My Greedy Dog Steve

ALthough pretty standart gameplay I really liked the level up system. It's soo cool when your choices give some downside effects.

Tweakable in many ways and a lot more fun to play because I watched you guys making it and struggeling in good old LD fashion :D! A lot of content for that short time and a cool art style. Would give you guys a high rating but....no flamethrower ! :P With love, Uno

Such a beautiful game. Follows the theme and I love the RPG progression system. Good job!

Very interesting game. I love how Steve got bigger lol. but I dont quite see how it goes with the theme? anyways, Great job mate!

@steel-dev Regarding the theme, shame it wasn't obvious as we tried to implement it in three forms:
- the more you feed Steve, the worse it is as he requires more and more food after each feed.
- the more you level up, the weaker your character gets from debuffs that come with levelling up.
- the more items you collect, the more negative stats you have to manage as gear has negative stats.

@honest-dan ooohhh, makes a lot of sense now

I just keep hearing the Jerry Spring rant in my head, "STEEEEVE! STEEEEEV!" :D This was a lot done in such a shot time, and looks fabulous!

@lillybyte that Steve you speak of was a hero indeed.

I love how leveling up is not only positive, but not being able to walk any more was really harsh hahaha. The art is incredibly amazing! I really respect that you guys went with a pretty difficult perspective. Overal a great game and its amazing what you guys did in such a short time span!

@flippo did it stop you from running? or moving at all? It was only meant to stop you from running! Oops! ...I mean, feature!

Such a greedy Steve! Great job on this one guys, I really love the art in the game and how you implemented the debuffs while leveling up was a really cool mechanic. It's one of those games that looks like it shouldn't have been done in 3 days, which is always great! Keep up the great work, and well done on your first Ludum Dare! :)

I think the game is really nice and soothing. The game play is quite neat and straight forward I think.
Art style is very unique and pleasant on the eye.
Very neat concept and game design I think. Plays nicely and enjoyable. Thanks for the pleasant experience

I want a dog and I want to call him Steve! I really liked it. I hope we'll be able to create a RPG too sometimes..

Steve was just always so hungry! I kept killing purple dudes and it never pleased him. 10/10 would feed Steve more bear meat.

Everything felt so clean, maybe one or two more frames in the attack animation or a shadow for the character would really help with immersion.

Awesome job!

Really love the art style. Enjoyed it very much!

Making choices about debuffs is always more satisfying than choosing buffs. The idea of needing to collect even more food was pretty brutal. Having a full swing attack animation would have gone really far to help illustrate the actual distance I could swing. Congratulations on finishing an LD!

Love the "however" part of leveling up, makes it harder to decide. The art was nice and the music was quite soothing.

However(yes, that was intentional):

Its not really obvious when steve is about to, the red bar is a little bit too small, maybe add a sound alert.

A minimap or some sort of indicator of how to go back would be appreceated.

Maybe add a way of dodging the enemies attacks intentionally(shield, roll, etc.)

Overall it was a fun game, congratz!

The character could move a bit faster but besides that, it's a pretty cool entry with cool art style. I like it! Very well done! :)

I find the art style charming. I would agree with @wova. Otherwise it is solid. Nice one.

I liked it, maybe not the best animation, but the sprites are great. The gameplay is good and I think the approach to theme is correct.

@theck animations are definitely programmerart :) Thank you for the feedback

Very nice concept. I enjoyed the art style with the hand drawn art and animations. The "but" part of leveling up was also quite interesting. I did have two suggestions. One, when I fed Steve, he took all of the food, even if he didn't need it all. This seemed a little punishing since I had four extra after just fighting a bear. It is also not being a responsible pet owner to overfeed your pet :grinning: The second is that sometimes right after leveling up, my character would walk for a while without any keys being pressed, and I could not get her to stop. I was playing the WebGL version, so this may be one of the buggier parts there.

Nice job, the art is nice but the animations felt a little bit clunky. The gameplay is very cool and very complete for a jam game, nice balance with the pros and cons of the level up perks. As someone has said, I would like to keep the extra meat when I feed Steve, sometimes it simply felt unfair.

Cool game, lots of different parts to it.

I am quite impressed at the amount of work and effort put into this jam game. UI, systems and even art. Great job!

@elendow Thanks for the kind words. We had only 1 artist and he did a real good job with the sprites, however animations were done by me(I'm a programmer), we could opt-out of animations if there was a choice :) But we had to keep the Graphics category because I think my friend did a great job there. Thanks again!

