Update

I beat level 38 with the short timer of that bomb. Not cheating by using R. MY GOD it was painfully hard, but it was fun.

BondageStorm

I think they could be part of the difficulty system, in fact. Maybe no fatigue or dizziness at all in Easy, some fatigue in Medium and more easily fatigued in Hard, something like that. I agree that this feature is not for everyone's taste. It does add to the difficulty though, especially in levels where you are timed, so it does change the game quite a bit in those cases. It is a lot more difficult to escape the ticking bomb now because of it. But it is true that when you are not timed, all the fatigue feature manages to do is make your level run longer. So the challenge here is to try to be more efficient in your moves so you take as little time as possible to complete the level, or if you prefer, play more levels in the same amount of time.

I can't say I was the biggest fan of the exhaustion and fatigue factors when i first saw the suggestions and now I'm more certain they're not the best ideas. They don't make the game impossible or horrible but I don't think they fit well or add anything to it other than unnecessary penalty.

Insert Name

I found the cause of the bug, soon I will fix it.

Alex8778

Thanks for the clarification. After testing some more, it seems like the bug I described in item 12 does not happen all the time, which may make it more difficult for you to fix. But I've definitely seen it happen a few times already. From what I observed, it looks like the thief has no real AI, she only walks to random pre-determined points located in the navmesh. But those random points seem to be influenced by the proximity of the player (which is good, it makes it more difficult to circle around her entirely in level 26). It is possible that the bug occurs when the first random point that is chosen is inside the room (there are two or three as far as I know), which happens to be the closest point to the player character. Since the room has only one exit, this makes it impossible to get out without getting caught. Maybe simply make her walk to one particular point outside of the room after she's done hogtie-ing the girl instead of letting her start her patrol routine right away to avoid choosing one of these close points first.

Seconding the party about the dizziness being a bit nauseating.

Cale

Thank you for adding the fatigue and dizziness features to the game, they really add to the feeling and to the challenge! Nice work there :) I really like that the girl is punished for rolling too much or for doing too many acrobatics now :) If you allow, I'd like to make a few remarks. 1. The way I understand it, every action costs stamina. Perfect. The screen gradually desaturates and becomes grainy, this is a nice, clear and uninvasive effect. But as long as the stamina is not completely depleted, her strength is at 100% (it seems, but I may be wrong). It is only when the stamina is depleted that she becomes weak and the heartbeat is heard. Instead of an on/off physical effect, how about making her strength gradually go down as the stamina goes down, passed a certain threshold (like 50% for example), and the heartbeat is heard gradually louder as her stamina keeps going down? In other words, if the stamina is between 100% and 50% there is no effect to her strength or to the view, and from 50% down to 0% there would be a gradual effect on her strength and a gradual effect on the view and heartbeat sound. Speaking of the heartbeat, could you maybe tone down the screen magnification effect a tad? With how much it beats now it looks like she's about to have a heart attack :) 2. Still about the stamina, it would be great if her breathing animation was slowed down or sped up as she grows winded. Not a big deal, but it would make sense. She already gets sweaty after some struggling after all. 3. And maybe instead of a heartbeat you could make the player hear a gradually louder and faster nose breathing sound (since she's gagged). Finding good nose breathing sounds is not easy but I have found a few so I can help you there. The tricky part is to avoid letting the girl moan while she's supposed to be inhaling. This is just a suggestion, not a big deal if you don't implement it, the heartbeat effect is fine. 4. The camera wobbling when the girl is dizzy is a nice effect... but it makes me feel a bit of motion sickness and I must not be the only one. It is also a visual-only effect, the girl is not more difficult to control when she's dizzy, she's just more difficult to look at. Here is a suggestion instead. You could make the screen very blurry (or just blurry and see double, you kind of did this with the chromatic aberration effect already which is nice) and nudge the girl to get on her back to stablise herself, or if you don't want that (the girl could be winded at the same time after all), maybe invert some controls, like left/right and maybe up/down. I know, inverting the controls in a game tends to annoy the player so to avoid making them think there is a bug when she's dizzy, maybe an explanation somewhere would be welcome like with your other tutorials. 5. I'm not sure but I think I have seen the girl shake her head after recovering from dizziness. If this is indeed something you've added, good job :) If not that's fine too. 6. Also I'm not sure either, but I think the girl becomes dizzy when she loses balance or when her head goes too fast (like when doing a back roll), not when she hits her head. It would be better to make her dizzy when she hits her head too hard because when you lose balance you still have some control to slow down your fall and avoid hitting your head. Not always but most of the time you do. 7. For some time I've purposely run into walls (with the legs free) to see how easy it was to make the girl dizzy. It turns out she's quite resilient! Maybe hitting a wall at full speed should make her dizzy more easily :) 8. I think hopping should consume more stamina than rolling and struggling. For the time being, hopping is the easiest and cheapest way to navigate when the legs are tied and feels a bit like cheating. Also it is quite easy to avoid falling over but if the girl is winded, it should contribute to the difficulty by making her balance more precarious. I'd also love it if hopping was more challenging and interesting overall: it could be like in Bondage Motel where every hop requires a separate press on th Space key, the length of the press determining the length of her jump, and the longer the more difficult it is to keep balance. I'd also like it if there was also a backward/forward balance to keep and not just a left/right one. Lastly, I'd like it if we could gracefully go down on the floor by crouching (and maybe pressing a key while crouched, for example crouching a second time) instead of forcing ourselves to lose balance, which usually makes the girl dizzy. In practice, it could be like this: press the crouch key once to make the girl crouch then a second time immediately before she stands up to make her lose balance without falling from too high. 9. We can still stand up easily from a laying position when the legs are tied in parallel. I know this was not the focus of this update but I hope you're still considering adding the requirement to get support for the girl's back in order to let her stand up, in the future. This would make falling down a lot more punishing and the "legs tied parallel" bondage a lot more interesting instead of being just transient :) 10. I have noticed a small bug (it was there in the previous version too). When in hogtie and you reach a knife, the small window with the knife appears, fine. But when you cut the rope and the window disappears, the controls seem to be stuck to whatever they were before the window appears, making the girl insist on rolling to one side until you press another control. No big deal but surprising. 11. Another bug, a more annoying one this time, is in Scene 7 (zero gravity). This bug was also present in the previous version. The girl always rotates around her forward axis whatever you do, always to her left, which ruins the careful positioning you have to do to navigate in this scene. It is already quite hard as it is, but this additional rotation makes the controls seem random. 12. And another bug I saw in the previous version, which I couldn't test in this one. In level 38, after you get captured the thief stays stuck in the room you're in and constantly re-captures you until she leaves you alone with the bomb. So either you have to finish the level in one try without getting captured, or you have to finish it after escaping from the bomb. 13. I don't know what the difference is between easy, medium and hard difficulties. Does it influence where the knives are located? We often don't have much distance to cover to reach the first knife when hogtied. Could harder difficulties make the knives more difficult to reach? More random? Or add decoy knives that don't cut anything at all? Or hide their beacons altogether? I don't think harder should mean the girl should be weaker though. The difficulty should modify the environment instead of the character, hence make the game more replayable in the long run instead of just more difficult. 14. One last thing, just a personal preference. I really like the levels where we have to fight against the furniture to make our way to the knife. Like the one where the knife is under the big table surrounded by chairs and you have to kick them away while in bondage, or the levels where the knife is on a chair that must be toppled over. I'd like more of that because I like games where physics are involved :) Keep up the good work, your game is getting better and better with each update!