Trail Of Pigs
TRAIL OF PIGS - Update!
(ONLY IN THE DOWNLOADABLE, FOR NOW, WILL TRY TO DO THE HTML5 VERSION ASAP)
There have been some huge problems that slowly, but constantly bugged me about the game, so i decided to make a huge update to fix all of them in one go!
Going down the list:
-Prettified bushes. (is that even a word?) Made them randomly spawn smaller, decoravitve bushes around them, and randomly displaced them all a little. This is huge, as it helps the illusion of random maps a lot more than before.
-Changed basically the WHOLE progression. It's overall a bit easier, i think, but way smoother. Last 100 meters shouldn't be impossible to go through. A lot more gunners spawn, but less enemies spawn overall.
This was necessary. As i introduced another big change:
-Hunting now costs food. This is huge. It means that you can no longer hunt infinitely, and you need to be careful to not be low on resources. It also means that you will have to go through maps on later levels if you weren't careful enough, instead of going back if the random maps weren't favorable enough. (Which is the reason the maps arre overall less tough with the randomness)
For this to be fair, another thing was changed.
-Tents now always give at least one resource. Less empty backpacks. This was needed to make the "hunting costs food" thing work. Also, i think it was way too punitive before, specially at later levels, so it helps a bunch.
The whole balance was changed as a result! It's a huge update. Also, some small things were changed here and there. You can now see the first tutorial again, and some small loot tables here and there were fixed. Spawns were changed too for cabinets and boxes! So they now spawn more stuff than meds.
Hope y'all like it! I don't think i will touch it up anymore. But i NEED to do the HTML5 version, for now only the downloadable has the changes.
-Stop <3
Comments
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ayyy, that’s some smart tweaks, excited to try it later!
Thank you!! It's become a faster, more dangerous game as a result, which kind of fits it's coffeebreak gameplay, though fits less the "long deadly hike" thing, welp.
I'm debating to make the hunger cost of going to hunts double instead of just one (right now you can hunt 10 times with the full bar, then it slowly drains health instead)
It might be too forgiving
I'll probably change it and test!
Hoo boy, nah it's not too forgiving! Ummm I gave it five shots and couldn't beat it, so it didn't really feel easier. I'd even swear there was more enemies in the third checkpoint? If I'd played longer I probs could've beaten it, but I definitely would not call this version easy.
Some things; with the hunger cost of hunting, it wasn't clear what '1 hunger' meant; I thought it meant a food. It also wasn't clear how much was one, cos it's an arbitrary bar of hunger so 1 could be half, a quarter, a tenth, who knows. Perhaps there could be little ticks on the hunger bar to say how much is one? Though I honestly don't think this hunger cost is a very elegant solution to the problem of players hunting too much. Maybe instead you could remove the leftmost exit forcing players to do the whole thing. Or maybe loot could spawn mostly on the right half of the level? For me, the main reason to keep hunting is often because of a resource imbalance; I've got food flowing out of my ears, but not a single damn medkit. Perhaps this could also be tweaked, or maybe some bias to give less of what you've already got?
Another thing, from my runs I think there's two types of playthroughs. One where the loot from a checkpoint fully stocks you with food and meds, allowing you to reach the next checkpoint without hunting. And another where you don't loot the checkpoints and end up hunting four+ times to reach the checkpoint. I believe that if you fully loot each checkpoint while bringing zero bullets you can beat the game with only 1-2 hunts at the start. Not sure if this is intended, but was the strategy I was leaning in to in later runs. I think there could be a sweet spot here, where a skilled player would need to do at most two hunts, but at least one in between each checkpoint?
And a final nitpick, it wasn't really clear that small bushes didn't provide cover, I like the extra detail on big bushes, but imo small bushes made it hard to determine where was safe, especially when there was a cluster of small bushes.