Main bug I've encountered is bosses dashing and getting stuck in walls, trivializes the fights, but altogether I enjoy the mechanics of the game, especially the perma mechanic. It's interesting to track how many times you've been digested or digested someone, I wish the other bosses were respawnable besides just Skylar and the other one, forgot her name. Pretty easy game, only had a few times where I felt like it was difficult to escape a grab, and that was after already suffering digestion damage as a bludgie and having the debuff applied. Fun concept, hope to see how it evolves.
feel like I'm supposed to do something when the boss turns red but I am not sure if I am supposed to press interact or not cause it does not seem to be working
Great potential, but movement is extremely slippery and controls aren't tight.
The "air bouncing" or "pogoing" (I don't know what the term is these days) is REALLY hard to pull off. It looks like you tried to make the player "pause" in midair to plan things out but it just doesn't work.
The double(triple?) jump doesn't always come out either. I'm not sure if theres a cooldown and I just didn't notice it?
The dashing feels weird. The map has a lot of low ceiling which makes air dashing over pits feel hard to pull off. To be frank, the dash should probably be removed because the camera is so zoomed in I don't see the ceilings getting higher.
Magic sucks. If you know the bosses moves/timing, you don't need magic. And if you don't know the bosses moves, the "casting time" just gives the bosses a free hit.
Taunting need a MASSIVE buff. I know this is a vore game, but if I'm going to taunt the enemy, gimme something for pulling it off successfully.
I don't know the characters, but everyone other than Lunalyn is a jerk. Lunalyn is the only character who will cannot vore anyone (as of the current build) and that feels oddly disconnected.
You can get stunlocked in the corner.
Give the player attack more range. Its not fun getting super close to the bosses cause you have the dagger but they have a grapple attack.
Make it easier to break free from vore attacks. If you don't immediately break out, its pretty much an instant death.
Voring needs to give MUCH bigger buffs. I did a 'everyone vores everyone' run and I did like 1 extra point of damage from a 'zero vore' run
I made it so that you need to have started falling for the double jump to register. I've preferred it when games do it that way, but enough folks have mentioned finding it frustrating, so I'll go ahead and change it to allow you to start your second jump before the peak of the first. I'll also see what I can do about making the divekick have a bit more control, that's definitely a fair point, especially given how narrow the hitboxes on some of the enemies can be.
The dash is mostly useful for evasion and quickly moving through rooms, so I might re-contextualize the tutorial for it to be more evasion-focused? I really haven't heard anyone else say they dislike it so far though. It's not going to be removed because I and other folks consider it to be a fun aspect of the game's movement, but I will see if there's anything I can do to improve how it feels. I can definitely make some level design tweaks to mitigate that frustration, at least.
Magic also has a lot of utility, I feel. If you time it right, you can do a lot of damage rather quickly. I actually had to nerf the triple-spark spell multiple times because of how easy it was to stunlock bosses with it. I'll look at the casting times, and I'm probably going to give the bosses more startup frames on their grabs to make it easier to counter them. I'll also make boss grabs cover a bit less distance, some characters like Vesper being able to rocket across an entire room probably isn't very fun.
Also, taunting is basically an easter egg to let you get eaten immediately by a pred. I don't intend for it to have any practical utility. I'd rather remove it from the controls list entirely and just let folks discover it as a goofy surprise. I could give it an innocuous buff like restoring some MP or something, but it's just not what I intended the feature for.
I will make adjustments to knockback angles and i-frames to prevent stunlocking whenever I find a situation that can cause it, but there are a lot of situations where the dodge or glide-kick can actually get you out of it that you may not realize immediately. I'll also likely increase ending lag on enemy attacks even further to help mitigate the issue.
I will consider giving a range buff to the weapons when players are using them, particularly the dagger.
Yeah, the re-grab scaling on boss vore attacks is too high. Some characters are meant to be better at escaping than others, but it's clear the balancing needs work.
Currently, the buffs you get from eating foes are limited to extra HP, SP, and MP. It might not be a bad idea for it to also add to your other stats, but I don't want to give attack damage buffs out too easily. I don't want the damage numbers getting into the hundreds by endgame. I will definitely look into this though.
