Oooh right, the Patreon! Forgot that was a thing, didn’t mean to try and bypass your means of funding money for the game, sorry about that! 
The discussion of the Onmyoji does raise an interesting question… at this time, do you anticipate us ever getting a non-human (or at least a kemono-style character like the reference provided for the Onmyo) character?
hey @bewildered_angel every time I try to play the game the site lags so much that it becomes unplayable. The game used to run fine on here, but recently its been acting up. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Thank you!
Haven’t checked in on this in a bit, but just did in the past day and WOW has progress been made! It’s looking absolutely fantastic! I didn’t actually realize this at first, but after putting more thought into it it dawned on me that for every new “form” you add into this you have to then add a variety of levels of “stuffed” for that form so it really is a lot of work!
I’m sure you already have your plate plenty full with what you have to do with this game (pun intended), but I just wanted to say that I think that adding points to speed should give a bit more of an effect on the timer. Putting just a few points into Power for really any of the characters can essentially double their attacks power, but putting even twice that many points into Speed barely changes the timer. Though, maybe that’s just me. Keep up the fantastic work and I look forward to added changes in the future!
lol don’t worry about it, talking about character ideas is fun
I’m 1000% on board with adding non-humans. There’s already designs for a dragongirl, kobold, fairy, and some others that patrons have submitted.
What device and browser are you using?
Thank you! Right now speed just reduces the timer penalty from fat, but lately I’ve been thinking of it also reducing the base timer. I’m still on the fence about it.
That’s wonderful to hear! May I ask how exactly the submission process works and how much it costs? Patreon doesn’t like to load on my phone…
I was thinking of new sprites being added to the characters at 1,000 lbs and 1,300 lbs. right now i’ve only got an idea for the Witch, but still:
-1,000: head-on camera view. sitting on her broom(black handle, shiny finish, black twig tail, and a skull on the ring holding the tail on the broom) and trying to adjust to her weight.
-1,300: camera view from the back, like with the Thief, but(and a very big butt at that. 
) her broom can’t hold her anymore. the broom is on the ground, and the Witch is now immobile. her reaction: annoyance.
hopefully you will consider this. please and thank you. 
also, i was thinking of names for each character, just to give them a little more life.
Witch: Charolotte (called Charlie by the Thief, Bard, and Warrior)
Thief: Skye
Warrior: Amy
Bard: Abby
Priestess: Maria
Just a thought.
I’m about halfway through the new stuffing levels, I should be able to add them all next week. For now, here’s a WIP preview of The Thief!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/eat-dungeon-10-31019107
$50 tier, the patron submits a text description or drawn image of a character for a class, I will draw a finalized version, I’ll make requested changers. Then when the class is going to be added, patrons vote on which design makes it into the game
Haha, I like these!
Hmm this is interesting. Personally something about merely referring to them by class is appealing to me
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@bewildered_angel I am using Safari. I always have and in the past the game worked without lag, but now the case is different. Any tips and or insight would be greatly appreciated!
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OH GOD! I’d love a fairy to fatten up!
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Abby is an adorable name for the Bard! XD
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I will have to look into this
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I have noticed problems with not so much lag directly, as loading in game assets in the past, which might be the ‘lag’ problem - since there’s not much in the way of loading screens and game assets seem to not get cached properly (?), sometimes images would be missing, or be delayed in appearance.
I haven’t experienced it lately, it seemed worse earlier in development. Was there some improvement made to memory handling? If not, it’s worth digging into before it can get worse.
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I haven’t done anything to mitigate it.
Putting in a proper loading screen is the first step. It’s been on my list of things to do but I’m probably going to have to bump it up in priority
Hey! I’m quite new here - only discovered this game a week ago -, but I’ve played several games in the weight gain sphere before (badum-tsch), and this is seriously the best I’ve experienced: the art is great; the game design is surprisingly solid, unique (at least compared to my usual interest in games), and implements the theme really well; and the ongoing demonstration of open dialogue sets a good example to other game developers of how to engage and involve the community. Not sure if this is your first gamedev outing, @bewildered_angel, but know you’re doing an awesome job!
I’ve sunk a decent number of hours into the game thus far (relatively speaking!), and I wanted to offer my two cents on certain mechanics and strategies I’ve been employing to anyone interested (TL;DR at the bottom). My playstyle and general experiments, for the record, have largely focused on optimising my rollout speed from the start of a new game, though I’m definitely not claiming that I’m anywhere close to perfecting anything. Without personally defining an endstate (such as S-ranking all missions, or simply clearing them all), and optimising my raw playing speed and gamesense overall, the only thing I can say with confidence is that, once the ball is rolling, my playstyle seems to play to the characters’ innate strengths and weaknesses quite well, and provides an economically-conscious spread of stats to decent benefit.
