Can there be multiple endings... here me out getting upgrades im totally guess can be based off items or fighting back like you know eating them?
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More than 1 ending is currently planned, but it's still loose in terms of what these will be; Moreso has to do with NPC relations than anything else, which should effectively boil down to hunting for some items around the map; This is also to incentivize going after some optional bosses and finding a hidden location or two.
A bit of feedback but when I saw in the description that the goal was to be as tailorable as possible I was like "Oh cool", because one of my biggest complaints about ratpacked that it lists as its main inspiration was that it forced me into so many vore situations with female preds. And not only was it immediately apparent upon starting the game that you don't have any control over that, but you also don't have control over the sex of your character and are forced to play as a female character. These are two of the most basic things when it comes to any degree of tailorability especially for a kink related game >_> I still gave it a look and the two male preds you DO have are really good. As a small note though, the space bar being the button to advance the scene and the same to teleport away is a bit of an issue if you're trying to see stuff in sandbox mode.
What Astrolucidity said!
For clarity, I'm like 2/3ds of the way done with the actual assembly of the first of the 2 zones that I'm adding in the next update; and a good chunk of the time up to this point was working on code stuff. My current goal is to have the next update around late June or early July, which so far seems doable, though if it ends up taking a bit longer the backup plan is to have it out as a Vore Day thing.
Fantastic project, a V1 that looks already fantastic. the gameplay by itself already feels good, gravity feels good, the little knockback seems good enough, pace of animation are perfect to me.
I have a few suggestions:
• charged attacks could add range and empower the attack (+attack visual & audio feedback when hitting enemies)
• health indication on enemy (maybe a slight sprite change indicating their exhaustion?) & I'm always a fan of having the vanquished enemies on the floor.
• having more abilities like a dash or a parry that could be mixed with a crouching feature (crouch slide?).
• multiple type attacks per enemies for multiple catch animation type would be so cool. (maybe one animation for contact grab and one for ability grab?) like the wolf that grabs you because she is at your range vs she pins you after a dash.
enemies ideas:
• fat lazy frog. ok so it's a fat frog and she doesn't move a lot but have a tongue that goes pretty far if she sees you... maybe she takes naps but opens her eyes once in a while or when you splash water around/ jump/etc.
• chameleon thing: a chameleon type creature (I'm imagining a kind of dark lizard thing with a very slick, tacticool design! maybe with magical glows like neon strips), that phases when spotting you only to reappear above you, and if you don't move fast enough, slurp, you're gone, only to reappear as a puddle of cum. a fun detail could be that this creature turns transparent under stimulus, and cant control themselves properly as it digest you.
I might come back again and suggest more things. thank you so much for sharing your game <3 please keep it up!!!
I almost agree, I never seen a dissatisfying parry in a game unless it's too free to succeed. ¯\_(ツ)_/ ¯ really depends on what Pthalo decides for future enemies as dodges/parries only fit the most paced action gameplays. depends on the reward for success and backlash for missing are too. I trust Pthalo can make good decisions
Extremely solid ideas! I might not go for those enemy designs specifically, but I like the gameplay perspective behind them, especially the stealth one. A further charged version of the strong attack is currently planned (technically sort of implemented, but there's no way to obtain it outside of the debug menu) Health indication would potentially be a good idea, though I'd probably just end up with like enemy health bars to save animation time. An i-frame dash is planned as a reward upgrade for an optional boss, and while parries aren't a consistent thing on the player end, some enemies have certain attacks that can be be interrupted by a player attack to put them in a stunned state briefly (the warden already does this in 0.1, though it's not made clear, which is something that's been changed in 0.2)
What you are describing, enemy attacks that can be interrupted by a player attack, is known as clashing, with outright interrupting an enemy's attack and getting special rewards for it is known as a counter hit. It's significantly better than an I-frame dodge or parry, though a I-frame dodge, especially when balanced properly, is always going to be better than a parry.
The fact save points are basically nonexistent, separated by huge lengths of stage populated by really, really annoying enemies that are more frustrating than fun to fight kills the game for me.
The save points being basically from Africa to New Zealand apart wouldn't be so much of a problem if the breakable items in the game actually dropped healing consistently. For some inexplicable reason, they're randomized.
Plus the player's intangibility being the same length as the enemy, AND there's no indication on a majority of the enemies that they're intangible is also extremely frustrating. I've found myself in constant grab loops over and over because of this, and it's really, really annoying.