@james-dunlap Noone experienced that bug as far as I know. Sorry to hear you had that. It's probably the WebGL version :/ Thank you for your suggestion, you are probably right. Actually, you can use the red X button next to meat to drop meat, so you can give Steve only he wants, because he is GREEEEEEDY! Thanks for playing the game!

@wowa @potti There is gear that will give you bonus movement speed, but that gear of course comes with negative stats to balance. Not sure if quicker movement speed or smaller map would be the better solution. Thanks for feedback.

@james-dunlap @elendow The idea to make Steve eat all the meat was my idea. I thought, if you present a growing dog with an overportion.. he would still eat it all! You are able to drop meat using the inventory hotpar (clicking the red X). I thought it'd be good to add another thing to manage, dropping meat to feed the correct portion, also making the next meal gathering easier as a result. However, it isn't very clear so probably a poor design choice! Thanks for the feedback :)

really solid game. theme implemented in a lot of ways. one of the best i've played so far. really well done!

solid entry! art and music are perfect. you played that guitar? catchy.

@bitsandcrafts I played the guitar in 10 mins improvising, 20 mins before the submission. It was stressful :D And thank you!

This is excellent! I really enjoyed the gameplay and the art was a high point, too. The leveling system is really well-done and cleanly presented - I enjoyed the benefits and drawbacks of each one, and it's very impressive that you created and implemented that in such a short timeframe. Great work!

That rascal is surely growing up fast, yo.

I like how this game gradually, but surely, keeps getting more and more challenging in pretty much every aspect. And not because it just increases the things to collect, but that pretty much every decision comes at a very heavy cost. Good weapons come along with great drawbacks, and upgrades have )somewhat unfitting) problems of their own, so it's never an easy decision to select what to level up. Specially since the Level 3 debbufs are horrendous.

But still, the game never felt unfair nor dull. I had a great time feeding that evergrowing pup and fighting the creatures in the very-good-looking world you crafted for lil' Steve.

If I have one problem, however, it's the hurt-yourself-debuff. I can take everything like dropping my weapons, loot, slowing down, attacking slower and recovering stamina slower. But damaging myself when attacking _and_ with poor health regeneration turned an interesting run into a supreme slog. I couldn't get into fights because I had to wait forever to have a reasonable health to engage without dying. I know it's meant to be an impactful debuff, but it seriously changed the tone of the game.

Still, it's one of the best submissions I've played so far on this jam. In behalf of my team, we hope to see what other games you make in the future. Cheers! :whale:

@safrmo Thank you so much for the kind words!

@moski it genuinely makes me very happy to see someone play and explore our game! yes, I agree with you - the damage yourself debuff is really harsh and makes it a bit tedeious. We didn't have a chance to try it to see how it felt if I'm honest! We could reduce it from 25% of your damage to either 1) a lower amount of damage, or 2) you can choose to eat meat collected to restore health. The second option is a nice (but harsh) solution I'd lean towards! Thanks again for the time you took to review

This is a really nice game ! I particularly like that you'll always get a counterpart to your new ability when you level up. It's impressive when you think it's all been done in 72 hours.

Interesting mechanic of choosing upgrades that also confer debuffs. The artstyle looks pretty unique, and Steve is so adorable. A lot of content here as well with the various debuffs and items.

Now for some nitpicks: gameplay felt a little of a grind, as the main character moved a little too slow for my taste. The font looks sweet, but is a little hard to read, especially the text colored in red. Would have been great with some Sound FX to go along with the gameplay, and the BGM seems especially relaxed for the action oriented gameplay. Otherwise, really cute entry!

The dog creeps me out :D

The game has a really interesting premise and an amazing art style. It was quite fun in the beginning, but later on you had to run around looking for enemies you hadn't killed a bit too much for my taste. This might have been worse than normal because I may have had some stamina and speed debuffs. Another complaint I have about the game is that the bridge to the bottom right of the tower was a bit glitchy. At first it didn't let me pass. I'm not sure if you have to do something to be allowed to cross, but when I tried to get across a second time, it still didn't work, however I also didn't manage to leave the bridge on the side I entered it, and could walk into the river a bit. At that point I gave up since I saw no way to get back to Steve :( Screenshot

Apart from that, I really enjoyed the game. The level ups were quite a fun nuisance, and I enjoyed choosing which debuff to get next!

