itch.io

Trello is a kind of a community/team board so you can collaborate on stuff and move things to different areas to signify you've completed it or are still working on it. (Also, you can open up the areas/tasks and see them in greater detail).

Also, I'm glad that you are back! You seem to be the best commenter I know of on itch and it is always great to see your really well communicated perspective on games! I haven't been on itch a while either so I guess I may be in the same boat.

Also x2, I'll really have to check this game out now; seems to have a lot of love and hard work dedicated to it.

Maybe now he could do this with rocks? Would be neat

Wait, we are nearing the 2022 year, comically large spoon update coming in hot (in about 3-ish months)

I personally would love a road map, but with indie games that's kinda of a false promise with all that can crop up/be thought of. Though I do hope with some other issues with the GUI will be fixed and it will become a really solid, non-buggy base for added content in the future.

Also hope for that spoon update

Oh yes, I've done this myself (though it doesn't have any animated bones due to me being a noob to blender), and I'm very glad that you like it!

Concept Art of Laech

agreed

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback! (Hopefully fishlicka will give this some thought too).
I actually agree with all of the points you've made, though maybe having the comet streaking across the sky be something in like a new game+ run. I'm also thinking about making the pollywog werewolf design in my free time to show to fishlicka to see what he thinks about it.

The meteor one and yarn one were just random pulls from thin air because I wanted to have more suggestions than three; moreover, I would love to hear some event suggestions from you!

Thanks again!

True, after I have seen your post and thought about it longer, having to sleep in the school would be better and much less of a "Wait no go back" thing with new players if they just go out the door like I did. Though what to do with the non-dream door if you go to it after defeating Ms. Slithers would still be up in the air.

I also feel like it could do good for introspection on the player, and give some hazy backstory for theories, though I don't know how it would go with how much variety it could have. Though it could also be a revisit of the dream eater, which would be cool.

Thanks very much for the reply Ryarod!

     Now, I have noticed that there is another way of getting out of the boss fight of the school other than the portal: The Door. We first see The Door. show up at the start of the game with Ms. Slithers warning us against it. Ms. Slithers doesn't lie (juice isn't stupid) and cares for the player (monitors juice kid at playtime for safety). The Door. doesn't seem to be bad for us though. 

     I, in hope, suggest a continuation of The Door. after the Ms. Slither boss fight (with her tough loving aura being gone). The point of no return would be when the player gives their hard earned juice to The Door. The playground darkens, the music muffles, the juice portal disappears, the ability to fly vanishes (jump is still there), and the player/juice kid gets greeted by a hallway behind the previous The Door.

The hallway is long and tall, with plywood walls and swirling red carpet originating from another The Door. from the end of the hall.

    The player going near the new The Door. gets told to look at it directly to talk to it, learning The Door. wants more than simple raw juice. It wants concentrate. Give other monsters your juice and they, after death, give the player concentrate. (item or a value)

    Turning back, the player is no longer looking at the school but a hazy unending room with plywood jutting out of the carpets and the tooth ceiling Idk, The Door. has teeth. having random teeth poking out from it. The swirling red carpet doesn't distract from the slow moving enemies. The player/juice kid would then have the ability to give juice to the monsters by holding space (a single press would be a jump). The more juice, the more concentrate and harder the monsters will become. 

    When juice kid finally gets enough concentrate, a new song will fill the air. It would be The Door. singing so you can find your way back. The player would then be able to escape, with The Door. singing a portal in front of it. Ingot then remarks that you look like Ms. Slithers gave you a wallop, and "borrows" your left over concentrate.

