(Future Fragments) The Great Survey Responses Post; Part 2 (Patreon)

So in part 2 of our series here, we'll be going over some things people wanted in the game but we can't (or don't want to) add in for various reasons.

Most of these were asked multiple times, which is why we're specifically responding to them as they're likely things a lot of people wanted. Some of these are things we already have in the game, so we wanted to clarify that with these posts also.

We'll be splitting this one up into two parts to keep post size down, too.

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Backer: "Really weird that our ranged specialist cant aim up. seriously."

Our Response; I'm going to give two reasons for this; the first is plot-based, the second is gameplay-based.

Plot-wise, Talia is always defending her Kingdom, not attacking other ones; meaning, she's almost always attacking at ground level, preventing enemy troops from getting to the castle in the first place, so she's never had any reason to get good at shooting up or down.

Gameplay-wise, having this as a constant ability would completely nullify any challenge from some enemies (the flying half-demon, for instance); you'd also be able to shoot up to other ledges and hit enemies with sprites that are a bit over the ledge's edge, also making them no challenge.

That all said, we DO have a powerup planned for the full game that will give you this ability; if it's something that's not a constant and the player has to give up a powerup slot for it, it becomes a lot more balanced/fair.

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Backer: "Maybe the ability to set own save points. "

Our Response: Normally we eschew making the gameplay bend around the plot, with the gameplay always being first priority, but for this particular event we simply can't do it if we want the full game to make sense.

It might not make sense right now, but when you get the full game and beat it, it'll be clear why we couldn't do this.

Speaking strictly gameplay-wise too, it would be a really complex problem to set your own save spots, because some cutscenes depend on the player respawning back at base for events to work correctly and for the game to not softlock, and setting flags/code to catch all possible places and ways someone could accidentally softlock themselves with this would be months of work and testing, at least.

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Backer: "I Really Really Really wanted something like "Dead Cells" movement mechanics, the sex the lore the ambiance everything is really nice, but moving around is really dull something Dead Cells like movement with more fluid animations with some rolls dashes wall latch and a much more fluid animation would be nice..."

Our Response: One of the things you have to realize about Dead Cells (which I haven't played, have only seen, so feel free to correct me on things here) is that when you plan a game out, at the start you need to decide on things like mechanics and movement and abilities; we started out planning Future Fragments as something more like old-school Megaman, where the player character doesn't have a wide variety of movement abilities, and instead relies on precise platforming and has a lot of "weight" to their character (falling fast, lack of floatiness or acceleration).

There's nothing wrong with Dead Cells, it seems like a great game, but we simply can't change the way Future Fragments plays this far into development.

As far as the animations go, it's a similar case there; if the character themselves is moving without acceleration for the most part and has a lack of floatiness and a lack of movement abilities, having fluid animation wouldn't fit it as much.

We also only have one artist for the entire game's art assets, so upping the number of animation frames dramatically (especially with the wide variety of backgrounds, game over CGs, sex scenes, etc.) would increase production time exponentially.

Now, for Faye's game, we DO plan to have things like wall jumps, dashing, and so on, because we'll be planning that from the start of development, but as far as the animation goes, it'll likely be similar for the above reason.

(We're not going to hire another artist on because we've tried that three times now, and in every case, while they were great artists, keeping consistency in art style between Triangulate's art and their art just never worked out, and it ended up taking more time than Triangulate just doing it himself to adjust their art to fit his.)

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Backer: "Playing as Faye and/or Vie."

Our Response: You won't be able to play as Faye in this game, but you will in the sequel! As for Vie, we MIGHT have some plans for her, but that's not something we're going to settle on or seriously discuss until the sequel to Future Fragments is mostly complete, at the earliest.

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Backer: "More paths between levels. For example in the public demo for Electric Level you have a main hub and a bunch of linear paths. I wish the paths would be less linear and more interconnected. As for the items ins public demo electric level. Make each item available only once and more difficult to gather. It makes them more rewarding."

Our Response: If you're looking for interconnected, less linear paths, then The End is definitely the level for you! The same goes for the powerups; we've got plans already setup to make powerups a one-time thing across the game, and will be redoing their placement as such, too.

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Backer: "Maybe a little character customization(Boobie size, haircolour, clothes, etc)."

Our Response: This is unfortunately outright something we could never do, simply because Triangulate hand-draws every frame of animation in the game (we're not using Spine or anything similar to give the characters skeletons); this means that for even a slight adjustment in say, bust size, he'd have to redo hundreds of frames of animations.

Maybe for some of our future games (not the Faye sequel though)!

