Marathon Jam Week 3

I broke the game pretty horribly this week, so I won’t be uploading a new demo version.

The goal for the week was to perform an item and limb audit, changing around some of the limb synergies, stats, and descriptions. What I thought was a solid design turned out to be really bad actually. Or maybe the implementation was a bit off.

Changing Things Too Much?

I planned to remove “ZONES” from the game this week. ZONES are tiles that boost your stats when you stand on them. It is simple enough, but I never see any playtesters going for this style of play. It requires you to significantly alter your playstyle and stop focusing on returns. Maybe bosses could have them to shake up gameplay (players could opt not to serve or return to these areas), but zones often weren’t even an effective way to build a winning strategy. So, I attempted to replace this location-based stat boosting with a SITUATION-based stat boost.

Players often play TORSO TENNIS very defensively, so anything I can do to encourage more offensive play is generally a good way to push people to try different strategies. One way this is achievable is by applying boosts or bonuses when the player performs an offensive action.

I did not yet have one of these boosts on Serving or Reloading - the act of adding MORE tennis balls to an already crowded court. Many new players ignore serving altogether - choosing only to Volley/Return tennis balls that the opponent is serving up. So, by changing the ZONE boosts to trigger after Reloading, it encourages players to empty their clip of tennis balls more often.

That was the design thinking, and it DID feel super cool to get 10 seconds to become an absolute monster after reloading. However, since enemies ALSO get the same boosts players do when using similar limbs. It did NOT feel good to see an enemy all of a sudden get a huge stat boost and end the game quickly. Maybe some balancing could be applied here to smooth things out or not allow enemies to generate with too many of these types of limbs.

There’s more work to be done here than in this focused jam state of Marathon Jam. And I think this week in particular convinced me to spend a bit more time balancing the game before release.

Marathon Jam Momentum

Due to the nature of this jam, I’ve chosen to revert these changes to the Limb sets in favor of keeping the demo highly polished and ready to submit. I’ve planned my final week of Marathon Jam to be focused on filling out the audio of the game a bit more, since there are a lot of missing SFX and the soundtrack could have some more variety. So I’m looking forward to carrying this momentum forward in the final week

What I got done:

Day 1

• don’t allow rips to spawn if they cant find an open space
• steam demo update 0.2.26
• make rips close, even if they are timer based
• Tomato Club Newsletter

Day 2

• Change TOOL limb set to GAINS
• Changed item descriptions
• Changed limb set bonuses to all go up to 5
• Improved keyword highlighting on cards

Day 3

• Made a new boss for new limb set
• Added new texture visuals on shop
• New mouth sprites: MOUSTACHE

Day 4

• Player Color - on Reticle, Return Color & more
• Leg & Critter axis flips
• Fix final boss roster gen bug
• Improved card visuals: outline frames

Day 5

• Remove ZONES and replace with RELOAD-triggered cards (maybe not good)
• Show the demo at local Retro Gaming expo

I also put out the February issue of my TOMATO CLUB newsletter. check it out here: https://toomuchtomato.substack.com/p/launching-torso-tennis-soon