. Now it gives bigger decks more leeway when it comes to RNG, so consider this another step in the continuous push to encourage the creation of bigger decks with more variety than small ones.

New gameplay stuff?

Of course, tweaks to cards isn't the only new thing. Perhaps the most interesting system to work on was the Item Crafting.

If you've reached this part of the game, you'll note one very interesting difference in this system compared to card crafting, and that is the use of ANY ingredients. Item farming, particularly fishing, was added in the previous update to facilitate card creation. There was one big problem though: card crafting occurred rarely, and after obtaining all desired cards, the player kept on accumulating materials with no place to spend them.

And so I came up with this solution. This system not only lets the player get rid of those leftover items, but it allows them to do so without having to use any specific one. Have too many fish? Doesn't matter which, you can use any of them here.

I've had this system in mind ever since I added all of those items in v0.2.0, but I've been putting it off, as it felt a bit programmatically daunting. There was also the matter of making sure the UI wasn't tedious. Especially since this menu is something the player will be accessing very frequently, I was worried having to select the materials over and over again would become annoying very fast. The proposed solution? Auto-Fill, which selects the materials for you.

Looking back at it, was it as hard to implement and design as I thought?.. maybe. It was definitely an interesting feature to work on. With this system, we have now addressed the sleep-inducingly slow pace of losing weight (in addition to help from the gym buddy system!)

Time to pop those buttons!

With the 0.3.0 update, a Plain Shirt has been added to the shop. However, as I've had time to polish up the rest of them, the 0.3.1 minor update adds three more variations. Feast your eyes on this:

Since the bulk of the work has been done in drawing the base images for the shirt itself, adding some patterns or color variations on top of them wasn't too much work. I will likely be adding even more to this line-up, so if there's any pattern in particular you'd like to see, definitely let me know! This isn't the only clothing option added though:

More accessories!

There are three more glasses options, as well as a beanie! There is also one more headwear added to the game, although you'll have to do more than just stop by the shop to see that one!

Putting the "role-playing" in role-playing card game

An interesting choice you might've noticed is after you beat Russell, when he invites you to his bakery. You're given the option to just accept, or note that you have certain dietary restrictions.

The wording is a bit vague for the sake of encompassing a broader scope, and in the grand scheme of things, the choice doesn't really change anything other than some details in the dialogue.

However, since I practically made the player character out to be a sort of self-insert for people to experience the world of CoG through, I felt it was important to have options that allow you to define yourself.

Other such choices are: when Beau asks you whether you smoke and when Edgar/Ted offers you alcohol (fun fact: the game only asks you about this once, depending on whichever scene you run into first, and remembers that information from then on!)

In similar vein, if you've gone through some of Beau's and Ikem's plotline, when they come out to you, you might notice the wording doesn't explicitly ask you if you're gay. Well... I myself am a gay man, the game itself is very gay, and I assume the main demographic for this game are other gay men. But of course there's a lot more nuance to the way people can feel about themselves, so I hope I managed to accomplish even a little bit of what I set out to do with that.

Let's talk even more about inclusivity

This is a fun area of discussion and something I tend to think about a lot when writing for Cards of Gluttony. Of course, I'm not the paragon of inclusivity and I'm sure there's a lot of things I might've missed already. If there's any aspect of the writing which you feel could use a change like this, I'm as always open to all feedback!

Here's a fun bombshell to just drop on you: one of the characters in the game is a transgender man. There's no confirmation for it in-game yet, so you'll just have to take my word for it until I get far enough in writing their plotline. And just to get it out of the way: we most definitely support Trans Rights here. If you are a transphobe, you are not welcome here.

For quite a while now, I've been wanting to add a "trans" option to the character creator, but so far, I've only spent a lot of time worrying about how I would handle all of the things that would need to change, especially a lot of the text. If you're trans yourself, or know any trans people who have played the game and would be willing to consult me and help in the writing of things surrounding this topic, feel free to reach out to me!

And now here's some other stuff at the end:

If you use the Free Battle mode, you'll notice the new UI for opponent selection, now featuring a selectable set of builds. These are the different setups that your opponents use as their plotline progresses. However, there's some work-in-progress available here as well.

Russell is among one of them, as you can see, there are 3 builds available for him. The deck is still unchanged for now, however you can see that it sees his max. weight going all the way up to 60. That is the weight he gets to during the story, actually! There is even fully written dialogue for this fight (as well as an actual lose variant, since the fight during the storyline doesn't allow you to lose!). So if you haven't checked that out, you might find something fun.

Save Data Management

With the minor update, I've added the [Data Management] button to the title screen. This new menu will let you export and import save data between devices, as well as open up the folder that contains the game data files!

Of course, this will be useful to people who want to transfer their save files (especially those playing the web version, I lied and this one will be the final web version, labelled "Web Demo Version"). However, this will also be incredibly useful to me while diagnosing bugs! As now I won't have to ask everyone to manually go into strange, complicated folders on their computers.

Are we still doing Card of the Month..?

Well, there's nothing new to see here: all the new cards can already be seen in the update, but I should keep this format going. It's a nice way to cap things off anyway! Here is our card:

Very aptly named "Defeat Enthusiast", this card has been added to the crafting pool, requiring... absolutely nothing to make, it's free. This card is basically a fast and simple way for you to lose a fight if you want to see what happens! And the illustration and all the flavor text even changes on the "Defeat Enthusiast*" card that you gain after using this one.

This sort of coincides with the addition of "Odious Zest", which is the material required to make DEBUFF cards. In what I'd say is a somewhat bold game design choice, you can only obtain this zest when you lose battles.

That's a great segue to talk about "winning" and "losing"!

Since the tutorial encounter in the forest is scripted in a way that has you losing by the end, every playthrough will always gain Odious Zest for the first time there. I know some players have gotten frustrated at what seemed to be a massive difficulty spike, when it was in fact intended to be a challenge where victory is optional. This actually applies to every fight in v0.2 - save for the tutorial fight.

Most notably, the fishing storyline has significantly different dialogue depending on whether you won the first and even second battle. There would be a very strange dissonance if losing locked you out of continuing the storyline, so... it simply doesn't. The dialogue and details may differ, but I've made the effort to avoid taking away content in case of losing a battle.

Now that I've sold you on that... in v0.3, there are now some battles that require you to win to proceed, but I hope that the addition of this Zest communicates to players that you're not expected to win every single encounter.

And with this being a retroactive change to existing content, older save files do get properly compensated for this accordingly. 

And that brings us to the end!

That was quite a lot to talk about, but it's always fun whenever I finally release a new update, as I can freely discuss all of the things that have been added.

As always, thank you for supporting the project and thanks for reading!