Hello everyone, I’ve been following this forum for a while, and now I’ve decided to create my own game. The title is still undecided, “Eating Frenzy” is just a temporary name.
All characters in the game will be 18+.
The game will be free, via Patreon you will be able to support me and access the latest versions. The first version —the demo— will be released here for free before I set up any Patreon account. I believe it’s only fair that people try the game before being asked to support it.
The game’s name hasn’t been decided yet because I’m still determining its direction. To make it as engaging as possible for a wide audience, I’ve decided to conduct a series of polls. The forum members will have the opportunity to shape the game’s content through their votes. In other words, you are the ones who’ll choose what this game will be about.
What do you think? Do you like the idea? If you’re interested in contributing, please participate in the polls.
Always nice to see new projects! But before anything a base idea of the game is needed for those polls to actually have a focus
First, what is your overall idea? We know it will be a visual novel thanks to the tag, but a general context of what the story will be about will greatly help.
What I am asking for is a “sketch” of the blueprint of the game you have in mind.
Do you have any experience with game development or complex projects in general?
Feel free to ignore me but otherwise I’d suggest focusing on make something for yourself only, not for anyone else. And make it really REALLY small in scope because you’ll learn a lot from your first project and you’ll want to start over from scratch.
Involving other people with polls etc. makes things a lot more complex because it introduces expectations, conflicting opinions, time pressures. It makes things more stressful for you and harder to dump bad ideas that aren’t working out, or that you try and find you aren’t passionate about.
Once you have a little proof of concept maybe then get some feedback on it, but these things always end up being WAY more work than you’d expect and it’s nice to deal with the learning process in provate rather than have a bunch of forum users breathing down your neck.
Again, feel free to ignore me as you might handle complex projects differently than I do.
I have a lot of ideas in mind, but before settling on one, there’s a particularly important poll I’d like to see the results of: Would you prefer a single gaining character with a lot of content or multiple gaining characters with less content? It seems like most games take the latter approach, but I want to hear your opinions.
No, I don’t have any prior experience. I appreciate the suggestion. I’m still going to give it a shot — it won’t hurt to try. I don’t believe I’m setting any high expectations, also.
While I would suspect multiple characters will always be more popular as often people will always want to see more weight gain content and more characters if you give them the chance. Some things to consider, if this is your first game it might be better to keep the scope smaller as @Lightning has also suggested. More characters will always lead to a larger scope and increased development time. Most commonly people “bite off more than they can chew” when jumping into an early project and there are always going to be mistakes and things that could be done better as you learn and get more advanced in your craft. A smaller scope project that is more manageable might be for the best in my opinion.
Depending on what type of VN or style of game you want to make you can always have a single completed route for a character and go back and add more storylines or solo routes depending on how you plan to structure your game. Even decisions about linear gameplay, branching choices, or multiple routes will affect your scope size and development time. Most devs will tell you to start small as you’re starting out because your scope and time to complete will never be what you plan/imagine it will be when you’re new to it. These would also be useful for a voter to understand to give you better feedback and polling.
Polls can be great to help give you direction or make some decisions you are unsure of but they are probably more helpful when the voter understands some basics about what your game will be. As stated above a single character or multiple could greatly influence your project scope when combined with other factors. For instance Love is the way to my heart had a great concept but it’s scope was way to large and trying to accomplish too much, in my opinion. With 14 love interests at the same time (there were many factors that led to its cancellation of course) but I believe the game might have been more manageable if the dev had focused on one girl and completed her fully with their planned style of development. Since it seems like you would be locked into one girl’s route once you choose her in the beginning.
Just my opinion and some thoughts on the matter, good luck with development on your game, the first step is always the hardest. Great to see you trying your hand and making something.
With regards to single character versus multiple characters, the difficult part of making a single character is that it really requires the story itself to be much more engaging, because there is (in all practicality) only so much you can get by with a single character gaining without losing players’ interest. A character can only start so thin and get so fat, and the slower you make the weight gain the better your scenes in between weight gain will have to be in order to keep a player’s interest. That’s why something like The Weighting Game is so successful. With multiple characters, it is much easier to make separate, smaller, distinct plot lines that tell a weight gain story but don’t overstay their welcome. D.I.E.T does a really good job of this.
One way to potentially get around this is as @Krodmandoon has suggested - build a single character but flesh out different paths for that character as you go. Then you can focus on a single character, but you can have different plot lines for that character and tell different stories. LifeBook wasn’t fully seen to completion and isn’t a Visual Novel, but it is a good example of having a single character but different branching paths you can take with that character.
I remember “Love is the way to my heart” very well. Even before it failed, I thought it was overly ambitious. After all, we don’t own a software house.
Heyo, even though this project is still early going, just wondered what the character focus would be, is it male/female or a mix of both? If the poll comes back and single character growth wins, would that be the player or an NPC character? And would the player character also get the ability to grow too.
Sorry for the barage of questions, especially if they have already been answered but i couldn’t see any prior mention.
Over 100 votes — thank you all! I’ll respect the poll results (after so many votes they won’t change) and go with the multiple-character approach.
Krodmandoon and others who advised me to avoid being too ambitious — don’t worry, I’ll focus on developing just one character and ensure it’s complete before adding more. Ideally, each update will introduce a new character and storyline.
Now I can share a few more details.
The game will be a typical dating sim where the player dates young women.
Regarding the possibility of player weight gain, that will be discussed later on. It won’t be in the first version, as implementing it properly requires a lot of work.
By taking the multiple-characters approach I can explore a wide range of possibilities. In the future I’ll run polls about minor fetishes such as male weight gain, vore, furry, sci-fi/magic weight gain and body parts expansion, but they won’t be in the first version. The initial release will be about the realistic weight gain of a young woman.
How the characters gain weight, the speed of their gain, how much they gain and other elements will depend on your in-game choices and on the character chosen. The choices won’t be difficult, they’ll be there just to allow you to explore different paths.
I see you’ve got Ren’Py in the tags there. Any experience working in Ren’Py before? Do you have an idea as to the structure of the game you want to make? Obviously you’ve already made polls for variables such as whether you have a single gainer or multiple, the intentionality of the weight gain, but what do you plan for the overall game to actually be structured like?
No one is going to tell you that AI is better than Daz 3D. The models for Daz 3D look infinitely better than AI artwork. AI artwork just simply isn’t there. The only real consideration for you is that working in Daz takes more time/work, so many aren’t able to put in that level of effort for a game.
If you are building multiple characters/story lines, no reason why you can’t do some intentional and some unintentional and every mix in between. If your story ever gets that far, you will have plenty of opportunities to explore multiple types of gain.
