itch.io

Right now ghost dialogue is like a state machine, where you have a list of dialogue options and whenever a ghost switches from one state to another it randomly chooses one option to display. (like going from chasing to having caught the player, or swallowing them, etc)

and while it works pretty well, it is somewhat limited. which is why i wanted to suggest the ability to have weights and conditions attatched to dialogue options within one of those "blocks" ("inital_grab", "taking_too_long", etc. are examples of blocks).

weights would allow users to adjust the rarity of dialogue options. for example if the "initial_grab" of a ghost has 2 options then both have a 50% chance of being picked, but if you give them weights of 0.9 and 0.1 respectively then the first one has a 90% chance of being picked while the other has a 10% chance. not specifying a weight just keeps the original behaviour.

now, conditionals would be the big one. having the ability to select dialogue options based on certain conditions in addition to randomness would allow for way more complex ghost interactions and make them feel more alive (pun intended) as you can make them react to certain things. JSON aparrently supports if else statements by default, so it might be possible to shoehorn this into the existing system without breaking any mods.

for a list of conditions i can think of:

• player health
• player health (as a percentage relative to max health)
• maximum player health
• player money
• player kills
• total player deaths
• total player deaths to this specific ghost type (so a ghost could mock you for dying to their kind multiple times specifically)
• current floor number
• current floor biome
• current debuf
• if player was hiding inside a box (so you can check it after the inital grab)
• current battery (as a percentage)
• if a power outage is currently happening
• remaining ghosts in this room
• amount of times player has been grabbed by this type of ghost inside this room (so they can comment on having caught you multiple times, or have special dialogue for catching the player the first time, resets after room clear)

and there are probably way more that would be useful to fun to have. overall this would massively increase the total amount of possible interactions you can have with a ghost as there are way more factors that can change it (depending on what the ghost is programmed to check for of course).

and from just looking at these, you could use conditionals in the "inital_grab" block to completely replace the "entrancement", "shrunk", "plushified", etc blocks as they are functionally identical. same with the "health_milestone" blocks which could just be a conditional option in the "taking_too_long" block. (thought for compatibility reasons with 2.0 mods that likely wouldn't be a good idea).

and to cap this post off, i'd like to shoutout to Psionikal, cause i also think dialogue boxes should automatically be interrupted if you free yourself from a ghost, plus you should be allowed to pause while a dialogue box is on the screen.

anyways, lovely game. hyped to see the next update (whenever that may be), good luck with development!

i'm hoping for more variety in terms of floor danger/goals. as right now the only danger you have is the power outage and the only goal is finding a key to the next floor.
having different dangers/timers and goals would absolutely increase replayability

would love some improvements to the controls as well. attacking feels very clunky and jumping/double jumping activates when you just hold the space bar when it should only activate when space goes from unpressed to pressed and then holding spacebar would control the height of the jump.
you could check out "Platformer toolkit" from GMTK for the control examples

the window really wants to lock your cursor in the middle, which is a bad thing if you have it in windowed mode as that makes it impossible to actually move the window. specifically grabbing the title bar makes the game try to drag your cursor into the center, moving the whole window off the bottom of the screen, where it's impossible to get it back without closing it completely.
The cursor should only be locked to the window if you click INSIDE the window, so excluding the title bar and edge (for resizing, speaking of resizing that would be a nice option to have as the window is absolutely tiny on a high DPI display).

i still feel like it should only be the ghosts from that floor as to not spoiler future floors :p
ultimately i found the key and the next floor. but an actual timer would've been nice. atleast it saved now so i think if i die on the second floor i start on the second floor, right?

had this battery icon in the top right of the screen, i don't remember if the game ever tells you about it. but while doing a room it ran out and everything (besides the player) went dark. now i'm being constantly attacked and (spoilered) by ghosts and i have no idea how you're supposed to recharge it. i haven't even found the first key yet...

goddamn i wish this was turned into a full game. more interactions with the internal storage, puzzles, objects to nom, maybe even a male character? eitherway i really like the concept and wish you would do more with it.

title says it.

what a shame

soo i can just say that the crude bread recipe is broken?

because it requires Water... but when you cancel the Recipe with only water in it, it tries to output the water... which it can't. so it gets stuck, untouchable, and unusable forever.

might want to make it just dumb the water.

that poor robot is stuck there, waiting for the furnace to output water... it will sit there, after the sun burned all it's Hydrogen and turned into a white dwarf, it will sit there, after the last Star died in the Universe and the Heat death is inevitable, it will still sit there waiting.

also when is 1080p support gonne be a thing.

I mean it seems this game was made to run on a Raspberry to take with you... which actually is not a bad idea

I know it is free, i have been playing it for some time.

I still want to support the people making it.

also broke my world, where can i report bugs?

I really wish I could pay.

but i'm to young for a Credit card and a PayPal account...

why is there no "Sofortüberweisung" (it never gets translated, strangly) Option like Steam has, so that i can just use my Bank Card