• A different way in starting this could be sleeping at the desk first, and then going to The Door. in the dream realm (with floaty gravity to help with jumps)
•  The teeth ceiling is pretty dumb, ceilings are hard.
•  The suggested new mechanic is secondary to getting a cool, new, non-euclidean room. 
• With no flying suggested, it could be a Supa Hard [TM] boss refight dream arena if totally new realm ain't doing it for ya. 
• I have a "tongue bug" monster idea, though custom monsters would probably be too jarring with the new mechanic After enough concentrate is collected
• The Door. has great lore potential

Thank you for reading, and I hope that you agree that something akin to this would be cool in the game

Wonderful ideas and additions, I sure hope fishlicka picks up on this after getting the more important gameplay elements down (a.k.a. the armor). I didn't even think about the dialog; could open up a lot for character interaction and lore.
Again, thanks for the inspiration!

I'm really excited about more unique monsters coming to the game! I feel like most people don't know about them or appreciate them, and more would always be a treat

And feel free to comment more ideas for cycles/events!

So, I realized that it is still called "Galaxy" now, and in a post by TreeGreen inspired me to tie that naming better to the game:

Comet Cycles (C.C.)

A flock of blue lights fly across the outer edges of the skies

Something that could come up if you decide to implement a system like this, because why would you just implement an un-juice-like sun/moon cycle when you can do so much more? Being able to look forward to events, and having it happen due to events you caused would give greater sense of progression. (Also if you want players to have a reason for more play time, it could be tied into this due to having to do certain stuff to unlock it).

Here is a table of ideas:

I know none of these specifically will probably be added in; however, I hope you still have something in mind like this with cycles/events.

(Also, great work on the game! It's wonderful every time I step into it, or even think of stuff for it because it is so inspiring)

I think a slo-mo when defeating an elite monster (or perhaps just new monsters when you defeat the first one) would be extremely cool; however, it should be allowed to be toggled off for speedrunner's sake.

I also feel a "day/night cycle" is too simplistic; Having phases or comets (this is juice galaxy after all) that could happen at random or non-random intervals could be very nice. Having it be comets could also give a greater sense of progress after defeating the creator with it doing something to the pollywogs (werepollywogs?) that couldn't happen before then. (really glad you talked about the day/night cycle cause it gave me the idea of comets)

I feel like a semi-passive monster could be some sort of leech (or have the mechanic I'm about to tell)

Laech Monster (WIP name)

Perhaps looking like a lady bug mixed with a leech; The Laech is attacted to monsters harboring a lot of juice. They would latch on to elite monsters and hydrandgla, leeching off their juice and causing their attacks to slow or have less power. They would drop "the good juice" after you kill them (when they are in a full state of course). They could also hassle the player by making their level bonuses go down or be nulled. 

Inversed Explosions

This spell would be mainly for the ranged pineapple weapon, what it does it that it would make the explosions pull in the monsters instead of scattering them. This would hopefully feel nice with the ranged weapons, if it also somehow pulls in the monsters with the other projectiles.

(I can't remember what else causes explosions but I think that's all the weapons that it would effect)

I definitely think that making the magic system separate will help stretch the game longer while feeling better:

Being able to do all the books at the start kinda feels overpowered on the various runs I done, especially being able to get them from the crates at the start in the school (which feels weird because I thought the school was supposed to be some pocket from the rest of the galaxy). Being able to "unlock" the ability to use spells by using juice in a more tiered manner would feel nice and add more variety to the leveling system. This could be done with two ways-

1. A more player controlled approach, with them basically learning to "read" the book by spending juice, this could be done for every weapon by giving the books each debuff and buffs depending on how good the player can "read" the book. Giving it half damage at a low tier and then giving a "crit chance" or "greater damage percent" would help not make it to where one stat controls all the magic, which would probably be liked because people also like being able to tweak the various physical aspects of the characters, so why not the magic system?
   1. Don' know where they would spend their juice at, perhaps a different fountain or a new NPC?
2.  Giving books a "unlock more power by completing certain tasks" which would make it more story/tasked driven. You would probably have to make it more of a binary system with just "you can't use this because you haven't explored/killed/helped [X] yet" (or a more subtle hint what to do).  
   1. This could encourage exploring or progressing the story, but it may make it feel to gated.

