God's Reject (a Surreal Biopunk RPG)

[jaggedjagd]

Look, this is not a vore game. It's more of a horror game. Sorta. Frankly, i don't really know wtf this thing is, but i've been working on it for almost a year now. And i think i might go insane if i don't find a way to talk about it with someone...

God's Reject is my earnest attempt at creating a full-fledged RPG. It's a passion project i work on it sporadically, and this thread serves as a quasi diary on my gamedev efforts. I built the game from the ground-up in Godot 4, every line of code is written by yours truly. All the artwork & writing is done by me as well. I don't have any plans for a release date atm, no idea when it will be finished. Consider everything i post here to be a work in progress, and every mechanic and artwork subject to change.


Goals:
✔ Dialogue System (100% done! yay!)
✔ Combat System (in progress, working pretty good tho. enemies have functional AI)
✔ Levels, Maps traversal (in progress, mostly gotta draw assets for this)
✔ Encounter System (added chance to enounter common or rare enemies)
✔ Shops (exist, but need work)

✘ Items / Weapons / Equipment (needs refinement)
✘ Level-up system (laid groundwork, needs serious refinement)
✘ Skill system (slow progress)
✘ Save System ("saving" that one for last, ha)


-------------------------

- Is this a porn game?
No. But it features a good deal of nudity, violence, gore, and general creepy & disturbing imagery. It's absolutely NSFW, and this is one reason i'm sharing it here. Because maybe some of you reading this are into the same freaky shit i'm into.

- Does it have vore?
Technically...? There are vorish elements for sure, because vore is a thing i enjoy. The main character is host to a parasitic creature who acts as a Navi like companion to him. You consume your enemies to heal or level up your stats, that sort of thing. But it's not designed to be a "sexy" game, the vore tends to be on the disturbing side.

- What's the gameplay like?
A fairly straight-forward RPG. Turn-based combat, NPCs to interact it, stats to level up, a world to explore. Main inspirations for the gameplay include the Gen1 Pokemon games, and oldschool Shin Megami Tensei.

- Which engine, who's working on it?
Godot 4. And just me. I'm doing all the art and programming. It's 100% a solo project so far. I would like to hire someone to create a proper soundtrack for the game eventually, if i ever get it into a playable state. That's still faaaar off in the future.

- When's the release planned? Will there be a demo?
Pfff, i really have no idea. I'm working on a strict "it's done when it's done" schedule.


Premise:
God's Reject takes place in the Growth, an organic structure that stretches infinitely through the universe. You play as Noise, a disposed service body. Rescued from certain death and enslaved by a parasitic creature called a WURM, Noise must navigate his way through the Growth. Battle hostile creatures eager to tear you to shreds. Harvest Meat from enemies, feed Meat to your WURM to upgrade your body. Survive, and reach the Nexus Tower to be free.

A collection of in-game snapshots & artwork on my FA and DA accounts:

https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery/jag ... d-s-Reject
https://www.deviantart.com/thejaggedone ... g-game-wip

Some selected artwork:

Spoiler: show

Meet protagonist Noise. An artifical organic being created to serve the upper class. But being a faulty product, he was thrown in the garbage instead.

Say hello to the nice audience, Noise. (He can't say hello, he's a silent protagonist. Because he was born with no vocal chords. It's fine, Murmur does the talking for him.)

And this is Murmur, Noise's symbiotic companion. He stitches his host's body back together whenever an enemy encounter goes badly. He also provides some snarky commentary on Noise's mishaps.

Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16B2k3i1_yI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxqWMvUlHiA
https://vimeo.com/1009176082
https://vimeo.com/1018810228

[Maybe]

Very interesting concept. I wish you good luck here even if it's not to everyone's taste here.

Personally I always prefer the option to pick a female MC but I get the narrative reason to have a set protagonist.

[jaggedjagd]

Very interesting concept. I wish you good luck here even if it's not to everyone's taste here.

Personally I always prefer the option to pick a female MC but I get the narrative reason to have a set protagonist.

Thank you! And yeah, i must dash any hopes for character creation, haha. That would be way beyond the scope of this game. It's a very linear game, with a very linear narrative. There's only one ending, and choices are limited to entirely optional side quests. Which can be skipped with no consequence, aside from maybe missing out on a cool item.

[jaggedjagd]

What i accomplished today:

Rethinking the combat system. I want to go for a Darkest Dungeon approach, where skills have both positive and negative effects. As it is now, the combat system works with Action Points. You have a certain amount of AP per turn, which you can spend freely on attacking or using skills. Once out of AP, you must end your turn to recharge your AP. The drawback of many skills is that you either have to spend HP in order to use them, or they may have some negative side effects like causing you status ailments.