@navot Thanks for the kind words. Bridge is buggy yeh, it's an easy fix of moving a collider, maybe you can enjoy the POST JAM version when we're done with it

Impressive game, very full-featured! I really like the mechanic of leveling up being a trade-off -- the loot dodging being collected was cracking me up and ticking me off :) Graphics are very nice and I like those weird monsters. I enjoyed the main song but I don't know if it fits with the bloodshed... it fits for feeding Steve though, that cute pup! Enjoyed this quite a bit, good work.

The game really has a lot of great things to it! First of all I loved the art style and inventory system, the subtle humor was nice. The game was easy to understand and gave me fun for a while. The hitboxes made me hesitate a lot during the game (as I choose +3 attack) as I wasn't too sure how big they were, even after playing for a while. The exploration aspect of the game was pretty nice as well, unfortunately it takes really long to run back and forth which becomes rather tedious as the game progresses.

Loved the game, a great time waster! Well done in such a short amount of time!

Really awesome concept. All the art was great, especially Steven himself. The pacing was a little slow for my taste (wish I could have made Lilly go a bit faster, maybe with one of the level-up options. The negative debuffs were a cool idea, although it got closer and closer to impossible to play the game (by design perhaps?) Overall I liked it, a nice little game!

Thanks @wheffle @twinGhosts @fluidvolt @randomphantom @sadsmile

The shame is - to be true to the theme, indeed the game does get tedius and slower - but that is by design! It was very interesting in fact, made us realise why real RPG games give the player new spells and shiny things to distract them from the monotomy of repetitive quests! Thanks for trying to give Steve a good start in life.

Beautiful game - love the graphics. Liked the guitar song as well (although if expanded, more songs/longer sections to reduce repetitiveness would be good).

Gosh steve is greedy :/ Just kidding :D Really a nice game. I felt that the movementspeed was way to slow. The runspeed could have been the normal movementspeed. At a lot of points I was just waiting for my character to arrive at the steves house to feed him ^^
And like I already mentioned in the stream, make me able to ride steve at the end :D would the best ending ever!

Really cool game i liked the ending our friendship wasnt enough i guess

For some reason, Steve reminds me of my cat. Always needy. Always wanting food. Always expressing disdain when not getting their way. And yet...

I like the graphical style of the game, and the relaxing music seemed to work well with it.

Pretty cool. I like the Alpha Bear! Red Glowing Eyes! :)

Very nice art and good ideas, well done!

The graphic style is amazing, and the game is fun for a while. "For a while" because the gameplay gets a bit repetitive with time. It's kind of what happens with several MMORPGs: the quests are always similar (kill N monsters and bring me the items they drop). I don't really know what to suggest about this, but *maybe* if the game was a bit faster, the player wouldn't notice the issue that much?

The perks with downsides are an interesting idea. I didn't like them at first, as I'm used to just progressing with my character, but they force the player to take some unusual choices: not only on what do I want to be stronger, but also on what do I need to avoid getting weaker! I'm not sure about the "big" anti-perks (like the one that makes you hit yourself, damn it!), though, but maybe that's because I didn't find enough items or stuff to try to counter those massive disadvantages (and that, in turn, may have been because of the perks I picked, which would mean it's totally my fault because of the choices I made!).

Overall, good entry! Congratulations on the good work, and on trying some cool ideas!

@rasco thank you very much for the detailed review. We are glad to hear your feedback. I think as game designers, we were aware it got "less fun" the further you got - but then the reason for that was because we made the character more limited - making the task at hand (collecting meat) harder and slower to do. This ofc is a bit less fun, but we felt it was so in line with the theme that we watned to keep it that way. However, a variety of quests etc could have aided, we do agree that with meat collection the only task - it can become repetitive. At the same time it added some strategy. Do you collect meat from far away and make a pile of it outside your house whilst you're still young and healthy? Do you use the most of your timers when thing's are easier? etc.

I'm glad you started to see the perks as intersting. Ofc, we are used to just wanting to grow our character, and get new abilities, and get more powerful etc. but thats standard RPG. This LD theme didn't align with a standard RPG, so that's why we went down this route

Totally loving the graphics, great job! somehow I don't know how to put down the meatx3, dog just die..

When I attacked a purple sphere and it attacked me back, I felt excited. If you continue to develop this game, after I fed the dog once, I didn't notice Steve grow, and wasn't sure what new features I had unlocked.