As far as the characters, Tanza and Skylar are definitely not meant to be nice. If they're not your cup of tea, that's fine. I always considered Vesper to be more teasy than anything, but she also doesn't let anyone talk shit to her, so she definitely slings back at Tanza and Skylar when she encounters them. I certainly didn't think I wrote her to come off like a jerk when she fights Luna, and there's also the fact that the dragons are literally inflicted with a frenzy spell when you fight them-- Though the dialogue that implies that was cut from the demo, I believe. In the final game, you'll have the option to spare them and let them return to the central hub room in the palace. They'll all be quite a lot more chilled out then. Except Skylar, she's just like that.
Love hearing what you have planned for the future! I'm very excited to see how things go.
It might have just been user error, but I noticed that when the bosses go to grab my characters, I can't use the dash to avoid it... (granted, I was trying to run passed/through them) they would immediately grab me upon collision.
(There's a taunt button somewhere?! I gotta find it!)
lots of potential, the movement already feels pretty damn good (though the fire dragon is pretty slippery to control). obviously hoping for future updates, more enemies (both named, where you can control them afterwards, and unaned like the slime where you just die). maybe even enemy on enemy interactions like packedrat. there were a few bugs, like i killed a mimic at the same time it grabbed me, which just softlocked me in the place. and i am also hoping for more game-y stuff like the ability to rebind controls and a resizable window. so i wish you tons of luck for the future, i'll have to keep track of this game!
Skylar's a freak who is meant to be a bit slippery to control hahaha! Glad you liked the movement otherwise though!
There will definitely be a lot more enemies of both variety here. I have considered having them interact with each other, but it's not a super high priority at the moment.
Will be fixing the mimic bug in the first update! And re-bindable controls will hopefully be a thing later on down the line. Currently, you can just toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes, but I'll take a look at what else I can add.
No real bugs and I enjoyed the Perma mechanics. I do think it does sort of trivialize boss fights as you can let the pred eat you to continue but you could make some fights non-permable to make it that you'd actually have to defeat the boss but then give an option to feed yourself to the boss to then play as them. I don't know what kind of full story you have planned but I would love if the perma mechanic was introduced as part of the story like Luna stays as sapient fat that guides each character after her, or she is like a mind parasite that actually guides the will of the next character to her own (explains why the player controls the bosses and has the same goal as the first.) The only major suggestion is melee combat is a bit hard to land on most weapons without an insta grab. I would also add a tutorial for how to break out of a predators grab as well and maybe make a slight telegraph mark that a pred is doing a grab attack like a blink of a red aura or something so you'd know to dodge. Honestly I'd mate attacking have a slight animation for both the character and the enemies as it would make the attacks not feel instantaneous like they come out of nowhere. Best way to explain is look at some other Metroidvainia's like Blasphemous, Hollow Knight, or Deadcells. You don't need to be as complex at all as any of them and honestly the framework you have is very good. The dash spam felt just right for fast movement. I'd say the wing jump is like 80% there as it can be hard at times to get it to activate every time. I also like the idea of the down slam on enemy for a glide but I'd like to be able to jump once out of the the glide kinda like in the old Spiro games where you'd do that final wing flap before landing to give you a bump of height to hit a ledge if you slightly miss timed you glide. I think honestly with a bit of time to flesh out the environments and add more rooms and enemies you'll have a nice game on your hands.
A lot of good feedback here, thank you!! I was hesitant to add more actions out of the glide at first, but after testing attacks out of glide, I chose to add that as a new feature. I do think you have a good point of letting you jump out of glides, so I'll see about adding that as well. Double jumping currently requires you to be falling to activate, but I've gotten a lot of feedback that folks don't like this, so I'll adjust it so that you can initiate a midair jump before the peak of the last one.
I'll also try to telegraph enemy grabs a little better, that makes sense. I know what frames of animation to look for to tell that's what their doing, but making it clearer is always a good thing since not everyone is going to immediately know what a new character's grab sprite is.
I was considering making the first Budgie fight a bit more scripted to better teach you how struggling works. Based on the feedback I'm getting, I'm definitely leaning towards doing that.
I do have plans for the 4 following areas to be not only much longer, but have a lot more exploration and enemy variety. Thank you so much for playing and I hope you're looking forward to the future updates!