Jotted down a bunch of ideas for skills in a neatly arranged spreadsheet. Highlights include:

- Autophagy: A quick fix that can either heal or hurt you. It's a coin toss!
- Rend, Slaughter, Devour: Insta-kill a foe that has exactly 1 HP remaining, restores 1 of your own HP.
- Sanguis Bestiae: Suck blood from foes to restore a bit of your own HP. Foes have only a limited amount of blood, so this skill won't work when used too much.
- Stomach Eversion: Cures the SICK status ailment, but you will drop some of your carried Meat (i.e. the currency of the game).
- Boiling Blood: Shoot scalding blood at your foes, costs a lot of your HP to use. Also a chance to burn foes.
- Black Breath: Lower your foes aim + evasion, might lower your own too.


Skills can be learned via special items you find or buy, kinda how TMs work in pokemon. Some skills also get unlocked from your equipment, you can only use these skill while having the according item equipped.


Another aspect i wanna go hard on is status ailments. I love when a game offers a multitude of ways to cripple you/your enemies. As it is, i have roughly 12 planned, still very much subject to change. Might cull some that feel redundant down the line.


Ailments: (persist after combat)

SHAKEN: chance to hurt self when attacking
SICK: can't use healing items
INTOXICATED: can't use skills
PAIN: attacking hurts you, take % of dmg dealt as kickback dmg to self
BLEEDING: -12% of max HP as DMG per turn
SCORCHED: chance to skip a turn

Afflictions: (fade after combat)

FRENZIED: DMG up, ACC down, chance player attacks immediately & skips turn
RECOIL: you flinch, skip next turn
TERROR: reduces AP to 1 at beginning of turn
FAINT: evasion is 0 for 1-3 turns
DESPAIR: aim down, dmg dealt is reduced, chance to skip turn, can't be healed, ends after 1-5 turns
DELIRIOUS: perform random action: may skip turn, attack, heal, use item, etc

[jaggedjagd]

Notes for today: How to deal with HP recovery.

- The game doesn't have an MP system. And Action Points recharge every turn. So there need to be other restrictions to not make the player completely OP, able to cast skills infinitely. Skills having potentially negative side effects is one. Maybe making the recovery of AP random per turn could be fun, gonna test that out.

- I'm gonna go hard on the "devour" type skills. Because that really seems fun. Encourage the player to weaken enemies first, then take them out with a big CHOMP to recover health.

- Some enemies should cause side effects ingested. Digital Devil Saga and Baroque has a mechanic like this, sometimes the player will suffer from a stomachache when eating bad food. I enjoy these risk/reward type mechanics a great deal, gonna put that on the to-do list.


Also doing some coding rework on the skill system, and the combat in general. As i crafted it, enemies are actually one of Godot's Button nodes. To attack enemy, simply press button.

Spoiler: show

And a code snippet for good measure. The player's stats are an Autoload, so i can access that easily with any enemy. Every enemy has a Resource for its own stats attached to it, which the Enemy Button can access. I guess i could attach the stats directly to the button itself, but other Nodes may wanna access the stats too. So it seems simplest to attach stats to the main Parent Node.

Code: Select all

##### Functions #####

# make the enemy button call this function with its parent as argument
func run_calculations(enemy: Enemy) -> void:
   # AP Handling
   ap_cost = calculate_ap_cost()
   enough_ap = check_if_player_enough_ap()
   if enough_ap:
      deduct_attack_cost()
   else:
      return
   # HIT handling
   hit = check_if_player_hit(enemy)
   damage = calculate_damage()
   enemy_take_damage.emit(damage, hit, crit)
   check_if_player_hurt()
   
   if !PlayerStats.attack_ailment_mods.is_empty():
      calculate_ailments(enemy)
   if !PlayerStats.attack_affliction_mods.is_empty():
      calculate_afflictions(enemy)


Calculations on how much dmg, hit/miss, crit and such, are done with a mess of functions inside the Button's script. As it is, it works just fine when the player is doing a standard attack. Next i gotta figure out the least convoluted away to connect a skill's functions to the enemy's script. Since skills can have very specific effects, can target one or several enemies, or even the player himself, they require a different approach. Thinking i'm gonna add a simple virtual function named _skill(), that can be overwritten in the individual skill's script. And when the skill button is pressed, the _skill() function is called and does whatever the skill does.

[TimeDefeat]

Oooh, really looking forward to playing this. I love Noise and Murmur's designs, and am generally a sucker for certain kinds of body horror. Good luck on your work!

