Mansuit First Public Dev Log

Mansuit Logo

Alright, first off, what the heck is Mansuit and why is it awesome? Take a look at the screenie below:

The first area, some features are not complete yet.

A BRIEF HISTORY:
I wanted to do the cliffnotes of my previous mansuit dev log that I've kept private. First off, this project started maybe 2 years ago. I was coding in GameMaker Studio 2 at the time but some of the features just completely broke me. Specifically when it came to cutscenes I finally encountered an oversight where you could either play/stop animations, or know their positions. Shrodinger's Animation. I could rant at length about the bullshit I had to deal with but eventually I switched to Godot. Unforunately, a lot of the code I used could not be re-used, so I had to redo a good chunk of it. I'm currently on version 0.3, as 0.2 was a very messy codebase and I've since made heavy use of custom classes and class inheritance. Of course because I'm doing other things and working on other stuff (I had written a book during the start of the project so I kept going back and forth with the project), and because I'm an adult, I have a job, and since that job is in tech I find that I'm not able to focus as much on coding just due to burnout. If I worked a physical job I'd probably be done with this already.

THE GAME:
The game is called Mansuit. It's about a squirrel... in a Mansuit.
The concept is inspired by quite a few things. First is all the times a person or animal has been stuck inside a human outer shell. See that one scene in Men in Black where a tiny alien is in the head of a person. Or that one time in Pinky and the Brain where Brain (as Brian) was controlling the suit with a variety of levers. In short: Tiny animal frantically moving knobs. Practically a trope. (TVTropes, let's talk.) The phrase "Mansuit" came from a particular store in Chicago that offered "Mansuit" alterations, which was such a weird way to phrase it that it stuck in my mind. The last portion of inspiration was Donut County. Never in the history of media has there been a more accurate portrayal of a Raccoon being a mischeivous Raccoon. (Insert Donut County rant about how memorable B.K. is) So, I decided on a squirrel that gets stuck. The squirrel is still a squirrel, there's all sorts of human things happening, and they may even be incredibly important. But as a squirrel, you only care about getting nuts.

THE COOL PART:
Inside the suit are panels which control different aspects. There are also 1/4mm Stereo jacks that you plug patch cables into in order to trigger other panel buttons. Essentially this is an engine builder where some things can break, or be disabled, and you can patch through to another panel to do both things. The result is some hilarious gameplay where you might need to constantly wink in order to bend over, or have to pour out sweat at a constant rate if you want to open your mouth, or (my personal favorite) intentionally failing to digest food so you vomit to increase your Believability.

THE GAMEPLAY AND THE CREATIVE STRUGGLES:
Originally, Mansuit had just a single screen with only Fuel (a resource that goes down over time) and Heat (a resource that goes up over time) If your Fuel gets to 0, or if your Heat gets to 100, you explode. So you're picking areas on a map to do their stage. Doing a stage means getting nuts (things you need to beat the game) or control panels (things that you REALLY want so you can get more nuts). The control panels controlled various aspects of the Mansuit. The first one made was a "Face" panel where you could blink and move your eyeballs around. This cost you fuel but you would need to "flirt" with an NPC to get a nut by just winking.

This quickly ran into the Door/Key problem, where 1 Key (A control panel) was accessing 1 Door (a single nut) and the gameplay would have felt same-y and bad after just a little bit. I kept going until I had arrived at a solution.

I added "Believability" as a 3rd stat. This was stat that needed to be high or low to accomplish certain goals. You couldn't do the "Date" level if you still looked like a robot suit. Adding this did make a bit of a difference, but I found myself hitting the same Door/Key problem. I didn't fix the issue, I just postponed it.

I added "Jank" which was a stat that messed with your panels but this felt tangental to the gameplay and just didn't feel good.

After many conversations and many false starts I had always dismissed the idea of enemies since it wasn't really a Metroidvania or an action game, but I realized I had to. Furthermore, I realized I couldn't just have the player show up at a stage and I needed to add friction. Hence, enemies...

THE ENEMIES AND THE OBSTACLES:
So far the only obstacle was managing the panels but I needed the player to make decisions based on the situation. I wanted players to have builds that work well in some situations but not others. Because this isn't a game with "Hitpoints" or anything action based, the enemies had to do things with the panels or do things with your Fuel, Heat, or Believability. In short, I removed "Jank" as it existed and made the enemies the "Jank" instead

BlockBot in "Friendly" mode.

Because the enemies weren't like other types of enemies, I had a lot of fun creating them. For example, the "BlockBot" seen above will block your way if you are too human. He "helpfully" prevents you from moving forward. However, if your Believability is low, he changes to his passive, unimpressed state, and lets you through. This makes it so you can't just max out Believability and ignore it. The presence of a BlockBot can complicate stages or add some friction when you're low on fuel and need to quickly dump your humanity. The other enemies that have been created so far are an "Apex" Obelisk. This patrols slowly but if it spots you it starts firing a heat ray at you. Depending on how your build is, you could just run out of the room before your Heat gets too high, have something that tanks the Heat very efficiently, or have a high enough Believability so that it doesn't target you at all.

WHERE I'M AT RIGHT NOW:
Hopefully I've described what the gameplay is like in a way that doesn't miss anything massive. I've had a lot of thoughts and work on this project and I guess this entry is keeping the people who have shown interest up to speed. Everyone is saying there needs to be a demo, but I'm certain that if a demo is created without all the pieces, the project will fail. I'd still like to make a demo or otherwise an alpha trailer just to show what I'm going with. The issue with a demo is that you need to have all the pieces right out of the gate so they can see the potential. It's not about adding 100 enemies at this point, it's about adding enough. However, this also means adding the 2 or 3 missing systems before I can safely say a demo is ready for alpha.