Hey, I thank you for getting back to my comment. I'm happy to see that you liked my feedback. I know that in a very early alpha state a game like this will often be more of a proof of concept than what we will see as a final build. I hope you stick with this, as it was very good. I'm not sure what you have planned for this now with all the Itchio drama and censorship, but I have faith that you'll figure something out. A good rule of thumb for Metroidvania-like games like this, which would obviously be later in development, would be to tease in earlier areas spots that you can tell you'd need to use another movement tech ability. I'd also say try to think about how all things flow for smoother movement. Maybe you want to give immunity or phase out frames on a dash to make combat more snappy, or add a grapple swing ability and allow the player to jump one or dash off of it to give them movement. Usually, the games are slower at the beginning, but each ability that opens the world up more makes traversal faster and more fluid and sometimes it's even a good thing to have a player double back through a previous area but now with the new abillity to see how much better and easier it is as you can zip through it.
I'd say it's safe to say for now design your "playground" first and get down the concepts of what movement tech and abilities you want to give the player. Then think about how they could be used throughout the game to make things better or more exciting. Then build the course, and finally start making the clutter and texture assets you want to "liven up" and make it accurate to the world you want it to take place in. If you look to even some of the best games in this genre, most of them are long hallways and split up platforms with a nice texture, background, and enemy variety, but what makes them shine is the tech and flow of the game under all of the nice paint. I think you have the basis of what it would take to make a great game and one I'd enjoy immensely.
Items will disappear permanently if you leave a room, which is especially cruel if you accidentally forgot to pick up the HP pick up (like I did) from a boss or their weapon before running off to go save.
Enjoyed my time with the demo! Few things i noticed when i was playing.
Watched a slime fall onto an enemy bird. Thought id wait and see if the slime would eat her since the bird just kept running into it. Instead the game kinda freaked out and started spamming 1 damage at the bird once she died until the slime moved far enough away to send her body flying.
I entered the testing tower with 2 spells on hand. Went to go test the spells but once i hit the cap, the others would just disappear when I picked them up.
EDIT: Went back in and just learned about the inventory system. whoops. spells are all there.
Sometimes the game over text would be cut off from the bottom of the screen. I wasnt playing in fullscreen so I cant confirm if this is an issue there.
In the testing tower fighting Skylar, I somehow clipped into the far left wall. Strangely, this inverted my controls until I kinda just moon-walked out of the wall to continue the fighting.
As for feedback, Its a bit odd to include stat upgrades if they can be lost in permavore situations. You might find yourself in a situation where players could game the system by only getting permavored by characters that would provide a stat upgrade, and/or circle back for upgrades once theyve done so as I did after getting perma'd by the second boss.
Maybe the stat buffs should carry over between permas? After all the idea is to absorb their power.
EDIT: Just discovered this is already the case! Wasnt clear at the time but after exploring the inventory more I noticed that they were being tracked. Cool!
Playing into the theme of sentient fat, It could also be interesting to have lunalyn either comment and/or provide exposition even if theyve been perma'd. As everyone else seems to have the goal of eating her or whoever got her first.
Overall I really enjoyed the premise of carrying on as the next character. Im exctied to see this game continue to be developed!
Will try to tutorialize the inventory/menu systems and the pred mechanics a little better, don't want folks missing that vital information! Glad you found those things though.
The thing that might make it unclear that health upgrades are persistent is the fact that each character has separate scaling for them, which is fun for balance, but I might need to do a better job clarifying this. Maybe I'll change the post-perma dialogue for the first time it happens to tell you to go look at the menus, and also explain some of those things.
I do like that idea of commentary from Luna or other digested prey! I'm gonna look into how I can implement that. Will also work on fixing those bugs you found as soon as I can. Thank you so much for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed your time with my demo! <3
getting knocked down by the vines can clip you through stairs (starter charachter, first room to the right) PS: combat seems a bit finicky for me, just a note.
found a bug. I went back into the vesper arena on accident and just stood there after starting the fight again and she kind of just dashed out of the arena. I had to restart to leave. I was also able to bait her to do it a couple more times so it could be an issue
literally only thing I want is to be able to custom map key binds for a controller instead of using the d-pad, and that's only because I have never liked the d-pad, love everything else and will keep an eye on this.