HOWEVER implement anything like these two things would make a lot of extra load with every new spell added; with the first approach suggested, you have to make tiers for every spell book and judge what would be the proper costs for each; with the second approach suggested, you have to make story beats and/or tasks kinda connected and judge what time accessing the spell would be that complements the average gameplay.

Really you can just ignore this because it would make a catastrophic workload for you, but with how the spells work now just shows me that it needs to have some limiting factors from the get-go and that it needs more tweaking of it's properties like how you can tweak your swing speed and damage with melee weapons and how you can tweak your movement with jump, fly, and movement speed.

I'm still going to be happy with whatever direction the game takes though with its iterations, hope the game-making process goes smoothly for you! (it's your project after all, not mine) ((also sorry for the horrible grammar and run-on sentences))

These are some really nice suggestions! I have about 2 that I can think of that may be able to be implemented as well- if fishlicka decides to do something like it. (also thanks for using the discussion we had earlier with "probablynotthere", very cool)

"Aging Vision"

• You know how you can mess with the setting to make you feel like you are playing on an old white box computer? Well now you can't mess with them, and it's getting worse
• It starts off with no pixelization, but whenever you feed the door the juice it starts a countdown from you hyper realistic vision to just a dozen squares on the screen
  • The pace of this degradation could be done however you'd like, though maybe the player could set the pacing themselves as a soft time trial mode
• Could forcibly end after going below a dozen or just have it to where you can mess with it again to not give up your progress, but you still go through the frantic speedrun way to actually see what you are doing for a while

>may be easy, but could become more complex depending how nuanced you make it

If you just make it to where you can't mess with it and just do some timer and it just soflocks the save when it reaches it's highest point of pixelization, but if you add a way to change it afterward or make the pace togglable it will be harder.

"Plunger Bone Tornado"

• All the skeletons have the plunger tornado attack of Sgt. Suckerpunch just has the kicking.
• You start with a large number of levels in flying and jump
• The cemetery is abandoned
  • Basically no gravestones for a skeleton to instantly kill you when you fall to the ground

>Probably really really hard to implement, unless the monsters' and bosses' moves are somehow interchangeable

I don't know much of coding, but I imagine the "ole reliable of ctrl + c and ctrl + v" probably won't work for making all of the skeletons have tools of war.

Thank you for reading!

I love the pet rocks interacting with the frolgs (frolges? frolgi?)! It's really fun, though I haven't found the wilderness locations yet- can't wait!

I could really see this as a gimmick of a dungeon, would be really cool if that is where you get a "berserker" (don't know how to spell it, and sadly too lazy to look it up) where you can have the gimmick outside of the dungeon. I think that would be a really cool (and deadly) experience to play something like that in juice galaxy! (If I try to flesh it out I will edit this message with a link to it)

I said that because it seems like the juice particles are stuck in the air whenever it is the black hole orb, instead of just not appearing like the rest

Lovely game!

That's great! It never hurts to have some inspiration (or well, a day to procrastinate by listening to random people's soundtracks) and trying to find some small channels that do music (like this one and this one) where you could find inspiration from. Hope the tune making goes well!

Just wanted to come back to this to say that if a freezing system was to be added, the skis could freeze the water below you in the upcoming pond biome

Haven't tested with it yet, but I think it's to do with the copied weapon hitting the hitbox of the original weapon, but because the original weapon is different it acts weird?

I encountered 3 slight bugs:

First, with the black hole spell, the juice the monsters leave sometimes stay stagnet in the air, this usually happens if you fly far away from the monsters while the black hole spell is doing it's thing. Secondly, a bug that whenever you get a large jukebox, go to hogan's to shrink it, and then use the "copy weapon" spell, the jukeboxes copied seem to remain the size before hogan's alteration and launches you in the direction the jukebox is being held (if you are a speedrunner reading this, I guess you can use this bug to fly fast without needing flight). Thirdly, you can still eat the monster even if you use a black hole spell, the black hole does not like that and smushes against your face, though this isn't a big problem because I haven't gotten some physic breaking thing from this like the jukebox bug. 

