Fun Facts & Behind the Scenes - CoG v0.4.x
Added 2024-09-19 06:00:04 +0000 UTCI haven't done a fun facts post in a while!
That is to say, I skipped out on them during v0.4.0 and v0.4.1's release. The reason for that is: unlike the previous updates, I stopped writing them down regularly about halfway through 0.4's development due to a lack of time and admittedly quite a bit of rush-work.
So why now? Well, as I had to sift through all of the content in the game so far to write the Journal entries for v0.5, it led me to uncover quite a few details that I, frankly, completely forgot about myself.
I didn't skimp out on writing down the fun facts during 0.5's development though, but as I gathered all the previous "Fun facts" posts to put in one Collection here on Patreon, it bothered me to look at what would be a potential gap between v0.3 and v0.5.
And so I figured I would revisit what few notes I did have written for 0.4 and expand them with what I recently remembered. Now that I let you in on that bit of a background, let's dive into it!
Beginning with everything other than the main MQ3 pub content
First is an neat gameplay quirk you might not have noticed:
Did you know that your opponents are also capable of doing mulligans? A lot of the characters have cards they will attempt to mulligan for at the start of a battle, which is why sometimes, your opponents don't start with a full hand!
The Big Beau Section
This update actually saw a full redesign of how progressing Beau's storyline works. It even rolled back progress on saves that got too far beyond a fight whose aftermath scene ended up being rewritten and changed!
In the newly added scenes, there are several points at which Beau acts differently based on your Wgt:
During the first date, if your Wgt is too high, it will interrupt the date, causing you to miss an extra scene if you flirted with Beau earlier.
During the first gym scene, he will flirt with you only if both of you have low Wgt.
Actually, quite a big chunk of the first gym scene is completely different depending on whether Beau's Wgt is low or high.
The low Wgt variants might be particularly rare because of the extremely slow rate at which Beau loses Wgt... that is to say, he almost never loses any if you don't help him out by dragging his lazy ass over to the gym.
Beau's "Wgt loss mechanic" was changed to work that way in v0.4.1 to compliment the long-teased addition of going to the gym with him. Before the update, it was as steady as most other characters'! Are you curious as to how the new mechanic actually works in practice? Well wonder no more!
If Beau's Wgt is below 8, he will stop accepting invites to the gym and just let the rest naturally melt off of him at a rate of -1Wgt per day.
Otherwise he will lose it at a default rate of 20%/-1Wgt (read as 20% chance to lose -1Wgt every day)
When you go to the gym with him, he will lose a guaranteed -3Wgt in addition to a 50% chance of losing an extra -1Wgt.
For the next 6 days, he will then continue to lose weight at a rate of 90%/-1Wgt.
That's what happens behind the curtains for all the characters when they lose Wgt in the background! Beau's just happens to be the most complex due to how it is intrinsically tied to and affected by what you do.
Arnold's Alcoholic Additions
This version also saw the addition of the 2nd Arnold event! There's one very specific set of circumstances you can run into involving Arnold and Hammond.
On days when Arnold's 2nd encounter is available, if Hammond has already taken over the pub, it will be uniquely closed down. This is because during Arnold's encounter, Hammond is also there alongside him, spending time at the bar. And so it is implied that he closed the pub down early to visit his good ol' pal Edgar.
(For "some reason".)
If you lose to Arnold during this 2nd encounter, there are three variants of how that can end up playing out:
The two of you start getting real intimate (this happens if you said you found Arnold attractive earlier.)
The two of you don't do that, instead Edgar just throws you out for ripping out your clothes and flashing everyone (or... that's what it looks like to him, at least.)
One where nothing particularly scandalous happens, which happens when your clothes don't break because you were wearing Gordon's clothes.
Names! Names galore!
In a lot of the dialogue, the game checks for if you have the same name as an in-game character and points it out. The most fun one is probably in this very Arnold encounter, where if you choose stay with Edgar, Hammond and Nicole; Nicole mentions a "Ben" that Edgar used to have a crush on:
"Is Hammy wrong, though? He kinda looks like Ben from university, doesn't he? You know, that Ben? Oh you were head over heels for that guy."
If you're also named Ben, she will then add this little quip:
"Oh, or maybe your type is just people named Ben."
MQ3, or: playing mind games with myself
Now let's finally tackle the monster that is MQ3. Allow me to take you along for a ride that I myself went on several months ago when I worked on it.
The branching and optional scenes in MQ3 were perhaps the most elaborate out of any other storyline in the game. There are also quite a few unique combinations of circumstances that require some manual handling.
(Note from post-v0.5-release Oak: the above line was written before v0.5... and it turns out that update ended up having quite a few elaborate branches too.)