[jaggedjagd]

Oooh, really looking forward to playing this. I love Noise and Murmur's designs, and am generally a sucker for certain kinds of body horror. Good luck on your work!

Thank you! If you enjoy body horror, you've come to the right place. This is basically Body Horror the game, haha.


Speaking of, a daily update: Drawing sprites of lots of weird enemies.


I got an enemy that attacks you with its poison filled tumors, an enemy that attacks you with its guts, an enemy that breeds worms inside itself to scatter & distract predators with the worms, several types of leeches, critters that will suck out your eyes and lay eggs inside your eye sockets... it's a fun time to be on the end of the food chain in this world.

Spoiler: show

And my favorite enemy i've come with up so far:

Spoiler: show

Worm Butt.

worm_butt_sprite.png (46.19 KiB) Viewed 6539 times

Still wiggling. Who knows what ate the front end... Better move on so you don't end up just a butt.

Enemies come in several different categories. Such as worms, molluscs, fungi,... and Rejects. Rejects are the humanoid type enemies, and more dangerous than the regular fauna/flora of the Growth. Basically mutants with various deformities. Noise himself is a Reject, albeit a harmless one. Any faulty artificials are considered Rejects.

Spoiler: show

I may or may not make the enemy category a part of the gameplay at some point. Like a weapon that deals extra damage to molluscs. Something like that.

[Trajan]

Totally looks like the kind of game I'd be into. Idk if I will have time to play it (my backlog is already pretty big, and college is a pain in the ass), but I find the time to do it I'll give it a shot.

[jaggedjagd]

Totally looks like the kind of game I'd be into. Idk if I will have time to play it (my backlog is already pretty big, and college is a pain in the ass), but I find the time to do it I'll give it a shot.

Haha no worries about backlogs, this game won't be done for a long time. xD I'm maybe 5% done right now, and that took me almost a year... somebody feel free to do the math on that one.

[Datstrudel]

This looks like a game that could end up being very popular. It has that vibe that just oozes with creativity and passion. I definitely hope it turns out great and wish you luck on this project!

[jaggedjagd]

This looks like a game that could end up being very popular. It has that vibe that just oozes with creativity and passion. I definitely hope it turns out great and wish you luck on this project!

Thank you, thank you! One can dream. I honestly can't say who my target audience is, but i could see it being popular with the same crowd that enjoys weirdass RPG Maker games like OFF and Hello Charlotte. That's the kinda games i wanna see more of/create, anyway.

[jaggedjagd]

Progress update: AAAAAAHH My skill system works AAAAAHHH

Oh i'm so fucking happy right now. This took me a week. And i somehow found a method that is only mildly convoluted. I'm putting the skill button into a global value, and when the enemy button is pressed, it activates that skill with itself as an argument. Or to say it in code:

Code: Select all

func _pressed() -> void:
   # runs selected skill attack
   if Globals.skill_button != null:
      Globals.skill_button._skill(enemy) # use self as argument to let skill know what to do
      return
   
   # run regular attack, if no skill selected
   for weapon in PlayerInventory.weapons.get_children():
         if weapon.equipped:
            weapon._attack(enemy)
         
   pressed_effect()


I can now:

- target myself
- target a single foe
- target all foes


Now, this was the easy part. The hard part will be to implement the visual effects /animations of each skill. That frankly, tends to be the hardest part with everything. Timing! Just attacking an enemy is one thing, but if you want a visual effect, you gotta coordinate. First run the animation, wait for the animation to finish, then give the player back control. So that's the next thing on the agenda, visual game juice for skills.

I actually have another system for visual effects already implemented, for the enemy attacks. So if one enemy runs its attack, it has to notify the next enemy that it's their turn to act now. For this, i simply notify the next enemy as soon as the visual effect exits the scene tree. It's another global signal, that send a simple enemy_action_done signal out, which then activates the next enemy.

Code: Select all

func _exit_tree() -> void:
   Globals.enemy_action_done.emit()

The effects scenes themselves get instantiated as a child onto the enemy, every time an enemy runs an attack. Once done, the attack scenes automatically queue_free() themselves via their animation player. Godot's animation player is still a freaking godsend btw. It's sooooo useful for soooo many different things, especially coordinating signals! I love this damn thing.

Spoiler: show

I'll probably do something similar for skills. Have a sginal once the animation is done, then give control back to the player.

[jaggedjagd]

Fun facts about programming i learned the hard way: If you wanna iterate over a negative number, you gotta make it positive first.