I've heard several people say they'd like to be able to move with the analog stick instead, so I'll definitely be looking into adding that functionality, hopefully soon. I would also like to add a more complete remapping system in the future, but that's gonna be a little ways off.
Game feels pretty good! Only bug that I encountered was that the bonus water wave spell in the bonus boss area can sometimes end up pushing bosses into the wall, getting them stuck so that it's basically a free win. Other than that, I enjoyed getting Lunalyn willingly digested by what is effectively a basic bird enemy, and then going on to digest all the other bosses afterwards.
Bug report! I hit and killed the mimic at the same time it grabbed me, and it disappeared as I was hanging suspended in the air. Had to close the game and start again. Was playing as a bird at the time if that matters at all. Otherwise, I love this. The gameplay's fun, the characters are great and I enjoy how they all feel different to play, and everything felt responsive and working to me. Had to finnick around with the controls a bit to understand the menus but no major issues here. I went through the game four times and only found one bug, so.
You've got a good thing going, I had a lot of fun with this and I wish you all the best!
Game looks pretty promising. I don't often see games where the protagonist changes like this, where the "divine power" can be transferred to another if its wielder isn't strong enough. I wonder how the storyline will play around with that idea. Fun concept, even if it clashes oh so heavily with what I seek in a vore experience.
Love the usage of sprite animations. Need more games that are not VNs (or RPGmaker things) and those that integrate vore into gameplay mechanics like this.
Not my cup of tea fetish-wise, but I was warned by the game page anyway. I wish you luck with this project, maybe it'll spawn something less fatal-focused from another dev.
TL;DR Overall? Love gameplay, don't like themes. Will silently support it.
The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the sprites are great, and I love the permavore mechanic, the other two end of demo bosses are extremely fun to play.
This game is already looking PEAK as is, so I am very excited to see where it goes from here.
I only encountered one bug:
I kept running into the first vine to the right because I have brain damage and it launched me through the stairs and out of the map, which wasnt really a big deal since I just got warped back but still something I encountered
And outside new content ideas I have a few suggestions that could be nice:
1. A menu button that allows you to quit to the main menu without having to alt F4. (I may have just missed this but at least for me esc does nothing and the other menus dont seem to have this option)
2. Maybe some way to increase or modify difficulty? This is just something that I think would be nice to have, like maybe just health buffs, damage buffs, or even something to make struggling harder for grab attacks. But I have no experience making games so I have no idea how hard that would actually be to implement, its far from vital of course.
When you pause (start/enter) and tab over to the left-most menu (L/A on keyboard), you can then press ESC and scroll down to the option that takes you back to the main menu.
Will take a look at the vine knockback issue, I think I missed a bit of code in the hitstun state relating to the slopes.
Yeah the difficulty actually used to be much higher, but in early pre-release playtesting, I had to tone it down quite a lot. I definitely plan on upping the difficulty as you get further in the game, and later on, I'd like to implement a "customized game" feature that will let you adjust difficulty more directly.
Thank you so much for your support and feedback, it means a lot!!
This was incredibly fun! I really really enjoy the permavore and extreme fatal mentions and such, my favorite type of ending for vore <3 I can't wait to see more!
AV isn't currently in the plans, but as far as the latter, I do intend on making a toggle for more explicit versions of the portraits that will have things like that.
Yup, found it! Saving still crashes the game however... not sure what to do there. I have to delete those files every time. moving the game install to the same hard drive as the appdata folder did not fix the issue either.
Hmm... How long does it freeze for? Does it outright crash? And is the game running off an SSD? I wouldn't think that would be an issue, but I haven't exactly tested it running on an old-school hard drive, so I dunno...
Awesome little demo, feels good and was fun to play. The premise with how the vore fits in is very unique, gave some good replay-ability. Hope to see more!~
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Main bug I've encountered is bosses dashing and getting stuck in walls, trivializes the fights, but altogether I enjoy the mechanics of the game, especially the perma mechanic. It's interesting to track how many times you've been digested or digested someone, I wish the other bosses were respawnable besides just Skylar and the other one, forgot her name. Pretty easy game, only had a few times where I felt like it was difficult to escape a grab, and that was after already suffering digestion damage as a bludgie and having the debuff applied. Fun concept, hope to see how it evolves.
feel like I'm supposed to do something when the boss turns red but I am not sure if I am supposed to press interact or not cause it does not seem to be working
Great potential, but movement is extremely slippery and controls aren't tight.