In the previous update, the cake scene with Russell required some setup by only triggering when you are below a certain Wgt to make sure you are always able to see the scene through to the end.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because MQ3 required a similar thing: during the investigation where you reunite with Cedric, there is a special rule in the battle that follows: you're only able to go as high as 40Wgt. There's a justification for this story-wise: you don't want your clothes to be destroyed.
However, if you're wearing Gordon's clothes, which covers the entire range from 20-54Wgt, this problem doesn't really arise... and so, originally there was simply a warning that didn't let you investigate, encouraging you to lose Wgt first. Doing so assured that you would always have to be in small-sized clothes during the scene for things to work.
Now let's overthink it
In the end, I decided that this limitation needed to happen more organically... leading to the entire alternate investigation scene where you get distracted by the tantalizing thought of food. This also had the added benefit of building up towards the eventual reveal that Norman was behind it all.
Of course, I had to overthink further it for no reason, and I ended up putting in two variants of this scene: a regular one and an extreme one for 40+Wgt, where you're even forced to pay 3¤ to Norman!
But what if the player doesn't have the money? Well, alright, why not add a branch where Norman lets the player pay it off later? Ok, but now I have to add a check to the future investigations, as well as the regular pub entrance dialogue that handles this and gets the player to have to pay. That's fine, right?
(As a side note: somewhat amusingly, if you end up finishing MQ3 without paying Norman back... then you of course no longer have to do that, considering everything that happens.)
Dig myself even deeper
What if the player continues to come in at 40+Wgt even after having experienced that? Feels like a lot of work to write another entire variant of the scene to loop infinitely, let's just prevent the player from doing it then. But narratively it's not very compelling for the player to want to go in and be told "You can't walk in cause that'll break the game", we need it to happen organically.
Ok, add a scene where the player is stopped by a fellow Stout and warned about it, now they have an in-universe reason to not go in!
That not only serves as a flat-out explanation to people who still haven't realized they're not supposed to keep blindly going in, but it also allows for as a brief appearance of another Stout to really flesh out the world and show you that there are other people working at the Stout Group besides you and like the 3 people you've seen!
At the end of this swerving road...
None of these (in hindsight) quite narratively significant scenes were originally there when the overall outline of MQ3 was written. Why did we do these again..? Right, because I needed to create a more believable way to railroad the player into the right state for Cedric's encounter... and it ended with the addition of two completely unique scenes that also required small checks and unique lines of their own to be added to existing dialogue.
This kind of "realism" that I ask of myself while writing for the game is probably unsustainable. At the end of the day, it is a video game, and looping/unnatural dialogue is eventually going to happen, but hell if I won't do my darndest to prevent that.
My god, there's even more..!
At this point, it's just bad design. There's another glaring issue I ran into while writing MQ3: the 7 day countdown until the confrontation with Norman.
Because of the very strict requirement that it needs to happen exactly when it was scheduled, there are many problems that arise: the player needs to be available on that day and not skip over it. But guess what? There are multiple ways that can happen!
If the player loses a battle 3 days before, they'll be in the hospital while it happens! This was fixed by not allowing any game overs during this time period, instead showing a retry screen similar to scripted required wins like the Russell and Matteo battles.
Many other events can advance the day! Such as staying over with Akello at the cabin and Arnold at the pub! This had to be manually remedied by not allowing either of these events to trigger the day before the pub battle
For Arnold's scene, this simply means not showing the Event on the map.
In Akello's case, when you call him, he will say that the campers are not there on that particular Wednesday (you'll notice that in the intro he says the campers are only there every "other" Wednesday or so)... or he'll just flat-out tell you he's not in the mood if you already lost to Borik and disappointed him before.
All of these branching requirements were quite a headache to cover, and they are the main reason why v0.4 took so long... In the future, I'll probably want to avoid any wildly branching and complex paths like these, as well as anything that would use the countdown that the final confrontation uses.
(Post-v0.5-release Oak here again: the above, too, was written before the release of v0.5, and is an utter lie.)
Some remaining details about MQ3
After the end of Russell's MQ, in the days leading up to the pub MQ, you can actually see Norman's Wgt slowly rise over time.
There was also the matter of handling incorrect times: one of the conceits of MQ3 is that you have to arrive at the pub at the right time of day to find new information.
... in practice, this time check actually only occurs in 2 out of the 4 investigations you have to do, and one of those will accept either daytime or evening, so it's actually not even all that strict.
Once you order food, you're locked in on investigating for the day, but you also have the option of escaping commitment by just changing your mind and leaving the pub.
This opens up a bit of potential for meta-gaming, where some people might try to predict whether they should order food or just leave depending on if unique text appeared right before that, which would give away that something new was about to happen.
This meant that the preceding text had to be at least somewhat unpredictable and generic, so that it wasn't obvious from the get-go whether the investigation was going to lead nowhere or not.
