Post by Vaughnfor in Ginas Gym comments

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I will also give you some feedback because I want this game to get even better in the future (and it’s a long one). Bear in mind I haven’t played the latest update. I joined a couple days before it dropped and the game is long, so you might’ve fixed some things already. Anyway, get ready for the longest unasked for critique you’ve ever seen.

Consider giving the players a bit of a breather after the end of this chapter. The last part of the story was heavy. Heavy and long and will likely leave the reader exhausted, but wanting more. Unless you force them into doing something simple (like make them focus on training). They will just burn themselves out. It seems like you’re already doing that, but just in case, I’m writing it here.
The game felt both too fast and too slow at the same time. As D.G. would say, “Pace yourself Gina”. During the second chapter, I managed to hit the strength cap way too quickly, before fulfilling any of the secondary requirements. Hell, I haven’t even been to the Dojo yet! So, you can probably imagine how thrilled I was when I had to grind away the next 3 weeks at the dojo without lifting a single dumbbell. Granted, that was caused by my stupidity, but if I had done it, I’m sure some of the other players would too. Actually, I’m pretty sure Gina herself would’ve done the same.

Then I get to stage 3 and it suddenly feels like I skipped a stage or something. Gina goes from simply trying to prove that she has it in her to be called a Greatarm to outright telling Greg that she will crush any patron who tries to be rude to her and actually crushes a wooden plank against her abdominals. Like what? Jade is practically drooling over how big she is. Like dayum girl, slow down, she merely stopped being called a pipsqueak at the previous stage and now you’re calling her “massive”?

I seriously feel like there should be one more stage here, like the point when Gina would be considered an “advanced gym-goer”, but not outright massive. Give the player a few breadcrumbs to make them feel like they’re progressing somewhere. You don’t need to alter the story (maybe move beating Mike here and give Gina a pat on the back from Greg), but give the player some secondary objectives to move them in the right direction. Probably the most difficult part would be generating new images… You seem to know quite a lot about working out (considering the lingo you’re using), so I think you know how bloody difficult it is to get abs as a girl. That is to say that stage 2 Gina is already pretty huge. Move those images to the new stage 2.5 and generate a new set of stage 2 images (somewhere between stage 1 and stage 2). This would smoothen out the transition between stages.

A similar problem is at stage 4. If two pages of requirements doesn’t tell you that the stage is overloaded, I don’t know what will.

In a similar vein, a lot of events are hooked up to one another in the story, but not in code. You sometimes get information about something happening before it actually does (Phil coffee event being mentioned to have already happened by the main characters, while I didn’t understand what they’re even talking about). I know, fixing this stuff is like untangling a pair of headphones and honestly, it’s not even that big of a deal. It doesn’t happen in the main story anyway.
A much bigger issue I’ve noticed are some missing images causing errors. At stage 4, while exploring the city, during the bobby hammer event, I met Jade who is supposed to show me the proper technique of striking with the hammer, but you probably didn’t expect my horny ass to neglect city exploration until I started looking for Jade clues. The code likely has a changing variable looking up Jade’s current stage, which is 3, but the programmer didn’t expect me to get here so late, so there are no images for that situation and the game crashes. Besides, the event shouldn’t even fire at this stage of the game as Jade is supposed to be missing.
That brings me to another issue. Gina always hit the strength cap so quickly, I had to practically ignore the gym until I had all the secondary objectives complete. She spent the majority of the game at exhaustion 0… in a game about her being a gym rat. Maybe make the gym more grindy?
Give the player the feeling like they’re ahead of schedule. Think it was mentioned in the Dr. Richter lab event that Tanya grew as huge as she is IN A YEAR. How about you make it 5? You just set a timer, and a tough one to beat at that. Characters often mention “weeks” or “months” and I often felt like you expected me to be much further than I actually was. When something like this happens, players tend to skip the secondary events and rush the main story. This can devalue the story (It becomes an obstacle keeping you from keeping up with where the creator expects you to be).
Gameplay is a bit undercooked atm, but it has a lot of potential. Imo, it would benefit a lot from a crazy bonus stacking system like the one in Warframe or PoE. You know, stacking motivation, effectivity and various other bonuses to hit crazy numbers that would be needed for some of the late-game strength thresholds. Also, give Greg’s shake some insane buffs and nerf overall strength growth to better represent how much quicker Gina grows compared to everyone else.
HOLY SHIT THAT MUSIC AT THE START BLEW MY FUCKING EARS AWAY. Seriously. Lower the volume to -23 LUFS, stat! That’s the loudness standard for podcasts. “But that’s not a podcast”. I don’t care. I couldn’t even enter the settings before having my ears blown off.