The "air bouncing" or "pogoing" (I don't know what the term is these days) is REALLY hard to pull off. It looks like you tried to make the player "pause" in midair to plan things out but it just doesn't work.
The double(triple?) jump doesn't always come out either. I'm not sure if theres a cooldown and I just didn't notice it?
The dashing feels weird. The map has a lot of low ceiling which makes air dashing over pits feel hard to pull off. To be frank, the dash should probably be removed because the camera is so zoomed in I don't see the ceilings getting higher.
Magic sucks. If you know the bosses moves/timing, you don't need magic. And if you don't know the bosses moves, the "casting time" just gives the bosses a free hit.
Taunting need a MASSIVE buff. I know this is a vore game, but if I'm going to taunt the enemy, gimme something for pulling it off successfully.
I don't know the characters, but everyone other than Lunalyn is a jerk. Lunalyn is the only character who will cannot vore anyone (as of the current build) and that feels oddly disconnected.
You can get stunlocked in the corner.
Give the player attack more range. Its not fun getting super close to the bosses cause you have the dagger but they have a grapple attack.
Make it easier to break free from vore attacks. If you don't immediately break out, its pretty much an instant death.
Voring needs to give MUCH bigger buffs. I did a 'everyone vores everyone' run and I did like 1 extra point of damage from a 'zero vore' run
I made it so that you need to have started falling for the double jump to register. I've preferred it when games do it that way, but enough folks have mentioned finding it frustrating, so I'll go ahead and change it to allow you to start your second jump before the peak of the first. I'll also see what I can do about making the divekick have a bit more control, that's definitely a fair point, especially given how narrow the hitboxes on some of the enemies can be.
The dash is mostly useful for evasion and quickly moving through rooms, so I might re-contextualize the tutorial for it to be more evasion-focused? I really haven't heard anyone else say they dislike it so far though. It's not going to be removed because I and other folks consider it to be a fun aspect of the game's movement, but I will see if there's anything I can do to improve how it feels. I can definitely make some level design tweaks to mitigate that frustration, at least.
Magic also has a lot of utility, I feel. If you time it right, you can do a lot of damage rather quickly. I actually had to nerf the triple-spark spell multiple times because of how easy it was to stunlock bosses with it. I'll look at the casting times, and I'm probably going to give the bosses more startup frames on their grabs to make it easier to counter them. I'll also make boss grabs cover a bit less distance, some characters like Vesper being able to rocket across an entire room probably isn't very fun.
Also, taunting is basically an easter egg to let you get eaten immediately by a pred. I don't intend for it to have any practical utility. I'd rather remove it from the controls list entirely and just let folks discover it as a goofy surprise. I could give it an innocuous buff like restoring some MP or something, but it's just not what I intended the feature for.
I will make adjustments to knockback angles and i-frames to prevent stunlocking whenever I find a situation that can cause it, but there are a lot of situations where the dodge or glide-kick can actually get you out of it that you may not realize immediately. I'll also likely increase ending lag on enemy attacks even further to help mitigate the issue.
I will consider giving a range buff to the weapons when players are using them, particularly the dagger.
Yeah, the re-grab scaling on boss vore attacks is too high. Some characters are meant to be better at escaping than others, but it's clear the balancing needs work.
Currently, the buffs you get from eating foes are limited to extra HP, SP, and MP. It might not be a bad idea for it to also add to your other stats, but I don't want to give attack damage buffs out too easily. I don't want the damage numbers getting into the hundreds by endgame. I will definitely look into this though.
As far as the characters, Tanza and Skylar are definitely not meant to be nice. If they're not your cup of tea, that's fine. I always considered Vesper to be more teasy than anything, but she also doesn't let anyone talk shit to her, so she definitely slings back at Tanza and Skylar when she encounters them. I certainly didn't think I wrote her to come off like a jerk when she fights Luna, and there's also the fact that the dragons are literally inflicted with a frenzy spell when you fight them-- Though the dialogue that implies that was cut from the demo, I believe. In the final game, you'll have the option to spare them and let them return to the central hub room in the palace. They'll all be quite a lot more chilled out then. Except Skylar, she's just like that.
