Gut Feeding by MugenMagnus

Gut Feeding is about an eating competition where you must shovel as much food into your mouth as possible and digest them within the time limit.
Objective
Digest and "process" as much food as you can.
Game Flow
At first, the food will be too large to fit into the intestines, but the stomach acids gradually digest it so it can fit. You can hover your mouse over the food inside your body to greatly speed up the digestion. At any time, you can use the toilet flush handle to help hasten the food's passage through the intestines. You receive points when food exits the intestines.
Multitasking is a critical portion of this game. You'll need to balance your flinging and flushing!
Also, be careful not to drop food off the table or fling it past your eater; you'll lose time whenever food goes out of bounds.
Controls
- Click, hold the food to grab it.
- While clicking you can drag grabbed food by moving the mouse, or fling it by releasing the click.
- Hover your mouse over food inside your body to shrink it.
- Click the toilet handle to flush.
- Press P to pause the game

Kodachi: Music, Programmer
MugenMagnus: Art, Programmer
Software used: Unity, Bosca Ceoil, Krita, Visual Studio, Bfxr
| HTML5 (web) | https://mugenmagnus.itch.io/gut-feeding |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/gut-feeding |
Ratings
| Overall | 827th | 3.167⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 487th | 3.333⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 512th | 3.258⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 693th | 3.379⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 854th | 3.03⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 479th | 3.106⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 210th | 3.406⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 44🗳️ | 9🗨️ |
I did run out of *time* before I ever ran out of *space*, though, so the theme application is a little weaker than it could have been.
The graphics are cute, but there's a bit of an onslaught of similar colours happening, which causes clashing. There's a lot of variety of similar brown-tones that could be reduced, for instance. The man and the audience members in the back have a black outline (the audience members having some artifacting on the edges too), the rest does not. In the case of your game it doesn't stand out that bad, but it's a slight style inconsistency.
I had fun with this, nice job!
Gives an addictive feeling, but its very hard with a mouse or pen. Touch is probably best :)
My daughter liked it ^^
Your mechanics work extremely (and I mean extremely) well together. The act of clicking and dragging increases in difficulty as the food piles up because it gets harder and harder to prevent food from flying (which gets you a time penalty), creating more and more challenge over the course of the game. On top of that, you re-purpose the mouse for digestion in a simple but genius way: hovering. Why is this genius? Well, since you have plenty of stomach space and a timer ticking down, the game becomes an act of knowing when to stop eating and when to start digesting. The more you eat, the more efficient the hover mechanic becomes because it digests more food on a single pass of the mouse.
So from start to finish, here is the gameplay loop: You scramble to eat as much as possible, becoming ever aware and affected by the pile of food and making sure not to accidentally toss some of it away as it gives a time penalty. At some point, you realize the timer is at about 20-40 seconds and your stomach is about half full. To continue eating would be a waste and so you move on to the act of digesting the food by hovering your mouse over the food in your stomach and intestines. The more food you managed to eat by this point in the game, the more efficient the hover mechanic is.
When is the best time to stop eating? How careful should one be with the process of stuffing one's face? These are surprisingly engaging challenges created by this game and its mechanics, and honestly, it is nothing short of a Ludum Dare masterpiece. THIS is what elegant design is!
As a designer, I am honestly impressed and since it can sometimes be difficult to realize how good something you have made is, I wanted to spell it out for you as best I could.
It is a shame that proper implementation of the theme (like cutting the stomach space in half) would undermine the elegant design as it would no longer be up to the player to deduce when the optimal time to stop eating is, but rather a matter of necessity. However, I am so glad that you didn't let the theme get in the way of great design!
Solid entry and it saddens me to see the lack of votes on this game at the point of writing this. I hope you make it past the threshold needed to get on the scoreboard.
The click dragging is using vector lerping, I assume? Maybe using direct "sticking" to the mouse would feel better to the user. All in one, fantastic little project!
I had a lot of fun with this game. Hope you do well :D
I kept running into issues where I wasn't able to pick up any food, but I'm not sure if it was intended or not. It would just not let me click for a second or two, and then it went back to normal.
All in all, I think you did a fantastic job considering what little time you had. I really like the graphics, too... Even if some images are a little rough, such as the background, they still have a great deal of charm!