Also Speaking Of Playtesting, I Think That I May Have Inadvertently Made One Of The Man-eater’s Options

Also speaking of playtesting, I think that I may have inadvertently made one of the man-eater’s options way “stronger” than all the others and I’m not 100% how to fix it at the moment or if it for sure needs to be fixed, and I can’t dedicate too much time to it right now because I need to work on The XXX-Files (because we need another mini-release because by the way we are not doing good on money right now please buy our games.)

In short, the man-eater is a Monster Trait (from Eureka: The Fanservice Files, a mini-expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy) that has the ability to swallow people whole similarly to the gorgon, but not much else in the way of powers. Also similar to the gorgon they are pretty female-coded though not explicitly gender-locked.

In some ways, this lack of other special features is an advantage because it means that a man-eater can pass for normal really easily, but it also means they don’t have a super obvious Weakness. I'm pretty proud of what I came up with, in fact I’m very proud of the whole Trait and being able to make a deviantart fetish into a mechanically interesting, viable, and thematic playable Eureka monster.

Man-eaters are the hungriest girls you’ve ever met, and that’s their weakness. Imagine the hungriest chick you can think of, she’s 100x hungrier than that. Eating enough food to qualify as “a meal” has a much higher threshold for them than other characters, and skipping a meal has much more severe consequences.

The “power” of a man-eater goes up with the severity of their weakness, and this is one of the most severe and punishing weaknesses out of all the playable monsters in Eureka. As you can see, man-eaters on the upper end of the scale can potentially drop dead from going, like, twelve hours without food.

Here’s the issue though. When first writing these, I considered the increased speed of the digestion to be a benefit offsetting the heavy penalties, since it dissolves evidence faster, but it might be the opposite. Because a man-eater having a full stomach like that means she automatically counts as having eaten a meal each time a meal time rolls around, she’s protected from the worst of the effects of the weakness. The faster she digests, though, the shorter the time she is protected from those effects and the shorter the time she can rely on a single oversized meal or victim.

I suspect that the higher metabolism severity levels will still see a lot of use even if they turn out to be sub-optimal in play, because I suspect around 60% or more of players that make man-eater investigators are playing that character because they wanna see her eat a lotta people, but if possible I’d like to avoid having one option that is just way way better than the others, especially if, like mentioned above, a lot of the people picking man-eater are probably gonna be doing it because they wanna see this chick swallow a half-dozen people alive. The ones that let her stomach stretch way more are gonna be the most fun to them.

Like I said in another post recently, character or strategy optimization is not the enemy of fun in games, “players optimizing the fun out of games” is a failure of game design.[1]

[1] within reason; if you have tens of thousands of people number-crunching to try and break the game like you do with tournament play in most games, even a super well-designed game will crack eventually.

As a game designer, you should design your game assuming that yes, obviously, players will want to win and will therefore will try to build optimal characters and use all the rules they can to their advantage, (and this is a good thing, it means that they are engaging deeply with the game mechanics you wrote!) so what you have to make sure of is that highly optimal strategies and character builds are also highly fun.

Of course, sub-optimal play for an intentional added challenge can also add fun to a game for many players, and Eureka knows this well, so again like I said near the beginning of the post, this may not be a huge problem, playtesting will probably have to be the thing that shows us whether this is a “problem” worth “fixing” or not.

But for playtesting to happen, people have gotta make man-eater characters and play them in-game and give us feedback. So go download Eureka: The Fanservice Files and show me the hungriest chick you can think of.

itch.io

Eureka: The Fanservice Files (Beta, April 1st 2025) by Agency of Narrative Intrigue and Mystery

A comical expansion for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(Another thing I might consider to help differentiate the man-eater from just being a weaker gorgon is to maybe make them a bit more spry effectual even when they have a big meal in their stomachs, representing how they’re more, like, warm-blooded.)