Couple that with the fact your attack now locks you in for an annoyingly long time, and also forces you to step forward with each swing, with enemies that are either way too tanky, come at you from odd angles or have absolutely no indication of what their going to do next, and the game just feels like crap to play because you get reset back to Africa when you're two steps from New Zealand because of one of several of the jank things above.
Admittedly a lot of the reason for this is because people were complaining that the difficulty was far too easy on the first release, though I think I may have overdone the attack exit time delay a bit in an effort to slow down player DPS to a sluggish amount while the enemy behavior in the later areas more matches the old attack speed. I'm going to put out a balance patch shortly, and a more bugfix centered patch after a week or two once I've gathered bug reports.
The game is fun to play, don't get me wrong. In its current state there are frustrating mechanics, but nothing that can't be fixed. In my opinion to fix the issues I've been having:
1. Give the player intangibility after escaping a grapple, not the enemy. This will help prevent re-grab loops, and give the player a window to fix their mistake, especially against tanky enemies, or enemies who attack from odd angles. Oh, and be sure to switch the submit button to a different button than "attack" nothing feels worse than accidentally getting grabbed mid swing, when you're just about to attack again, and accidentally deleting yourself at full health with no checkpoint nearby.
2. To adjust player DPS, make it so that your attacks are a three-swing cycle, rather than an infinite loop of A→B→A→B. I've noticed you have a windup swing to deal double damage after a brief charge. Have that as part of the three-swing cycle. A→B→C! This would also leave the player open briefly, fixing the DPS problem. They can also choose to only swing twice and back off. You can still have the charged up power swing, letting players wind up to use it right away, and have powerups tied to only that type of power swing.
3. HP drops. Make canisters and breakables 100% drop for HP pickups, but have the full heals randomized. If you want to keep the random drops, make it a default that enemies drop HP unreliably.
4. Have a split between minor and major checkpoints. Ones that fully heal you, and another that just saves your progress, and current health without healing. That way you can have those midway through difficult gauntlets. It isn't about the difficulty of dealing with individual enemies, its the iteration time in doing so. Having to fight through a gauntlet after gauntlet just to get back to where you were feelsbadman :(
5. The mage enemies that you include need to have a telegraph of their spell. I know you have the icon of their spell they're casting show up when they cast, but the indicator of their spell is useless if it shows up at the same time their actual spell does. An enemy that causes that much disruption should go Telegraph → Delay → Execute. Plus, to make them less of a problem, have it so only one of those "fields" can be active at a time, but the duration of each field is shorter. This gives a gap for the player to approach, and react to the spells as they come out.
Gameplay critique out of the way, now for suggestions:
I love the fact you include melty digestion in the preferences, it's probably one of my all-time favorite kinks. If there's any way you could draw out the animation of her melting, it'd be even better. Right now it feels a bit too quick. If anything, it should go through multiple stages of the stomach window closing in, then opening up again, her getting progressively more melty, repeat a few times, before dissolving completely. This, of course, is skipped entirely if someone turns off the preference.
I feel like it might be a good idea to move the first tanuki gaurding the lever slightly to the right so that the lever is visible, otherwise some players might be low on health and choose not to fight thus missing out on the shortcut.
Also (I'm aware it's probrably a glitch but) it would be kinda nice if the thing where you could jump just before charging an attack to air strafe and get some additional movement while charging was added back since I felt like it made the combat a bit more interesting 👉👈 (ofc it's fair enough if that's not the direction you want to go)
Also also it might be a good idea to require a charged attack to parry the tanukis (or at least reduce the parry window) since currently it's possible to just hit them repeatedly and can't attack back most of the time.
Super solid suggestions all around; The charge attack to parry in particular is potentially a really good solution to the main issue that's making combat balance so difficult to figure out right now. I wouldn't have to arbitrarily slow regular attacks, but it also wouldn't be a spam-to-win thing if they can just smack you if you're not paying attention (that plus like a stamina system might be good). I'd probably have to lower the charge time somewhat, but I can also just slightly lower the damage along with it. I actually wasn't aware that you could do a charge jump for extra movement previously, but I'll look into adding that in as well. (might be a little hacky for the balance patch, but I'll try and make that more of a deliberate thing when I do the ground up attack system rework for the next update.)
1: some way to rebind controls would be nice, something about the current control scheme just feels wrong to me personally
2: I understand why you put all the 'niche' vore types in one option, but I would appreciate some sort of additional option to enable/disable each different type independently (such as, for my personal preference, enabling absorption and tail vore but disabling bladder vore)