This sounds interesting - though, I wonder if there will be a way to bet on eating. For example, you challenge someone to a more personal (and unofficial) eating contest, and the winner takes the bet (but everyone takes the food, unless you want a system to ‘fail’ that, like overeating leading to ‘losing it’ - ideally not described - or something worse…which I would personally hope against). You could (if you had a way to guess a challenger’s stats) use this as a way to get better at the eating contests (if eating a lot ends up tied to being able to eat more in the future, which is always fun), as well as a means to make money. You could also connect side quests to maybe gaining means to improve stats (which I think you mentioned) in a fun or alternate way. For example, maybe eventually unlocking someone who is just a manic feeder, who will help force your capacity with extreme stuffing sessions - but the downside would either be taking a whole questline to unlock them, that they take a not-insignificant amount of time/investment to take advantage of, or any combination.
Let me throw out there that I would probably be the sort to look for a non-gambling way to earn progress, so that informs whose looking (as weird as it may be hearing someone who doesn’t like gambling being eager for this being developed), but also informs my perspective and biases. I always like the idea that the risk of gambling can be mitigated, because I think leaving progress and rewards to luck isn’t the best strategy; I’m sure that’s why you mentioned probably having ways to stack things in your favor. Some people get their fun from chance - and I can sometimes find fun in it, but usually just as an option - while others prefer effort being rewarded and/or skill paying off. This is part of why I’m normally on the Blackjack train, because (without the ability to carefully study your opponents and master their tells) Blackjack has a measure of skill to go with the luck; slots are pure luck, the same going for Poker (unless you can read your opponents, play mind games, and/or count cards).
I just wanted to, as a final thought, throw this out there: game design is often executed poorly by smaller devs (especially on these levels), and it’s especially hard to know what to do/avoid when it also changes based on genre. For example: time limits are a bad mechanic, unless they’re the points, such as a racing game or any other game requiring getting good/better to a simple array of tasks in a very small amount of time (but highly and easily repeatable). Another example is failure; losing feels bad, and ruins the fun, unless it’s something built to be easy and common, and doesn’t matter much - you die a lot in Dark Souls, but you never go back to the beginning, and you can infinitely work to progress and ‘git gud’ in an environment meant to appeal to brutal challenge; you can easily fail in Mario games, but that just takes a number off a stock you can keep replenishing (which you can replenish easier and easier as the games got bigger and bigger worlds and levels, to the point some almost work with a Dark Souls-esque checkpoint system you can’t fail behind), and enough playing of the small collection of levels and worlds (decreasingly with more modern, bigger Mario games) could let you come back to where you left off from zero with enough cultivated skill. The need to farm/grind is fun in games focused on narrative progression, having a ton of story you can enjoy around the work (and cool pay-offs to the work, like sweet loot and stunning worlds to explore); in a small game with no fun loot and few assets, grind it just a chore (an example being a game I’m currently fighting with, Vale City, where the limited assets and locations aren’t helps by the absurd grind, the unreasonable anti-cheating position and measures of the creator, and the fact that progress only gives you a higher temporary state you could temporarily work back up to). Unknown threats are fine in a game made to have suspense, which also has checkpoints and other mitigation of failing to those unknowns; they’re awful when there isn’t any way to predict them with a little more effort, when they’re still complete fails (not something you can retreat from) if you guess wrong, and where failure against them can make succeeding at the overall game impossible. Secrets are a fun surprise; secrets needed for the only possible good ending, which are really hard to find, and which make no sense in finding them/give no hint they’re even a thing ruin the fun. There’s a lot more, but that’s sort of my point: I hope you’ll be putting in gambling so it is fun, and so the chance element can’t just cause you to lose contests that will keep you from eventually being able to beat the game - the game concept sounds too long for that to be okay. This is especially the issue in so-called “fetish” (a word people really misuse, if I may be overly-nerdy for a second) games; people tend to play those for the normal game pay-off, but more so for the unique ‘pay-off’ they give. This is why most “fetish” games tend to either be really short, easy, and/or so full of relative content that the challenge isn’t reaching ‘pay-offs,’ but eventually finding them all. I know, personally, it feels really un-fun to play a “fetish” game so non-kink-game-esque that it feels less like an appeal to the kink than a ‘what if’ imposition of the kink onto a theoretical world…or makes it so difficult to reach relevant content that you forget it’s a kink game, and not a game about suffering and wasting your time. That said, it’s definitely not impossible to make a game that’s both ‘fun as a game’ and ‘fun as a kink game’ - it’s just a rare skill some people forget, and can be difficult to pull off.
I am really sorry about this freaking book of ranting I just gave you…I’m just saying that I hope, if you’re making this a long game, that it will be made with ‘how can I make this fun and appealing at the same time’ on your mind the whole way through. It’s not a standard I could ever demand (no one can, or should, especially not for a game made without tons of people and lots of money behind it), but it’s something I still can’t help expressing my hope for. Again, sorry.