Early WIP report, semi-realistic weight gain strategy-sim

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Update for anyone digging up this old thread: The project is now called Gaining Perspective, and has it’s own section. See you there!

So I’ve been lurking a while. I’m here for the same reason as a lot of you, and generally found a lot of games that are proof-of-concepts, teasers, adaptations, mods, and afterthoughts.

Could I make my own? Definitely maybe.

This game is a project I’ve been working on sporadically for a couple of years. There were several false starts, different ideas, and different platforms. (I considered different game engines, dabbled in Flash/HTML5, and eventually got traction working in Twine after seeing what Leupai achieved with Boundless). I’m not entirely useless with graphic design, but decided a bare-bones look would suffice unless the graphics could add something to gameplay. I figured out a bit of CSS recently, which helped dress things up a little.

Premise:
Your character has a fattening childhood, graduates from school, enters the workforce, and tries to holds down a job while they save their money, lay the groundwork to support their advancing obesity, and slowly (or not so slowly) watch that groundwork crumble. How long can you last, and how big will you get?

It borrows inspiration from a few games, off the top of my head:
Leupai’s Boundless (Twine platform, some of my UI choices)
dj_sharp’s “A Game” (Some of the food inventory handling, automated purchase system)
noone’s “Fatty Text Adventure” (Probably the closest thing I can recall to a “finished product” in this genre)
Several others: (inspiration for Metabolism, stomach, and digestion simulation)

Some planned features (* mostly implemented):

  • Opening framing story, with basic questions that affect your starting situation (*)
  • Metabolism simulation (*)
  • Daily cycle, with rest and sleep (*)
  • Food shopping, inventory, and fast food delivery (*)
  • Health, stamina/energy, and morale personal stats (*)
  • Work days for income, career events, telecommuting options
  • Mobility “check” challenges, with risk/return mini-game.
  • Employable Housekeeper / assistant / nurse
  • shop for medical items, home amenities
  • Medical emergencies
  • Random events, flavor text
  • Soft endings / bailout events
  • Final ending (spoiler: you ded)

Call this a tease if you like. I’m not going to promise anything like regular updates, and a playable release is a ways off. But hey – I saw a lot of other WIP posts, and figured I’m not doing too bad. I’ll try to drop by from time to time with progress updates. Happy New Year, all.

1 Like
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Sounds and looks interesting, for sure. I probably wouldn’t last that long, though. Sim games aren’t really my thing, and the couple of times I’ve tried them, it didn’t go well.

3

Have you considered making a version compatible with Chromebook?

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Very exciting! Are you using Twine as a base or just the same font?

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Medical emergencies, huh? How so?

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[quote=“geekdragon, post:1, topic:1145”]So I’ve been lurking a while. I’m here for the same reason as a lot of you, and generally found a lot of games that are proof-of-concepts, teasers, adaptations, mods, and afterthoughts.

Could I make my own? Definitely maybe.

This game is a project I’ve been working on sporadically for a couple of years. There were several false starts, different ideas, and different platforms. (I considered different game engines, dabbled in Flash/HTML5, and eventually got traction working in Twine after seeing what Leupai achieved with Boundless). I’m not entirely useless with graphic design, but decided a bare-bones look would suffice unless the graphics could add something to gameplay. I figured out a bit of CSS recently, which helped dress things up a little.

Premise:
Your character has a fattening childhood, graduates from school, enters the workforce, and tries to holds down a job while they save their money, lay the groundwork to support their advancing obesity, and slowly (or not so slowly) watch that groundwork crumble. How long can you last, and how big will you get?

It borrows inspiration from a few games, off the top of my head:
Leupai’s Boundless (Twine platform, some of my UI choices)
dj_sharp’s “A Game” (Some of the food inventory handling, automated purchase system)
noone’s “Fatty Text Adventure” (Probably the closest thing I can recall to a “finished product” in this genre)
Several others: (inspiration for Metabolism, stomach, and digestion simulation)

Some planned features (* mostly implemented):

  • Opening framing story, with basic questions that affect your starting situation (*)
  • Metabolism simulation (*)
  • Daily cycle, with rest and sleep (*)
  • Food shopping, inventory, and fast food delivery (*)
  • Health, stamina/energy, and morale personal stats (*)
  • Work days for income, career events, telecommuting options
  • Mobility “check” challenges, with risk/return mini-game.
  • Employable Housekeeper / assistant / nurse
  • shop for medical items, home amenities
  • Medical emergencies
  • Random events, flavor text
  • Soft endings / bailout events
  • Final ending (spoiler: you ded)

Call this a tease if you like. I’m not going to promise anything like regular updates, and a playable release is a ways off. But hey – I saw a lot of other WIP posts, and figured I’m not doing too bad. I’ll try to drop by from time to time with progress updates. Happy New Year, all.[/quote]

Let me know if/when you want a development board of your own.

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I’m not very familiar with Chromebooks or their challenges. Twine games run in a browser using HTML, with some Javascript and CSS. I wouldn’t expect any problems with a web browser conceived within the last 10 years.

Everything is coded using Twine 2.0 “Harlowe”.

The plan is to have an assortment of events that can occur, based on things like your health and mobility. Some of these might include breathing difficulty, choking, heart attack, fall, infection, chronic distracting unreachable itch – you get the idea. Your options may include waiting and hoping for an episode to pass, aid from employed help, calling for help, attempting travel. You might end up in hospital for a while, or receive divine intervention. Quite a pile of conditions, and I’ll admit I’ve barely started working out how I’m going to handle my in-game event system.