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Backer: "A seducing attack to beat the enemy by fucking him, so you can see the animation without dying or getting damage, with high cooldown or rare ammunition so people dont overuse it."

Our Response: This is something we wouldn't do just because it doesn't make sense with the characters; while they don't mind sex, they want to get on with their mission as quickly as possible, and having sex with an enemy wouldn't logically defeat them anyways. Gameplay-wise this would be too easy to abuse even with a high cooldown or anything of that sort, too.

That said, we do have the Arousal Meter mechanic planned for future releases once we work it out some more, which effectively lets you see sex animations without it directly harming your health, so look forward to that!

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Backer: "mute dialogue option for voice overs"

Our Response: This is already in; just go to the options menu and you can mute male voices, female voices, or all voices, as well as change the volume level for them individually!

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Backer: "User made map finder. Something that lets you see a variety of user made maps that the community made and possibly a rating system for them."

Our Response: I'd love to have something like this, but the problem is, Jason Bill is currently the only person out of well over 150 people we've sent the editor to that has actually completed a set of maps. If other people were to do this, we'd be happy to make a system like that!

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Backer: "I wish that there was a minimap, kinda hard to pause the game consistently to check where we are on the world."

Our Response: There is a minimap in the upper right corner; you can press the M key to remove it or bring it back! :)

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Backer: "Little comment/rant: I'm french canadian, so my computer is in french. The thing is, the game detect it and set the keyboard to an "AZERTY" french keyboard. Even if we speak french, our keyboard are "QWERTY" like the US and the rest of Canada. For me (and probably other players), this feature is annoying because even if I manually fix the key binding (which I need to do everytime), the "accept" button is stuck on W instead of Z."

Our Response: We'll be fixing this soon, thanks a lot for telling us! If anyone else lives in regions we've put the "auto key rebinding" features on for and you're in a similar situation, please let us know!

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Backer: "Perhaps some kind of block/counter where when you use it just before an attack lands you don't take damage or even deal damage back or reflect projectiles kinda thing."

Our Response: We actually debated on this for a few months back and forth, but we eventually felt it just was something we wouldn't be able to put in without making the game a cakewalk as a result, or that the circumstances in where you could plausibly use it would be so low that it'd feel kind of like a forced/wasted mechanic.

It also doesn't fit too well with Talia being a ranged specialist. For Faye's game though, and its faster, more combat-oriented gameplay, we might consider something like that.

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Backer: "Rarely do these games have so few typos"

Our Response: As far as I know, the Electric Level has one or two typos which have since been fixed; if anyone ever finds any other typos in v027F, please let us know! We'll honor you in the credits or give you a special code for something neat in the final version of the game :)

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Backer: "Unlockable ability to use electric jump in the air / higher jump in general / dashing in multiple directions up into the air"

Our Response: The main reason we don't do this is because it would make the map design nearly impossible to work with; we'd either end up with maps with countless softlocks (meaning the player couldn't escape), or we'd end up with pretty boring maps that were just effectively huge open rooms with few platforms in them and fairly similar design between each map.

This is why Megaman games, with these features, have such maps; they're great games, but let's be honest, the maps for almost any level in most Megaman games are just huge rooms with a few platforms here and there and progressing in one direction with large open spaces around the platforms.

Conversely, the gravity reversal effect in the Electric Level was hard enough to design around; even with that we had to make 3 or 4 "softlock" cutscenes for people who exploited the system by using freeze shot mechanics to turn enemies into platforms and then reverse gravity and get to unintended areas. (We're happy people are finding things like this though, don't get us wrong; it's pretty awesome!)

When you add in things like the mechanics we have planned for The End, it would just completely break the game to give you the ability to get such large jump or dash heights; most maps would be softlockable or glitched as a result, unless we made them big, open, empty rooms like mentioned above.

That said, we do have a compromise; there's a powerup we've got planned that'll let you hover at your jump peak for a few seconds, and there's another of course that already increases your jump height a bit.

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Backer: "The ability to go back to levels to find missing scenes Or make other choices for the scenes"

Our Response: Once you've beaten a level, you can't go back to it; this is because the "web" of gameplay choices as-is, is already going to be very, very dense with choices and interconnecting effects based on said choices.

All of this works though only because you're forced to do each level in succession and can't go back to earlier ones; if we allowed that, it would become so complex that it just wouldn't be feasible to design even for a team of 5-10 different writers. (Remember, I'm the only person writing on this game and designing cutscenes for it!)

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That's it for now; we'll have more responses next week!

The new demo will be out by April 6th, and if you'd like to join the Discord, feel free to do so at https://discord.gg/puXrfSm !