Obviously there’s a bunch of other, secondary issues. Like some atrociously generated eyes on some of the images, Jade’s expansion having arm-bending magic, or typos. But I was capable of glossing over most of them. To me, they’re just a part of a process.

Anyways, I got lost in the sauce. I want to reiterate that you made an amazing game. Hell, it even convinced me to pick up the gym again. Right now I will take a breather, but in a couple weeks I will be back and you can be sure I will write another essay for you (Whether you want it or not).

The_Don36 days ago(+1)

Many thanks for the kinds words. I'm glad you enjoyed out little game. And I don't mind long ass rants; shows people actually care a lot. So I'll say thanks for the input and I HOPE to get another one😁

Let me see. Some simple things first:

- Music volume is already lowered as a default, but I can lower it more (no specific LUFS in Renpy available though 😅)

- Thank for bringing the high-striker thing with Jade to my attention. I thought I made the event inaccessible if Jade left with Xici already, but apparently I have to check it again.

For some content stuff:

- Lvl 2 was supposed to be the "just slightly bit stronger than a normal guy"-Level 😅We gotta progress, if Lvl 6 means breaking the human limit.

- Shakes are OP 😅Chars without them can only progress to Lvl1 in the span of the game, but I could make this clearer by tweaking some numbers. Same goes for the requirements. It was mostly balanced around the fact that most quest-goals and side activities can be completed while training on the side, but ofc Lvl.4 with double goals broke that (since we wanted Gina to only surpass Stella after the lab assault).

- The feel of pacing is vastly different from the effectiveness of the playthrough ofc. Some min-maxers reached Lvl4 before the executioner appears, so stuff like weeks or months is more a "middle"-ground thing. The general time-frame is more or less set in the skip functions, so reaching Lvl.5 took Gina canonically 4 months (ofc. then she gets some new bonuses to speed things up 😁)

Oh, just to be clear, I value your input A LOT. Me explaining is not meant as a defence or to debase valid critique. I just like discussing things and give insight in our process.

Vaughnfor36 days ago

Oh no worries, I can’t see the progress behind the scenes. Thanks for clarifying some things a bit.

I am used to having my ears blown up by these itch.io games. But this one was so loud it was literally painful. Loudness Units are used in studios. Really, it’s just a fancy way of saying dBs. You can measure it in Audacity in Amplitude Statistics. Measured the Gina’s Gym.mp3 file, it’s -12.35 dB (flexing my college skills, I know), or roughly 3.5 times the volume of a podcast.

I actually thought you would shift all of the stages a bit. More stages, same size, same story. Just gameplay changes to give the player some feeling of progression. You probably wouldn’t even need to generate more pics tbh, but it would be nice.

And I know shakes are OP. I can see it in story. What I meant is some actual written number to make the player realize just how busted they are. Gina grows about 4x as fast anyone else, so imagine just a simple text under the shake of “quadruples your strength gain”. It doesn’t need to actually do it, just make the player think it does it.

“middle”ground risks half of the people feeling stuck behind the schedule. Say “shouldn’t be more than a month” instead of “a couple weeks”, “not even half a year” instead of “a couple months”. It means the same thing, but gives the player wider time frame.

(Also, “our little game” is like Bobby saying “little Gina” lol)

The_Don36 days ago

Think I will reword some time paragraphs. You're right there, feeling behind in progress is not appealing.

More stages without visual growth might upset other players though 😅 Can you imagine people's reaction when I said in the early stages of development that I only envisioned a visual growth every second level? Oh boy...
But we kind of want to rework the training function to show some numbers on the lifts, so there would be noticeable improvement even inside of the same level as the weights on the lifts would rise.

Vaughnfor36 days ago (1 edit)

Yeah… you’re right. They wouldn’t. I am just throwing out ideas. You don’t need to make the change at all if people wouldn’t like it.

I felt like a stage was missing, so I thought an entirely new stage would be good, but realized it would be too much work. A fake stage, as you said, wouldn’t work either. Maybe a checkpoint system? Dunno how you would implement it, but it would be perfect for squeezing in more requirements (not the stage 4 “checkpoint”).

The_Don35 days ago(+1)

You're not wrong there with an additional stage, but current focus is mostly on pushing forward the story and only rework old material where it is needed and within the scope of our timeframe. I currently have two of my cute lil helpers rework some old images, but most of the effort goes into creating new content for act3.