Thanks, will do. I think a decent guideline will be to wait for playable releases before I bother making more board clutter.

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Oh my, sounds quite lovely. I’m a fan of just about all of these. I do hope they get plenty of detail when they come about.

Otherwise, the concept soudns great. I hope we can get something soon.

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Certainly sounds interesting!

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Definitely looks very, very interesting. Can’t wait to see the end results.

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Pile of bug squashing this week:

  • Fixed glitch that sometimes allowed purchases while in debt
  • Mini-rework of metabolism code that handled burning fat
  • Tuned pricing and nutritional value of delivery foods
  • UI improvement in options screen, food purchase screen
  • Got resting mechanic and energy recovery working a bit better
  • Added some tuning variables to help tweak gameplay difficulty

I’ve been loosely judging my progress by the size of my code base:
December 21, 2016: 29kB
January 4, 2017: 65kB

Next up:

  • Work day, eating while at work, income from work
  • foundation for Event system
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Here’s some suggestions for specific endings (outside the endings that were previously mentioned):

One where the player suffers a non-fatal heart attack and is eventually liposuctioned (bad ending in reference to Family Guy’s Sibling Rivalry).
One where the player breaks the record for heaviest person alive (good ending).
One where the player dies and their corpse is destroyed via dynamite (bad ending).
One where the player is victorious in the fight against fat shaming and becomes a role model for fat people (good ending).
One where the player explodes, only to wake up in their skinny state and find out that it was a lucid dream (bad ending).
One where the player marries a person with the exact same interests and weight-gaining diet and eventually has plump children (good ending).

Here’s some suggestions for some aesthetic changes for the player:

One where the player gets bad gas (mostly releasing it from their butt).
One where the player becomes a total slob (i.e.: gas, scat, messy eating, etc.).
One where the player becomes diabetic (if the player eats too much sugar without getting sugar sickness early on).
One where the player’s appetite drastically increases (meaning they eat a lot more).
One where the player becomes a NEET gamer.
One where the player becomes a XXX internet sensation on a BBW/SSBBW website.

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LOL. I saw that whale video.

Some good suggestions, and I would imagine a few of them will work their way into the game. Still trying to keep things semi-realistic-- so exploding or dynamiting the corpse is probably not going to happen except in something like a dream sequence. The “slob” idea would appeal to many, but I’m pretty set on a model where the player’s health depends on successfully maintaining reasonable hygiene.

I’ve been on the fence about implementing a diabetes condition. On one hand, I’m a fan of something like the “sugar sickness” effect in Tainted Elysium. On the other hand, such a condition should really develop into full-on insulin dependence, and I can’t think of a way to make this anything but tedious for the player. Plus it would take a pile of new code. :frowning:

Thanks for the brainstorming.

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Checking in. Not much progress.

Still setting up the logic for going through a work day, and settling on how much different the options should be while holding down a job. (in game – but IRL too – lol).

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[quote=“geekdragon, post:13, topic:1145”]I’ve been on the fence about implementing a diabetes condition. On one hand, I’m a fan of something like the “sugar sickness” effect in Tainted Elysium. On the other hand, such a condition should really develop into full-on insulin dependence, and I can’t think of a way to make this anything but tedious for the player. Plus it would take a pile of new code. :frowning:

Thanks for the brainstorming.[/quote]

I suggest fictional conditions! Then you can program them however you want and don’t have to worry about making people with real conditions feel bad/awkward that you are fetishizing them.

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A fair point, and there have been games that do fictional conditions pretty well. I don’t think that fits with the style I’m going for, which is more of a “I probably wouldn’t do it IRL, but what if?” sort of scenario.

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A quick post to state the I’m not dead.

Just the usual RL distractions, combined with a little bit of development hell. Lots of reworking existing game logic. Not a lot of obvious progress.

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Hm. Just got around to finding and reading this. Not looking like my cup of tea, but I wish you luck regardless!

19

Feeling more confident. Made a reworked project checklist, and realized I might eventually pull this off. Someday.

A fresh bit planning gave me a chance to brainstorm some things, and question a few existing plans. I had a “morale” stat that just wasn’t making sense in gameplay and I’ve decided to scrap it. I realized I needed more meaningful player interactivity, and planned some opt-in style events to give you a chance of payoff or consequence.

I’ve got ideas, but a major sticking point has continued to be figuring out the programming to manage and trigger such a variety of events types, like:

  • one-time weight-sensitive events (i.e. standing for the last time)
  • time-specific events (i.e. interrupted night’s sleep)
  • location-specific events (i.e. getting fat-shamed at work)
  • medical events that may need immediate intervention, or span several turns with various effects like forced immobility, health drain, stamina drain, etc.
  • special events that advance time, and put everything else on hold (i.e. opting into a experimentation group)

Not to mention a pile of planned “flavor text” entries that will occasionally appear with similarly varied triggers.

On the upside, I’m still happy with what I think is a solid metabolism model and UI. Turns out that framework might have been the easy part. I’d say the project is sitting at about 20-25%, and I’m not willing to settle for a release before it has a playable start, middle, and end. And a bit of strategy. And polish.
sigh

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Glad to see this is still chugging along. Keep it up!