Thank you for the feedback!
Love hearing what you have planned for the future! I'm very excited to see how things go.
It might have just been user error, but I noticed that when the bosses go to grab my characters, I can't use the dash to avoid it... (granted, I was trying to run passed/through them) they would immediately grab me upon collision.
(There's a taunt button somewhere?! I gotta find it!)
lots of potential, the movement already feels pretty damn good (though the fire dragon is pretty slippery to control). obviously hoping for future updates, more enemies (both named, where you can control them afterwards, and unaned like the slime where you just die). maybe even enemy on enemy interactions like packedrat.
there were a few bugs, like i killed a mimic at the same time it grabbed me, which just softlocked me in the place.
and i am also hoping for more game-y stuff like the ability to rebind controls and a resizable window. so i wish you tons of luck for the future, i'll have to keep track of this game!
Skylar's a freak who is meant to be a bit slippery to control hahaha! Glad you liked the movement otherwise though!
There will definitely be a lot more enemies of both variety here. I have considered having them interact with each other, but it's not a super high priority at the moment.
Will be fixing the mimic bug in the first update! And re-bindable controls will hopefully be a thing later on down the line. Currently, you can just toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes, but I'll take a look at what else I can add.
Thank you for playing, glad you had a good time!
No real bugs and I enjoyed the Perma mechanics. I do think it does sort of trivialize boss fights as you can let the pred eat you to continue but you could make some fights non-permable to make it that you'd actually have to defeat the boss but then give an option to feed yourself to the boss to then play as them. I don't know what kind of full story you have planned but I would love if the perma mechanic was introduced as part of the story like Luna stays as sapient fat that guides each character after her, or she is like a mind parasite that actually guides the will of the next character to her own (explains why the player controls the bosses and has the same goal as the first.) The only major suggestion is melee combat is a bit hard to land on most weapons without an insta grab. I would also add a tutorial for how to break out of a predators grab as well and maybe make a slight telegraph mark that a pred is doing a grab attack like a blink of a red aura or something so you'd know to dodge. Honestly I'd mate attacking have a slight animation for both the character and the enemies as it would make the attacks not feel instantaneous like they come out of nowhere. Best way to explain is look at some other Metroidvainia's like Blasphemous, Hollow Knight, or Deadcells. You don't need to be as complex at all as any of them and honestly the framework you have is very good. The dash spam felt just right for fast movement. I'd say the wing jump is like 80% there as it can be hard at times to get it to activate every time. I also like the idea of the down slam on enemy for a glide but I'd like to be able to jump once out of the the glide kinda like in the old Spiro games where you'd do that final wing flap before landing to give you a bump of height to hit a ledge if you slightly miss timed you glide. I think honestly with a bit of time to flesh out the environments and add more rooms and enemies you'll have a nice game on your hands.
A lot of good feedback here, thank you!! I was hesitant to add more actions out of the glide at first, but after testing attacks out of glide, I chose to add that as a new feature. I do think you have a good point of letting you jump out of glides, so I'll see about adding that as well. Double jumping currently requires you to be falling to activate, but I've gotten a lot of feedback that folks don't like this, so I'll adjust it so that you can initiate a midair jump before the peak of the last one.
I'll also try to telegraph enemy grabs a little better, that makes sense. I know what frames of animation to look for to tell that's what their doing, but making it clearer is always a good thing since not everyone is going to immediately know what a new character's grab sprite is.
I was considering making the first Budgie fight a bit more scripted to better teach you how struggling works. Based on the feedback I'm getting, I'm definitely leaning towards doing that.
I do have plans for the 4 following areas to be not only much longer, but have a lot more exploration and enemy variety. Thank you so much for playing and I hope you're looking forward to the future updates!