The Witch is clearly very important to most playstyles for her high DPS, huge AOE, and maximum range. Beginners will quickly observe that she rapidly gains weight and KO’s herself regularly, and that, because weight gain provides a positive feedback loop with her already-insane damage output and worsens her already-abysmal attack speed, she is going to spend a lot of time out of commission. I was originally tempted to focus on upgrading her to counteract how much time she spends being KO’d, but this proved to be a painfully long journey because her extreme properties regularly leave her unconscious until she has received a huge number of upgrades. Furthermore, even when she has been leveled-up to death, she is then prone to dragging the rest of your team down by virtue of often being the best candidate for weight extraction (even though this pattern does emerge when other characters are treated preferentially, it seems to happen to the Witch more frequently because her baseline damage output and overall viability is so great), leaving others severely obese and ineffective, and from having tanked most of your upgrades up to that point (assuming you have prioritised overcoming this flaw of hers before buffing your other characters significantly). Besides, in a world where assist characters can deal with cooldowns and KO’s in lieu of upgrading a DPS character’s “survivability”, I now consider the counter to the Witch’s problems to simply be having an effective team of support characters.
The Bard is an interesting one because her Buff and Heal abilities stack in their capacity to steal food from your teammates and reduce cooldowns, effectively making her the best at keeping your teammates in action. Her total lack of damaging elements emphasises that her role is purely supportive, and so she should only be used for combat to deal the last shred of chip damage if everybody else is on cooldown. Because her food leeching is so powerful, she can find herself being a KO-sink on behalf of the DPS characters, unless she gets equipped with a ton of survivability stats. This is obviously effective for what it is, but having her out of commission is a waste of her Buff ability (which is a huge benefit to DPS and assist characters alike, and severely negates the need to invest in the Power stat on anybody else), and the fact that she will automatically apply Buff to the recipient when tanking their food means that those who are already a KO risk are now even more likely to decommission themselves shortly thereafter. As a result of all this, I tend to roll the Bard by focusing on her Power stat, and rarely/never targeting teammates who are currently digesting anything; I instead relegate the role of “surrogate stomach” (huge Metabolism stat, and a Capacity upgrade every now and then) to another support character, so that the Bard can purely buff others and be a hard counter to attack cooldown timers.
The remaining support characters - the Priestess and the Warrior - both make good surrogate stomachs for different reasons. The Priestess “heals” one point more than the Warrior innately (though that’s just one upgrade/weight buff away, so it’s not that significant), I tend to find Heal more effective than Shield in the early game because it weakens debuffs (which are somewhat inevitable when you are being attacked higher/faster than you can apply Shield), she has ranged capabilities, and her Faith element and Dairy preference can be a convenient and exclusive shortcut for defeating certain enemies that others struggle with/are often on cooldown for. On the flipside, the Warrior’s Melee element is much more universally effective against enemies, effective use of Shield maintains higher ally damage output than using Heal on a debuffed teammate, and her default attack speed is twice as fast as the Priestess so she can help with chip damage and heal much more frequently (though, as weight increases for them both, the percentage difference in speed between the two begins to diminish). I tend to favour the Priestess as it stands as her exclusive damage shortcuts seem to be more beneficial on the whole and she seems to require much less maintenance during combat for similar output (due to her longer cooldowns and the fact that Heal is reactionary whereas Shield if preemptive), but admittedly I know these two characters the least.
Between the choice of the leftover support character and the Thief, I usually choose the Thief. Her quick attack stat makes her excellent for chip damage, she circumvents the role of the Warrior’s Melee elemental benefit, and her Fruit preference and Sneak element give her unique avenues to dispatch of certain enemies extremely quickly. Having two surrogate stomachs might be effective, and is something I’d need to look into more, but the Thief’s damaging benefits seem hypothetically more effective than a third support’s output, at least when employing this overall playstyle. The only drawbacks to the Thief is that her DPS can lead her to KO herself frequently and gain so much weight so as to cripple her flagship Speed stat; thus, if rolling with her, I tend to focus on upgrading her Speed.
