Update: 1/16/22: The Great Skill Overhaul

Hey there! It's a bit late, but... Happy New Year! Here's to progress--in life, in happiness, and in me making this game! Given my plans/designs/expectations, the game won't be finished by the year's end, but maybe I'll have enough put together for an actually beatable experience, w/o all the bells and whistles?

(Although in my opinion the bells and whistles are the best part)

Thank you so much for supporting me for now, and I hope to put out a new build soon to justify said support!

Now, to this update's content: Since the very beginning, I had an idea for how I wanted the game's skills/spells to be done. But I didn't have the experience for it, or the patience, and I had other things to do as well, so I just kinda tossed stuff together and called it an attack skill, the end.

Well, inspired in part by my playing the Very Good Shin Megami Tensei 5, I finally got off my butt to implement (roughly) the skill theming I had from the start, which also necessitated re-doing and rethinking the stat definitions/logic I had previously implemented. Behold:

In previous builds, there were Belly, Boob (or bust?), and Butt stats; these have been replaced with more conventional Defense, E.Attack, and E.Defense, as seen above.  While I still like that idea, and would be open to building on it at another time, it really complicated the logic behind making new offensive skills, and character/class/enemy stats. I've also re-labeled TP (nominally 'technique points' or something) to the more thematically appropriate Fatty Power/FP, which embarrassingly took way more brainpower to come up with that one might think.

The stats being re-done allowed me to make a set of 48(!) universal offensive skills for use by both characters and enemies:

(I know the picture only shows like 20 skills. Just extrapolate the remainder, haha).

There are 3 elements in the game --Boob, Belly, Butt-- and so those 48 mean each element gets 16 offensive skills. This 16 is further divided in two, based on being either physical or special damage (now classified as ego damage) and that 8 is divided a final time in two as single-target or multi-target skills.

...And that's just what I've come up with so far! I also need to make some element-exclusive stuff, and some class-exclusive stuff (heals, tanking, buffing) as well as character-specific and enemy specific skills... Still, this has done a LOT for my morale.

Part of this has also been making art for new icons indicating the skill's element for the player:

The green ones are for a state, while the yellow ones are for the player.

In combat, it'll kinda look like this:

(Guest-starring Rumia's new enemy/bust art)

And it looks good, I think!

One final thing, is that I'm tweaking how one resolves enemies. Depending on what this does to a game's pacing, I may revert it, but...

When a non-boss enemy reaches a certain health threshold (15% or less), it'll acquire a passive state, WEAK. When this happens, a skill will appear:

Selecting that skill will bring up further options:

This will allow players to have more agency in how they want to play, at the cost of perhaps making it more difficult to just eat everyone... With this change, enemies will no longer become consumable items upon defeat--you have to capture them. The thought process behind this was to make sparing vs eating vs catching a legitimate choice; also, in previous builds, I wasn't sure how to flag an item to NOT drop if the enemy was eaten.

If does feel in some respects as if this was a solution to a nonexistent problem, and maybe playtesting will cause me to re-think it, but I earnestly believe this to be in-spirit with my design thus far.

Also, you can't hear it, but predator enemies (like rumia in the pic) now have special chiptune music made for me by a friend. As the game progresses, and more and more enemies become, well, fatty-eating fatties, the song will play more and more often...

'Til next time!