AHH! This makes me wanna squeal and clap my hands together!
It's really fun and cute, but I wasn't able to make much progress... It took a long time to build my first house, and then one of the babies died from starvation. Seems hard to manage trees enough to really get houses built or prevent guppers from starving. It would be nice to know how close a gupper is to doing something like building a house (maybe some stats appear when you pick them up?).
I agree there definitely needs to be some better indication of how each Gupper is doing in terms of the underlying "food" metric which ultimately begets houses, trees, and starvation. I'm trying to keep the underlying mechanics relatively obtuse but intuitive... like, I think maybe if the appearance of each Gupper slightly changed might help. Not sure yet. I might even just have "worker guppers" appear somehow.
Also yeah... I'm still fiddling with the balance in terms of how long it takes for a house to be built. The waiting period for the first house is definitely a little long, but once they get going they should be relatively quick and stable there-after. Right now the game is so bare bones I figure if anything it's kinda the only reward right now for being patient and sticking with trying to care for the Guppers.
Also, right click didn't seem to do anything for me, unless there is a delay on the rain clouds?
Right now I have the auto-spawn cloud mechanics attached to manually spawning them, so you have to actually click a little above trees or the clouds won't spawn. Will definitely fix it next update so manually spawned clouds can be placed anywhere.
The comments when you pick them up are also really cute! I want to play more and see more structures, and those pink creatures!
Thanks! Yeah, there will be a lot more random comments coming from the guppers in relation to what they are actively doing, though I want to keep them as cryptic and random-ish as possible, because when they are just going about their normal business they'll be talkative for sure, but not non-stop. In the original Guppers, TNERB had a neat design where all the gupper thoughts appeared as a floating cloud of words in the background but I definitely wanted something more traditional.
As for the pink creatures... I have something special in mind for them but also still still need to figure out how they will spawn / breed.
The original Guppers was a bit of a sandbox where you simply placed trees, rain, animals, and then a single gupper to eventually populate everything but interacting with those things.
Right now I'm designing something that is more of a "garden" than a sandbox. You mainly tend to the basics... making sure Guppers don't fall to their death, starve to death... making sure the feed their young, and that trees get plenty of water. I like this mode because it's more about meditation and nurturing rather than control.
While I'd love to also create a more RTS oriented mode, it'd require a lot of specific metric balancing and more clear and defined resource gathering system I'm just not up to spending time creating right now.
For now I just want to focus on the "gardening" aspect, as well as increasing the amount of interesting events that will occur over time to make it feel rewarding to keeping up with the Guppers. (not to mention I've already included "creative mode" shortcuts if you want to just make things immediately happen)
... but yes, more structures, Gupper types, world events, and creature / world interactions are already apart of the short term design I have in the pipeline!
Also I LOVE the idea of actually naming Guppers, and maybe even trees and buildings. Hell, it'd be neat if Trees that survived long enough got older and bigger even! I'll write those down for later implementation.
I'd love for Guppers 2 to eventually reach Dwarf Fortress levels of complexity... but that's all a matter of how much Construct 2 (the platform I am using) can handle all at once, lol.
Thanks again for taking the time to check it out, and hopefully the game will be more rewarding to play for ya as I tweak it. Next up I'm doing a huge code overhaul because it's all spaghetti unorganized garbage at this point. Then after that back to implementing more!
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