TL;DR:
My recommended team is: Bard; Thief; Priestess; Witch. For the Bard, I would focus on her Power stat exclusively, use her to buff teammates and counter their countdowns, and never use her for combat or to leech food from teammates (unless in a pinch!). For the Priestess, I would use her to leech food from teammates (often preceded by a buff from the Bard for maximum effectiveness) and for combat when the enemy is Dairy/weak to Faith and her teammates are on cooldown; as for leveling, I’d put a couple of levels in her Capacity stat to start, then focus almost exclusively on her Metabolism stat, occasionally adding another Capacity if she KO’s frequently or Speed when she is regularly obese. I would use Thief and Witch for most of the combat, and use the support characters to counteract their cooldowns rather than upgrading them in these areas. I might give them a cursory couple of upgrades in each “survival” stat to lessen the workload on their supportive teammates, but they’re pretty strong on their own, their teammates combat their glaring weaknesses more than they can on their own volition, and the first few upgrades are the most proportionally relevant anyway (i.e. 10 → 20 capacity is a 100% increase whereas 20 → 30 capacity is a 50% increase, 1.5 food/sec is 50% more than 1.0 food/sec whereas 2.0 food/sec is 33% more than 1.5 food/sec, and so on).
Again, I need more time experimenting to find out if this is actually a good build, but it works well as it stands and definitely makes a lot of sense on paper. Hopefully it is useful insight on the mechanics of the game for others! If I were to make any design suggestions based on what I have observed employing this strategy, I’d probably invest in making the Warrior slightly more relevant (potentially by buffing her damage (directly or by giving her more/different food preferences for more exclusive benefits), giving her a unique relationship with speed loss from weight gain to keep the gap between her and the Priestess wider, and/or changing her attack pattern to allow her to hit several opponents at once) and maybe making the Witch slightly less omnipresent (perhaps there could be damage fall-off on the outskirts of her attack, or the damage could reduce/split between the enemies hit by a single attack).
A few replies ago, there was also a brief mention of a considered alteration to the Speed stat where it would apply even when a character hasn’t gained any weight. Admittedly, it was a little annoying when I learned the hard way that the current restriction existed (see: leveling the Bard’s Speed to 30~ whilst using the aforementioned strategy of not gaining weight), but I also think that, if it applied universally, it could make the Speed stat overbearingly useful (though it could benefit speedrunning strategies, that’s for sure!), and/or make characters act so quickly that teamwork/strategy is erased. Some sort of compromised approach might be good, such that Speed still applies a benefit even at zero weight, such as: contributing slightly to Metabolism (eg. 0.1/sec/level); lengthening enemy attack timers slightly; impacting KO recovery speed specifically; reducing the entire attack cooldown only if your attack kills an enemy/recovers a teammate; and/or maintaining a minimum cooldown of some description, even if now impacting the attack speed at zero weight to a degree.
EDIT: Went into further detail regarding the Warrior’s speed as a benefit.
EDIT 2: Grammar.
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TL;DR still TL. lol XD
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If trying to reduce the weight of the others is a problem, then maybe do a floor with only one character in order to give your team some down time. For me I use the Grape Dragon as every monster can be defeated by the Thief, and if you have improved her stats she can even finish it with a S rank. Just make sure her metabolism, capacity, and speed are able to handle the her power when she does it (her speed for me is already maxed, but I was able to do this even at a 50% speed buff on her). If needed, have the warrior take on some of the monsters as needed you can easily bring down three adventurers back to normal without having them being used.
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Fair! Had another go (even resorting to emoticons, God forbid), but guess it’s hard to condense it all…
S[till]TL;DR:
Bard
100% - Upgrade often
Never target allies who are still digesting food; leave that role to the Priestess exclusively!
Priestess
30%, 
60%, 
10% - Upgrade often
Thief
50%, 30%, 20% - Upgrade a little at start, then only occasionally
Witch
20%, 60%, 20% - Upgrade a little at start, then only occasionally
[Percentages pulled from thin air, but generally align with the strategy]
Yeah, powering through one of the “single-handed” levels is probably a good way to go! The surefire way to get everybody down ASAP and uniformly is probably with the first bonus round (either idling (still grants an extraction if you let everyone escape!), or minor combat if the beginning weight stages aren’t that concerning). Hadn’t realised the Grape Dragon stage was quite so easy with Thief solo, though; just got back from trying it, and you’re totally right! Not sure if it’s just my build, but I was still a good 10 seconds or so out of the S rank, and I invested 72 level-ups in her in that run (12/46/13/5 - run started out just focusing on making her the kingpin of the team, then kinda melded into my aforementioned strategy). I find it useful to have support characters pitching in too, unless that’s what you meant?
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Thank you for the thorough analysis! I’m glad that this largely matches up with the intended gameplay patterns and strategies I had intended for players, though I had wanted people to pick team compositions based on what level they are about to play. If the Warrior isn’t handy on meat/weapon heavy levels than that is something for me to fix
For reducing weight of others, I do want to add ways to extract multiple times but I haven’t gotten around to putting those in yet.
If I do change the speed stat, maybe it will be a minimum cooldown, or maybe it will reduce the weight penalty plus half the base timer
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