oakfells

Fun Facts for v0.5.1 and v0.6.0

Added 2025-07-19 16:00:17 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone! It's been quite a while one of these, mainly because I didn't have a whole lot to share about v0.5.1. Now that 0.6.0 is out, there is enough to combine into one post, including some fun statistics stuff at the end. Let's begin!

Version 0.5.1

Storytelling through gameplay

Cedric dialogue has variations based on how you treated him in the pub MQ: whether you won during the match, as well as how you treat him afterwards. Because of that it can end on two very different vibes.

There are several interesting things about Cedric's deck in this encounter.

(Note from the future: while v0.6.0 changed a lot of opponent's decks, the following still applies to both his previous and current decks.)

During the 2nd fight, at the pub, it is just a variant of his tutorial deck that adds some of the cards given to you by Gordon at the start.
(In v0.6.0, the deck is completely identical to the intro since Gordon no longer gives you new cards.)
- This is meant to show that until the pub MQ, he had indeed not done anything or improved at all like Gordon said.
However, after the pub MQ is done (which is implied to be the first time Cedric had actually faced anyone other than you with The Fattening), Cedric's deck is finally updated with several new cards. These are notably:
- Bottleneck (which unlocks after you fight Norman/Ratko)
- Without further ado (which unlocks for the you after fighting Matteo, but Ratko and Norman both also have this card)
- Don't end up like that - a new card unique to Cedric.

In addition, the final new card in Cedric's deck changes depending on how the finale of the pub MQ went:

It will be "Food Coma" if you fought Ratko and won.
It will be "Taste of your own" if you fought Norman and won.
If you lost during the final fight, the deck will not have either card.

The implication is of course that Cedric crafted the card of whoever he ended up fighting, but in the route where you lose to your Opponent, they end up ganging up on Cedric and cutting his fight short: resulting in him missing out on the final card.

This actually creates an interesting "self-balancing" effect, where players who lost the final pub fight will end up having an easier fight with Cedric here due to him lacking the more powerful Signature cards. Since the player missed out on the card themselves, it sort of balances itself out.

A little easter egg

Basically only vaguely teased through the patch notes, I added a fun little easter egg with the 0.5.1 update, hidden inside the phone UI in the game.

As you can see from the screenshot, it is based on a certain variation of Mastermind that became quite the phenomenon a few years back. I worked on this as a fun little distraction and exercise on the side.

Obviously I didn't want to just create a one-to-one clone, so I infused it with a bit of CoG-themed flavoring: putting in only words that are either directly, or tangentially related to the game.

However, there were only so many 5-letter words I could come up with that were relevant, and so, there are actually even a few words from other kinks as well, that only appear if you have them enabled in the content settings.

More storytelling through gameplay

And now let's get back to the main game. Franklin's deck introduced two new draw cards: "Smart Start" and "Meticulous Draw". Back in one of the previous posts, I pointed out that because of how lacking the game's draw cards have been until now, these have been added as a way to diversify your options a little.

(Note from the future: this point isn't really relevant anymore, because v0.6.0 just added a ton of cards all across the board.)

However, because cards are usually only unlocked for crafting after you fight its user, this meant that people who lost to Bucky would miss out on these very necessary cards.

Originally I mended this by just unlocking them regardless of if you fought Franklin or not, but in v0.5.1, the cards now unlock after you meet Franklin and Bucky in town. In a way, this is a nice little narrative tie in to the way Franklin decides to confide in you.

... and this is actually a fantastic segue into v0.6.0, because in v0.6.0 many cards now unlock through story progression/reaching certain criteria, rather than only through battles like before!

Version 0.6.0

The 0.6.0 update added a whole 33 new cards, not counting auxiliary ones such as Empty Packaging or the 2 stages of Binge Eating and Treadmill.

That is an increase of an entire 40% compared to the previous count of 79 (which includes cards that don't even appear anywhere in the game yet). In other words: a hell of a lot of development time went into the cards during the development cycle for 0.6.0.

This is also the first time I've put focus and effort into the card illustrations - until now, all of the cards illustrations were largely fast and messy sketches that were done more out of necessity, rather than to create actually interesting images.

It's clear now after the companion story "How the times change" came out (which you can read here), that the reason for this is that I actually decided to start building small self-contained narratives in a lot of the card art! That meant a lot of the card art got the same care as any other standalone illustration.

How the times change and how it came to be

"How the times change" appears in a whopping 15 of the cards (+2 cards that don't appear anywhere in-game yet). The way I developed the cards in tandem with the story is a bit complicated.

It started with me revisiting the very first card illustration I made for the game: the basic "Feed" card. From there, I bounced off, deciding to tell a bit of an implied story using "Feed" and another card: "Menu for 2".

After touching them up to not only update the shoddy old art, but also match the new story and character designs I wanted to write about them, I looked through the list of card effects that needed to be added in the update. Many of them naturally gave way to theming that I could see myself fitting into the story: and so in a strange way, I started building off the story based off of how the plot point could be used to illustrate the cards and match their effects.

As the story got more complicated, finding an appropriate card from the list of to-be-added cards became more difficult, and so I started working backwards: thinking of plot points that could then be turned into new card effects I had not yet thought of. So in the end, "How the times change" was created both by and for the cards that would use its illustrations.

But Joe and Connor from How the times change aren't the only two recurring characters in the card art!

There are a few, such as "Exercise"'s updated art, or the character that appears on the new "Treadmill" card.

There are also a few cards that feature characters that don't appear on any other ones, but were still made with a future story in mind. I was basically coming up with a bunch of story concepts to go along with the new card effects that needed to be created.

Unlike How the times change, which I had mostly written almost in full before the update went out, these other illustrations have a more unfinished, rougher story outline with some short drafts written that go over the key points that appear in the illustrations.

Since the cards' flavor text sometimes gives away some of the plot (some even being direct quotes from their stories), there's a bit of extra fun that can be had with sleuthing out which cards are connected, and trying to piece together what their stories are about.

And now: a fun little literary exploration

As of v0.5.1, the word count of the writing in CoG is:

About 152,106 words

Here are a few extra details about what that count comes from:

It only includes overworld dialogue + character battle text.
- It also includes duplicated dialogue that has slight variations based on branching.
It doesn't include things like card descriptions, flavor text and activation text.
It doesn't include the journal recap entries.
It doesn't include text in other miscellaneous parts, such as equipping clothes, item descriptions, etc.

Now a number like that is nice and fun, but it doesn't really offer much information unless we put it into perspective... so why don't we compare it to other pieces of literature?

Cards of Gluttony is:

As long as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Macbeth, Tempest, and Midsummer Night's Dream combined.
60% longer than The Hobbit (95,022 words), the least wordy book in the Lord of The Rings series.
1/3rd of the Lord of the Rings trilogy (481,103 words)
1/5th of the Bible (783,137 words) (based on the King James translation)

Neat! We're a third-way through writing the LotR trilogy! What other statistics can we look at? What about how long it would take to read all of CoG?

The average reading speed of an adult is about 250 words per minute.

At this speed, it would take about 10 hours to read through all of the dialogue, provided one wasn't just speedreading/skimming it. Wow, that is... definitely far longer than I expected, especially considering the game is still under development.