The case of the Cedric
Here's a bit of a fun storytelling detail that doesn't appear in the actual dialogue itself. During the first fight in the intro, Cedric's deck consists of:
3x Feed
2x Menu for Two
1x Abs... drool
1x Drink it All Up
1x Exercise
1x Fat outbreak
1x Keep Pumping
1x Seconds
In your rematch fight at the pub, his deck is the following:
3x Exercise
3x Menu for Two
1x Abs... drool
1x Drink it All Up
1x Fat outbreak
1x Keep Pumping
1x This hand sucks!
1x You want more?
Notice something interesting? Well, the deck has barely changed, of course, but there's something else... all of the new cards in his 2nd deck are, in fact, the ones you get from Gordon at the start of the game.
This is a bit of a storytelling through gameplay moment. Because Cedric hasn't gotten any new cards, it means that he hasn't used The Fattening at all... and more importantly: he hasn't even touched the card crafting mechanic which requires you to hit the pub a few times!
And with that, I'm all facted out...
I hope you enjoyed this clobbered together menagerie of fun facts. I sure enjoyed writing them, especially since I managed to cram in so many details in the update, and it ended up being a bit of a technical look into how things had to be designed to work, too!
With v0.4 out of the way, I can now move on to properly formatting and editing down the fun facts I wrote down for v0.5, so look forward to that coming out in a week or two!
And so we find ourselves at the end of a post once again... and you probably know what I'm going to say now: thank you for reading and for supporting the project!
Comments
1) Ah, in that case, that is definitely a temporary limit for now while the game is in development! 2) I'm not sure I understand, but it's actually the player that always gets to play first (since there's no priority determination at the start of battle). Because the statuses tick down at the start of either participants turn, they should last the same amount of time for both you and your opponent. For example: - when you activate So Greedy , it starts at 2, but you still have to finish the rest of your turn. Once you do, it ticks down to 1, and your Opponent gets to play, and that's when they will likely trigger its effects. After their turn is done and they pass it to you, the status ticks down to 0 and is disabled. - same thing happens when the opponent uses So Greedy on their turn: it starts at 2, then they finish their turn and pass it over to you, at which point the status ticks down to 1. You get to play and the effect activates every time you draw a card. After your turn is done, you pass it to the opponent, and the status ticks down to 0 and is disabled. In both cases, the status lasts so long so that its target has to play with it active, and then once they finish, the status is turned off.
Oak Fells
2024-09-30 16:14:53 +0000 UTCNo worries! Thanks for your diligent replies! 1) For ticking clock I mean 'The game will finish on x date in this current version'. I understand this is currently due to the fact the game is a work in progress, but I'm wondering if it will ever open to just being a continuous romp through the countryside to 'build' your characters deck until you're ready to meet certain objectives to continue onto the next part of the storyline. 2) Oh I see. That explains why 'so greedy' only really lasts "one turn" as even though it's technically two turns, the opponent cannot draw cards during the current turn. Does the opponent typically always go first in a turn? That would explain why it feels like their statuses always seem to last longer than mine. 3) Ah. Ok. Yeah the money was basically for clothes. For some reason intended or unintended I 'lost' the black shirt on this replay and lacked the money to buy another due to other purchases I had made in the month and I just thought 'oh no now I'm going to have to fish for money but I have so much other stuff to do!' 4) Ok understood. I do love the one sided battles, they're great haha. Perhaps there could be a 'reason' why we could fatten up the townfolk. Like they know the secret about the fatteners and the only way to stop them from telling everyone is to get them too fat to leave town haha. Anyway, thanks once again. Really enjoying your hard work and I hope you're proud of yourself for making something so fun and novel :-)
Casual Munch
2024-09-29 12:05:50 +0000 UTCThanks for all the feedback! 1) Could you specify what you mean by "ticking clock elements"? If you mean missable events, then there isn't actually anything in the game like that! Sometimes event markers will seem to disappear off the map, but that just means they will reappear later when you fulfill the conditions again. 2) This is an issue with the keywording that I haven't quite figured out yet. There are two ways the word "turn" can be understood: - one round, after *both* you and opponent have gotten to play - or, every time someone finishes playing their cards (i.e. 2 turns have passed after you and your opponent got to play once) The first definition, while more intuitive, doesn't quite work because every status would count down at a different time depending on if it was caused by the player or opponent, which would be very confusing. And so I settled on the second option. Since statuses were added later to the game, there isn't really any place in the game where this is explained... other than the Game Rules, which is tucked away deep inside the pause menu. I'll probably have to add a more clear-cut tutorial on statuses somewhere. 3) The fishing money was added *before* the monthly paycheck and was just meant to be a cute little bonus. I still haven't quite figured out how I want money accrual and spending to work (since realistically, the only thing you *really* need to spend money on in the game so far is clothes, alongside the gym, which is a given), so for now I decided the monthly paycheck was enough. 4) That's a neat idea! Though unfortunately it doesn't quite work with the format of the game, as most of the battles are scripted, unique, one-time encounters with a full narrative written around them. I've been pretty careful with the few One-sided battles I added to the game so far, because if the player was allowed to just freely attack people willy nilly, it would very quickly lead to the game just abruptly ending, as the Stout Group wouldn't tolerate that kind of behavior.