Hey, I thank you for getting back to my comment. I'm happy to see that you liked my feedback. I know that in a very early alpha state a game like this will often be more of a proof of concept than what we will see as a final build. I hope you stick with this, as it was very good. I'm not sure what you have planned for this now with all the Itchio drama and censorship, but I have faith that you'll figure something out. A good rule of thumb for Metroidvania-like games like this, which would obviously be later in development, would be to tease in earlier areas spots that you can tell you'd need to use another movement tech ability. I'd also say try to think about how all things flow for smoother movement. Maybe you want to give immunity or phase out frames on a dash to make combat more snappy, or add a grapple swing ability and allow the player to jump one or dash off of it to give them movement. Usually, the games are slower at the beginning, but each ability that opens the world up more makes traversal faster and more fluid and sometimes it's even a good thing to have a player double back through a previous area but now with the new abillity to see how much better and easier it is as you can zip through it.
I'd say it's safe to say for now design your "playground" first and get down the concepts of what movement tech and abilities you want to give the player. Then think about how they could be used throughout the game to make things better or more exciting. Then build the course, and finally start making the clutter and texture assets you want to "liven up" and make it accurate to the world you want it to take place in. If you look to even some of the best games in this genre, most of them are long hallways and split up platforms with a nice texture, background, and enemy variety, but what makes them shine is the tech and flow of the game under all of the nice paint. I think you have the basis of what it would take to make a great game and one I'd enjoy immensely.
Items will disappear permanently if you leave a room, which is especially cruel if you accidentally forgot to pick up the HP pick up (like I did) from a boss or their weapon before running off to go save.
Yeah that's a problem. Going to try to address this in the next patch, thank you for pointing it out! Pretty dumb oversight on my part lol
Enjoyed my time with the demo! Few things i noticed when i was playing.
As for feedback, Its a bit odd to include stat upgrades if they can be lost in permavore situations. You might find yourself in a situation where players could game the system by only getting permavored by characters that would provide a stat upgrade, and/or circle back for upgrades once theyve done so as I did after getting perma'd by the second boss.
Maybe the stat buffs should carry over between permas? After all the idea is to absorb their power.
EDIT: Just discovered this is already the case! Wasnt clear at the time but after exploring the inventory more I noticed that they were being tracked. Cool!
Playing into the theme of sentient fat, It could also be interesting to have lunalyn either comment and/or provide exposition even if theyve been perma'd. As everyone else seems to have the goal of eating her or whoever got her first.
Overall I really enjoyed the premise of carrying on as the next character. Im exctied to see this game continue to be developed!
Will try to tutorialize the inventory/menu systems and the pred mechanics a little better, don't want folks missing that vital information! Glad you found those things though.
The thing that might make it unclear that health upgrades are persistent is the fact that each character has separate scaling for them, which is fun for balance, but I might need to do a better job clarifying this. Maybe I'll change the post-perma dialogue for the first time it happens to tell you to go look at the menus, and also explain some of those things.
I do like that idea of commentary from Luna or other digested prey! I'm gonna look into how I can implement that. Will also work on fixing those bugs you found as soon as I can. Thank you so much for playing, and I'm glad you enjoyed your time with my demo! <3
getting knocked down by the vines can clip you through stairs (starter charachter, first room to the right) PS: combat seems a bit finicky for me, just a note.
Thank you, will try to address this in the next patch!
found a bug. I went back into the vesper arena on accident and just stood there after starting the fight again and she kind of just dashed out of the arena. I had to restart to leave. I was also able to bait her to do it a couple more times so it could be an issue
Whoops! Yeah I think I missed some of the collision boxes in that room. Will be fixed in the next patch hopefully.
looks like theres some white text on the bottom of the screen when a slime digests the playable character but the text is cut off so i cant read it
literally only thing I want is to be able to custom map key binds for a controller instead of using the d-pad, and that's only because I have never liked the d-pad, love everything else and will keep an eye on this.
I've heard several people say they'd like to be able to move with the analog stick instead, so I'll definitely be looking into adding that functionality, hopefully soon. I would also like to add a more complete remapping system in the future, but that's gonna be a little ways off.
Game feels pretty good! Only bug that I encountered was that the bonus water wave spell in the bonus boss area can sometimes end up pushing bosses into the wall, getting them stuck so that it's basically a free win. Other than that, I enjoyed getting Lunalyn willingly digested by what is effectively a basic bird enemy, and then going on to digest all the other bosses afterwards.