Wow, that is an impressing project, having a fully explorable map and lots of RPG features surely did not come easy... And the result is purely awesome! You captured the feeling of RPG and bring it the calm atmosphere of a retired life. Great work.

If I where to give you directions for improving your game, I'd say that animations could be improved (while static graphics are perfect) and maybe to rebalance level-up debufs (movement slowing is super anoying while you can max your HP without stamina being a real problem).

@starlin when you have 3 meat for the first quest, you go stand next to Steve in your house and a button "Feed Steve" appears above his quest display panel.

@ethan-kennerly The dog does grow every time you feed him! once you get to around 5 feeds, you should notice him becoming bigger than his owner! Completing the quest doesn't unlock features, but levelling up does - these are presented to you on the level up menu.

@sgadrat thank you for your kind words, we definitely put in a lot of hard work :D We are glad you felt we brought things together well. The animations were all done with only 1 sprite as my brother who did the wonderful art was not fully available so we ahd to do our best to implement skeletal animation based on that. Balancing debuffs I agree with you, we have discussed these and are almost finished on a post jam version that addresses many bugs and issues that are present in the LD build.

Beautiful game art, loved the mechanics very smart, good sounds and song is calm, good game, I wish I could play this on my phone

Very nice visuals, I really enjoyed the look of this game. The fighting animations felt a bit stuff, but that is understandable due to the time constraint. The extra step of adding background music also added nicely to the atmosphere. Overall good job.

I dropped my sword and I couldn't get it back. Game looks pretty nice though.

@logicon211 Was it due to the major debuff "you can no longer pickup loot" perhaps? Thanks for letting us know.

Cmon Lilly, move it! I've got a greedy dog to feed! Besides the slow movement it's enjoyable :) Not bad animation for a jam, and the art is really good. Is that your actual dog that you drew and based the game on?

@tvance thanks for your comment! We are aware it would be easier to increase the movespeed, but we felt we wanted to put the player in a position to choose between gear with increased move speed / not choose the perks to slow down the character. In our post jam version we did increase the general speed, and reduced the multiplier that the perk reduced player speed by - which makes it a nicer experience from that perspective! No, we don't have a cute dog to base this on unfortunately! We just like making silly games

This game.. quite punishing indeed :D

It did feel a tad odd to have the perk choice pop up straight as you "levelled up" in the midst of combat, even if I can see why making that choice might make it easier to let the player know right then and there.

The art style is definitely charming, if theres any complaint on those grounds I have it would be the font being nigh-unreadable for the tiny hints that showed up over items on the ground at times! (the animations can be excused easily, with the time constraints :))

Great work, the music and the art and the game's progression definitely fit the theme.. maybe a bit too well? :D

@profan thanks for taking the time to give us some feedback! I think you summed it up well, fit the theme maybe a bit too well :D you end up wanting to win out of principle and commitment, rather than enjoyment haha.

Agree on the font, agree on the level up. For us, the level up couldnt be optional, else people could just avoid choosing a perk. Sure there was a better way to implement that though. Thanks again for playing

Great submission! I really loved the art in particular.

I'm kinda cheating in my review because I'm playing the post-jam-polish version, but I made it to LA, got my stuff unpacked, internet setup today, and I wanted to review/rate at least all of my friends' submissions before the end of the window. So here goes nothing, Kegan, Protector of the Orange Soda's review of My Greedy Dog Steve:

Immediately off-the-bat, I really enjoy the addition of an icon/splash screen and the title screen was cute (the instructions were very clear as well, and I dig the chill tune!)

I think the movement felt really nice and the addition of an equipment inventory was a great touch. I'm amazed by how much you guys got done given the time constraints (your talent for design definitely showed in the details (e.g. the arrow around steve's portrait, pointing the player back home)! Shout out to Dan's brother for the art too, looks awesome! I'm sure others have said this, but it slightly reminds me of Don't Starve. Oh, and cool water.

I only had a teensy gripe in that the knockback from the bear enemies felt like a little too much, but oh well :P

Speaking of enemies, the variety and designs were cool! I liked the ghosties, and defeating the big bear made me feel like a champ!

Overall, this is a fantastic take on the theme and quite an original, relaxing experience! The punishing level ups really put pressure on me get Steve fed before the timer ran out, and I had a lot of fun doing so, especially when reading the humorous "BUTTERFINGERS" floating text when the meat would dodge me (not to mention the ending of the game, but I won't spoil it for anyone)!

Awesome job guys! :) The credit sequence was sweet and I'm honored to have been included in it