The slight idea:

Maybe have the black hole spells (and other spells?) take juice away from the kill? At least with the black hole spell because it's weird to see the juice come to you instead of going to the dark matter. I feel like the spells using (maybe just some of) the juice it finds would be good for 2 reasons: 1, to make it where you still want to swing swords because you don't get as much juice out of using magic, so magic would act more of a room cleaner than a "get juice fast" scheme. 2, because it really slows down your computer with all of the effects from a big ball of anti-matter gets compounded by the game having the juice try to go to you.

Nerfing the black-hole spell (and other spells?) with getting less juice back might be rude to the mage players though, so take it with a grain of salt (but not the bugs, the bugs are there)

Thank you! I was actually playing it a bit more whenever you replied, I'm glad that there is going to be more in the future! Can't wait for some more updates (and maybe new music perhaps?)

After seeing the video I could imagine a "frolge hurlicane" because Fishlicka said that he could have a lot more of the frolgs on the screen at once. 

So the "king frolg" or "prince frolg" could have a crown that produces the frolg hurlicane and you have to knock the crown off to stop the attack of the mini-boss. Of course if you defeat the mini-boss but not knock the crown off, you can pick it up afterwards to have two little frolgs circle around you when you wear it. 

Well, you do monkey around don't you? Though I don't know why they would send a monkey to a school.

There was a post/thread started about that, if I find it/remember it I'll link it to you

Edit: Here you go! You may like to see this one, and upvote/comment on it for Fishlicka to see

It's been really nice the little I've been playing with it- though the in the campaign it would be nice to see where the most amount of enemies will be coming from, because it's a bit embarrassing on my end to build up some walls with the most coming from behind. However I want to complete this cool game before I think of anything else to say, good work!

Seems like it will be interesting, hope it works out!

Can't wait to see the future spells!

I think a lot of things have already been said, but I feel like I can add something not given.

Perhaps you can "Over-fill" the stats? So instead of having infinite leveling, you can go really high, but it will slowly go down to the cap. So you can still get really strong to swing at a bunch of enemies- yet it won't be that way forever. This could make it to where grinding isn't really encouraged due to the player going to loose the over-filled stats sooner or later. (also because over-filling juice would make so much sense pun-wise)

I also feel like giving more stats to fill would be good, maybe not "n00b trap" stats, but even more specific stuff for us to do. Though if you were to add more stats being able to be done, I feel like they shouldn't be given from the starting point, and you would have to go out and find leveled-up fountains. An example of a stat to be given for people in the level-ed up could be the dashes/special moves you want to add, or even making the over-fill top a bit taller so you can level up more, or the "over-fill" goes down slower.

I may not be saying/explaining my viewpoint in the best way, but basically I like a more "short-burst of power" where you can be really powerful for a bit instead of a permanent "Kill everyone you see unless they are some gigantic tank" mode. The only major problem I could see forming with the "over-fill" idea is where you treat juice like a health potion and never use the overfill (maybe there could be some "linger" aspect where it doesn't cost as much to do again to encourage using the hypothetical system more?) 

Maybe making some weapons have to "attune" to the juice/magic so there is a nerfing to some of the magic spells (like the one where you copy it a bunch of times) and it gives you reason to explore the world for "attuner" (or because it's juice, perhaps "straws"?) ;  I feel like that would make some of the balancing easier and give a bit of pacing to the power you have.

Raisin bran crunch is a top notch cereal, especially with almond slices.

Also that's gonna be great having a ball and chain! Though after watching shadiversity I more cautious about the nunchaku.

So you would get some NPC to put a bunch of juice into some tome/magical object so you can do magical spells easier?