Hehehe, glad you enjoyed!~
Yeah, I should be able to fix that issue fairly easily? Will look into it. Thank you!
Bug report!
I hit and killed the mimic at the same time it grabbed me, and it disappeared as I was hanging suspended in the air. Had to close the game and start again. Was playing as a bird at the time if that matters at all.
Otherwise, I love this. The gameplay's fun, the characters are great and I enjoy how they all feel different to play, and everything felt responsive and working to me. Had to finnick around with the controls a bit to understand the menus but no major issues here. I went through the game four times and only found one bug, so.
You've got a good thing going, I had a lot of fun with this and I wish you all the best!
Whoops! Thank you for catching that, I'll look into it!
Really glad to hear you're enjoying the game <3 Stay tuned, I have a lot more planned!!
Game looks pretty promising. I don't often see games where the protagonist changes like this, where the "divine power" can be transferred to another if its wielder isn't strong enough. I wonder how the storyline will play around with that idea. Fun concept, even if it clashes oh so heavily with what I seek in a vore experience.
Love the usage of sprite animations. Need more games that are not VNs (or RPGmaker things) and those that integrate vore into gameplay mechanics like this.
Not my cup of tea fetish-wise, but I was warned by the game page anyway. I wish you luck with this project, maybe it'll spawn something less fatal-focused from another dev.
TL;DR
Overall? Love gameplay, don't like themes. Will silently support it.
🍕?
The movement feels great, the combat feels great, the sprites are great, and I love the permavore mechanic, the other two end of demo bosses are extremely fun to play.
This game is already looking PEAK as is, so I am very excited to see where it goes from here.
I only encountered one bug:
I kept running into the first vine to the right because I have brain damage and it launched me through the stairs and out of the map, which wasnt really a big deal since I just got warped back but still something I encountered
And outside new content ideas I have a few suggestions that could be nice:
1. A menu button that allows you to quit to the main menu without having to alt F4. (I may have just missed this but at least for me esc does nothing and the other menus dont seem to have this option)
2. Maybe some way to increase or modify difficulty? This is just something that I think would be nice to have, like maybe just health buffs, damage buffs, or even something to make struggling harder for grab attacks. But I have no experience making games so I have no idea how hard that would actually be to implement, its far from vital of course.
When you pause (start/enter) and tab over to the left-most menu (L/A on keyboard), you can then press ESC and scroll down to the option that takes you back to the main menu.
Will take a look at the vine knockback issue, I think I missed a bit of code in the hitstun state relating to the slopes.
Yeah the difficulty actually used to be much higher, but in early pre-release playtesting, I had to tone it down quite a lot. I definitely plan on upping the difficulty as you get further in the game, and later on, I'd like to implement a "customized game" feature that will let you adjust difficulty more directly.
Thank you so much for your support and feedback, it means a lot!!
This was incredibly fun! I really really enjoy the permavore and extreme fatal mentions and such, my favorite type of ending for vore <3 I can't wait to see more!
Thank you so much for playing! I'm really glad you enjoyed the demo. Stay tuned, I have a lot more content planned for the future!
Really fun game, will there be an AV option at some point? or an update that shows their holes during the butt shots in the perma folder after vore?
AV isn't currently in the plans, but as far as the latter, I do intend on making a toggle for more explicit versions of the portraits that will have things like that.
Game froze while trying to use the first save point I found, and now even after reinstalling it freezes every time I try to press "Start Game"
Is it storing data somewhere besides the install folder that could be corrupted? EDIT: ah, the other appdata folder, local, had it.
It should be saving to C/Users/(Username)/AppData/Local/Dragoneaters_7_7_PreviewDemo
Yup, found it! Saving still crashes the game however... not sure what to do there. I have to delete those files every time. moving the game install to the same hard drive as the appdata folder did not fix the issue either.
Hmm, that's strange... I haven't been able to reproduce the issue even when installing on a second SSD.
What version of Windows are you on?
windows 11 here
Hmm... How long does it freeze for? Does it outright crash? And is the game running off an SSD? I wouldn't think that would be an issue, but I haven't exactly tested it running on an old-school hard drive, so I dunno...
Awesome little demo, feels good and was fun to play. The premise with how the vore fits in is very unique, gave some good replay-ability. Hope to see more!~