Had my eye on this one for a bit, but I figure it’s time I drop a response. I think that the game definitely has potential and what’s already there is fairly fun, but obviously it’s a bit light on content right now. To start, I have a few suggestions I’d like to give that I believe would help to better realize the game’s potential.
Weight gain for the player sounds like a fantastic idea. This concept is mentioned in the changelog, and I think it would be a great addition. Allowing the player to gain weight also adds replayability in the fact that food becomes more of a resource for the player to manage - should they gift it to coworkers, or eat it themselves? On one playthrough, the player could focus on giving food to everyone around them, and on another they could be greedy and take everything for their own consumption.
As for actually implementing the player’s weight gain I’d probably do it one of two ways - either adding a mirror at home/in the bathroom that the player can use to check their weight, or by giving them a permanent item in their inventory (maybe ‘examine self’ or something) that would allow them to view check themself out by inspecting it. I’m not really an expert on Quest games, but one of the two aforementioned methods are how I would go about implementing player weight gain.
As a big proponent of AI art, I’m very happy to see another game making use of it. I won’t go into a whole rant about it, but I think that AI art is really overhated and can be a great tool for devs that are on a tight budget. However, I would recommend curating images a bit more - many of the pictures of characters in the game have a few visual artifacts and discrepancies, which can sometimes cause a loss of immersion (Mainly when it comes to Naomi and Vanessa, not sure if this is because the AI has trouble with darker complexions or something). I know that it can be hard to get exactly what you want from the AI without any blemishes, but at least doing a bit of basic image editing or messing around with the steps/scale/quality on the same seed can help quite a bit. I know I’m describing stuff pretty vaguely though, so if you actually want to pursue any of these methods for curating images then I’d be willing to explain more in a DM.
Regarding the whole thing about typing in questions to ask the NPCs, I think it’s a good idea, but the execution could definitely be better. Having secrets or little details hidden behind doing a bit more digging can be good, but just typing in stuff and hoping there’s a response can feel pretty unintuitive - especially if there’s large amounts of content hidden behind typing out some obscure question. I don’t really have a great solution when it comes to this problem (since I’m more experienced in Twine), but I think that some method of making question-asking more intuitive would help. I know that in the changelog it was mentioned that the system would potentially be outright removed; and while I wouldn’t be entirely against this, I think that asking questions is a cool way of rewarding the player for logical thinking and observation and it would be a little sad to see it go.
Anyways, that’s pretty much all I have to say for now. Sorry in advance for dropping basically an entire essay, but hopefully some of these suggestions can be helpful in the development of the game. Like I said before, I think there’s some real potential here and I’m excited to see where things go in the future.
@tharsus Great catch! For Vanessa, it has been fixed, will be in the next update. I realized the gift and eat thing, but I’ll need to look into an easier way to fix that. Also, I literally didn’t even test the edge catch that people call Mandie ugly so thank you for testing that!
@Chadley To be honest, I’m new to Quest too, so I’m not 100%
@Berry_Zxon Honestly, no idea. I currently do not know how to do that.
@hanzsolo1 Haha Ciara best girl? Thanks for the review.
@Lap203 There is not, just passively earns $10 per day, and thank you!
@Jupiter Thank you for such an thorough review! I’m thinking of how to implement player weight gain, but there is quite a bit more backend stuff I may need to rework if so. I’ll see. That may be done in conjunction with making the playable character female and dropping the choice. As for curating AI art - I’ve had the most issues with Naomi and Vanessa, I basically have to bully the algorithm to make them have a darker complexion, and, oftentimes, it can be really inconsistent. They’re likely going to have fewer weight gain ‘stages’ for this reason, unfortunately. As for asking questions and counter-intuitiveness, I view that as a weakness of the game. I’m currently implementing a system that would remove typing altogether, but I am aware that the thrill of discovering more content via typing would be lost. I’m leaning towards that being a worthwhile change right now, though. And Mandie ‘best girl’ status has already been challenged by others haha but thanks for sharing.
Ciara > Naomi > Vanessa. Gotta love the top heavy girls.
Also great job on the game overall, glad to see AI art being used to such a good degree. I think it will let people with great ideas, who aren’t as artistically inclined, to create awesome stories we normally would miss out on. Really looking forward to the next update and where it goes from here!
0.3 now out with tons of positive improvements! NO MORE TYPING or ‘ASK ABOUT’ Nonsense! I will say that I’m a lot happier with this version than my last and it’s certainly steamier. Updated the original post with thorough changelogs and new teaser images!
If I could ask y’all to help me out by providing your opinions/discoveries on the following:
Bugs (I’ve found and fixed a ton, but I can’t try every situation and every possibility by myself)
Feedback (writing critiques, character developments, what you’d like to see in the future with characters, etc.)
AFTER playing 0.3, a new vote on ‘Best Girl.’ I suspect they’ll be a shift, as 0.2 had Mandie at #1, Ciara at #2, and Vanessa getting #3.
First thank you for the game and the new update. The new content is great, chracters are well choosen and I’m currious how they will develop in future. I’m wondering if it’s possible to twists characters mind (character who don’t like fat people or being fat start to love the idea and vice versa, maybe due random events).
Really like the art you choose for characters. Speaking of the art, since you said it’s AI art may I ask if you use Stable Diffusion and if yes what model do you use for the anime style? Started to explore SD myself few days ago and it’s very hard to have same character in same clothes with different shapes.
Again thanks for sharing your game and keep going with the good work.
I still needed to “ask about” to get Mandie to run out of her office. The “Herself” option of the question menu seems broken more than it works.
I’m noticing that most of the characters with a unique option (Ciara’s uniform option, for one) disappear once they’ve been triggered the first time. I’ve been experimenting with not triggering these until later weight stages to see if there’s a unique option that I don’t get right out the gate, but keeping them as persistently available would be cool. At least refreshing with the new day, since there seem to be other knock-out style dialogue in the question menu with other characters (asking someone about their coworkers seems to be a once-a-day thing more often than not).
Vanessa still has the “ask about” tutorial in her opening dialogue
I keep breaking the second day. Mandie says we have work to do, but never goes to the break room
So I have been playing the game for a bit now and I was wondering who the two characters are that have 5 weight stages. Obviously one of them is Mandie, but it seems like she only went up 2 stages. Also who is the other character? Is is Sarah?
As far as I can tell, it’s Sarah and the player character who have 5 stages. Both Sarah and PC can just cram any food you get into their gaping maws.
Mandie has 3 stages: one after you give her the donut, another after giving her the premade meal, and the last after giving her the muffin you can steal from Margie.
On my side I feel like their is a refill problem with the premade meal. Last update I feel feel like we could at least buy one per day but this time only one.
Love the game, and I love to see how it progresses.