Oak Fells
2024-09-29 11:04:53 +0000 UTCI'm really enjoying this new update. I'm playing it from the start and there's quite a lot of new stuff you've added in. It's been a project I've been very happy to support because let's be honest, there's nothing like this out there to this degree of quality so you're actually producing something pretty groundbreaking. I had a couple of questions/suggestions. Please don't take them as me telling you what to do with your own game, it's just a bit of fun so take from it what you will. I also don't understand the limitations of the software program you're using, so you might just think "pffft, that won't work". 1) Do you plan on removing the ticking clock element at some stage in the game? This is obviously not feasible at this point due to the timed quests, but perhaps later so we are able to get those energy zests and consumables for the cards we'd like to build our decks with without fear of missing out events? 2) Status reduction times: I've noticed that when using certain status cards they expire faster than specified. For example 'so greedy' which is supposed to last two turns. Is this an oversight? 3) I've noticed the only way you can accrue money is to fish. And it's not reliable. Perhaps a 'sell' feature from goods you grow in the garden could help that. 4) I enjoy playing a bit of an 'evil feeder' sometimes and enjoy the fattening the townsfolk scenes you've put in. Perhaps once of the daily choices we could make (to help add as much fattening content as possible) is an area where we could go and fatten a rotating roster of townsfolk. If we fatten them to capacity, we could get some sort of reward, like money or items or cards or whatever. Anyway, love what you're doing just the way it is, and thanks for creating such a fun game :-)
Casual Munch
2024-09-29 09:56:03 +0000 UTCI honestly can not put down this game! Thank you for all your hard work!
ArtyMoobs
2024-09-20 15:17:05 +0000 UTCThe entire park location and jogging minigame are very much afterthoughts from very early in the game's development, so it will likely be completely overhauled in the future, at which point there will probably be a storyline to go alongside it!
Oak Fells
2024-09-19 21:20:24 +0000 UTCI really appreciated these insights! It's a phenomenal game on its face, but being able to peek behind the curtain of how it's designed is extra gratifying.
L.K.
2024-09-19 20:33:09 +0000 UTCI absolutely love the dedication and love you put into your craft!
PanDemonics
2024-09-19 15:43:48 +0000 UTCThis is very gratifying I like it. I would like to make a contribution, when you go to the park at night the game mentions "nothing to do here" or something like that, could you add a mini event in which you get assaulted or something if you go during the night without care Well, not that they just attack you like that, but something funny or interesting to fill out the game and also remove the time limit for saving games please T-T
Eduardo Nuñez
2024-09-19 13:02:13 +0000 UTCAh fair enough, phew! I was worried I had missed content
Turmeric Watercress
2024-09-19 09:54:11 +0000 UTCAh, the wording might've been a bit misleading! I was referring to the battle text at the end of the battle if you lose. This was back from when I still put most of the aftermath text in there, rather than into fully-fledged dialogue scenes like in the farm encounter!
Oak Fells
2024-09-19 09:22:02 +0000 UTCWait! there is a chance for a sexy scene with Arnold if you lose?! I thought that only happens if you win and go to the back room! How do you trigger that coz I always get told off by egar and black out
Turmeric Watercress
2024-09-19 07:39:47 +0000 UTCThis is awesome and was a lot of fun to read. I really appreciate how much time, attention, and detail you are putting into this project. It keeps me coming back to it and wanting to replay it/search for branches/events that I may have missed. Can't wait to see the v.05 fun facts. That update was a ton of fun. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
M. Anthony Horne-Williams
2024-09-19 07:13:52 +0000 UTCReading through all of this, your respect to detail is amazing and I really appreciate it from a player perspective. It allows flexibility as one of the biggest fears when it came to playing / reviewing the game was missing bits so being railroaded is appreciated so I can see all the content. (Also the guides written in previous updates were very nice) I just know I would totally be doing something similar if I were in this position so it's actually really nice to hear the process from someone else. Regardless, once again your effort is so appreciated, try not to get your head into a spin too much! Remember to have fun and always looking forward to seeing whatever you end up cooking up. (also interested in seeing the v0.5 fun facts!)
Guybee
2024-09-19 06:46:22 +0000 UTC
