It's a cool idea and concept! Oregon Trail is a classic, but...it's also a frustrating classic, and one that is synonymous with cheap deaths and alot of trial and error to actually succeed.
I never got to encounter any size mechanics at all, as I just kept dying. Whether from cold, starvation, or cold starvation. Everything functioned well enough gameplay wise, it was just not well explained enough so that I could survive.
I think ditching the common elements of hunger, temperature, and so on for stuff that actually felt size-kink influenced would've been cooler. Maybe someone in the crew has blueberry affliction- which could boost the party energy while slowing them under the weight. Or a giantess roams, and you have to travel slowly to avoid detection.
I want to believe there's that kinda creativity on display, but I just never got that far as the base difficulty hits so hard, so fast. For a properly big game with all the time and budget for it, this could be cool! For a game jam title, I'm left sadly deflated.
Viewing post in Journey Across Gargantua jam comments
Thanks so much for giving it a try! We definitely ran into scope creep real bad towards the end and unfortunately didn't have enough time to implement all the sizey events we had planed. Of the sizey events we do have, there's a good handful of them but we didn't quite playtest enough to find a good middle ground for encounters, there were plans to "hard code" some size events but we went with the random distribution to kinda keep things fresh. I think we didn't realize just how likely a non-size playthrough could be. We actually do have a blueberry event, it's a random foraging event!
We're hoping to fix most of what you mentioned, including balancing to die a lot less from the environment. But I think we want to keep the classic Oregon trail references for the most part. We'll see how the additional playtests come out!
Thanks again for giving it a shot, and for sharing your thoughts! <3