At least, that's how it works in GDScript.

Spoiler: show

Code: Select all

func calculate_damage(attacker: Enemy, damage: AttackComponent) -> void:
   var dmg = randi_range(damage.min_damage,damage.max_damage)
   var enemy_dmg_mod :int = attacker.stats.dmg_dealt_mod
   var final_dmg_mod :float = 0.0
   
   # check if enemy is buffed/debuffed, and how it affects damage output
   if enemy_dmg_mod < 0:
      enemy_dmg_mod = -enemy_dmg_mod # gotta be a positive number for loop to work
      for level in enemy_dmg_mod:
         final_dmg_mod += Repo.MOD_AMOUNT
      dmg = dmg - ceil((final_dmg_mod*float(dmg))/100.0)
   elif enemy_dmg_mod > 0:
      for level in enemy_dmg_mod:
         final_dmg_mod += Repo.MOD_AMOUNT
      dmg = dmg + ceil((final_dmg_mod*float(dmg))/100.0)
   
   var crit_roll = randf_range(0.0, 100.0)
   if crit_roll < attacker.stats.crit_chance:
      dmg *= attacker.stats.crit_multiplier
      
   Globals.player_hurt.emit(dmg)


I learned this because i wanted a system similar to Pokemon's buffs/debuffs. Where buffs are done in stages, so you can only lose/gain a maximum of 60% to any given stats.then buffing doesn't work any further. MegaTen does it that way too, i guess many RPGs do. Can't Sukukaja more than 4 times!

So, i had to figure out how i'm gonna make this work behind the scenes. Say you are at +2 DMG level, then you get 20% more damage to your attack added. Doing this for positive numbers was easy, but if you're say at -2 level for damage, then how do you calculate that... Was racking my brain, and the answer was this little line of code:

enemy_dmg_mod = - enemy_dmg_mod

Just set the number positive, then looping works. This is what happens when you don't come from a programming background, and gotta reverse engineer all these basic knowledge that you were never taught from youtube tutorials.


Anyway, i drew a nice picture of Noise and Murmur the other day.

I'm also feverishly working on the art for the Silent Factory area in the game. Yes, there will be the mandatory creepy Factory level that every JRPG needs.

[Kartomic]

Ooh, I'm loving what I'm seeing so far, very nicely done!

[jaggedjagd]

Ooh, I'm loving what I'm seeing so far, very nicely done!

Thanks! Happy to hear it! 8D

Since i'm here, another update on what i've been doing yesterday:

Still fine-tuning the details of the combat system. I'm gonna split status ailments into a physical & a mental group. Bleed and Burn would go into physical for example, while confusion and fear goes into mental. Resistance calculation is done for one of each group, rather than the individual ailment. So if you have a 30% resistance to physical ailments, the 30 is calculated for both burn and bleed. Works like MegaTens Nerve and Mind skills.

[jaggedjagd]

Oh! Also! I found a way to handle XP gain and level up mechanics.

You don't level up automatically in the game, you can distribute your XP (aka harvested MEAT from enemies) as you please. The main things you can level up are

- Health points
- Skill capacity (i.e. how many skills you can equip)
- Equipment capacity (i.e. what kind of equipment you can equip)
- Carry capacity (There's a strict limit on how many heal items you can carry. This should motivate the player to actually use items instead of hording them. Too good to use syndrome is a terrible affliction.)

What you can't level up manually are things like your attack, defense, accuracy, etc. These stats should be handled via skills in combat (i.e. buffing and debuffing), or via your equipment. Action Points are their own special beast, these only increase when defeating bosses or special events.

What has been a headscratcher is how i would handle how much XP you need in order to level. You should require more and more XP as your level goes up, but what formula do you use for this? I researched this a lot on how other RPGs like Final Fantasy do it, even how it's handled in Pen & Paper games. In the end, i think will settle on a very simple formula with a set level curve.

So, in pseudoe code it would go like this. You have a few level_curves constants, each a fixed number you use for calculation.

const level_curve_01 = 100
const level_curve_02 = 500
const level_curve_03 = 1000
etc.

Then the current level the player is on. This goes up every time the player levels up.

var level = 1

Then you have a function that checks what level the player is on, compares that to which level curve to use, then multiplies the level with the level_curve.

required_xp = level_curve_01 * level

In this case, the first level would require 100 XP to level up. Once you're above say level 10, then you use level_curve_02 for the calculation instead. So level 14 would require 14 x 500 = 7000 XP to level up.

I like this system, it's simple and straightforward. I might add a little more finesse to it at some point, but for a basis this will totally do.