Hi! I think some of you may know me for my weight gain visual novel Fattening Office: Weight Gain Visual Novel (1.6.5 Released 05/27/26). I’ve been working on it for about a year and three months now and recently started developing another visual novel which will be called Voluptuous Elves. It will be a breath of fresh air for me, even though it will be a side project and a lot smaller in scope.
It’s not important for this post but if you want I’ve already published a couple of screenshots and more details on the story for the Elite tier members on my Patreon. Anyway, I thought I’d post some thoughts here as well. You may remember my old post in the Project Ideas category Would my visual novel be worthy of a paid release? after which I continued to work on that fantasy game for a bit then decided to scrap it because I wasn’t convinced of it even though the game was there. Some may even remember my oldest thread on this forum for “The Weight Romance”, the game that eventually became what it is now my main project Fattening Office.
That said, I decided to open this discussion to step out of my Fattening Office thread and hear some general opinions from the community again. I’m very interested in any type of feedback, criticism etc. I can’t promise I will implement anything based on this because the first playable demo will release next week and I’m pretty limited on what I can realistically do. The game will be similar to my current project Fattening Office, so you can get a pretty clear idea from that. Anyway feel free to use this thread to talk about the state of weight gain visual novels in general if you’re interested in these types of games, what you would like to see…
Fetish aspects
I will probably tone down the “fetish aspects” a little in this game. Don’t get me wrong, if everything goes well I will follow the same path as Fattening Office. But I need to be prepared and I decided to start with characters at “stage 2” already, to keep me the door open for a possible tweak of the game for a Steam release featuring general curvy and prosperous characters with “a bit” of weight gain throughout the story. The protagonist won’t have a feeder personality too, and if I end up inserting all the usual wg elements I will just assume he’s a generic “curvy girls enjoyer” and won’t add long monologues about the growing bodies of the girls and other fantasies.
One reason is to differentiate the game from Fattening Office (which, while the protagonist doesn’t start as a feeder either, is full of those things already) both from a user’s perspective and my own. Writing two very similar stories can be confusing and I’d end up repeating things quite often, so I prefer to go down a more “vanilla” route with Voluptuous Elves, at least if we’re talking about the POV which as usual will be the male protagonist’s. This won’t prevent me from adding weight gain and fat elements, but they won’t be totally made obvious to the reader, if that makes any sense.
The other reason is that I’m a bit pessimistic after a year of working on Fattening Office (which I consider a pretty successful game in this small niche) about the sustainability of projects like this and the actual amount of people that’s interested in them. Even though, also thanks to this place, gathering some initial interest is probably not that hard, turning it into a sustainable business with the taxation and laws of my country (Italy) is pretty impossible at the moment, if we’re talking about my current numbers. You have to consider that game dev is generally a full time job, and even though in my case is all super amateurish and probably not so worthy, it actually requires some hours of work almost every day. In my case I don’t rely on this activity to live, so it’s not a huge problem for me, but this prevents me from investing more money into the projects (I really hoped to commission some illustrators but at the moment I’m not confident spending thousands of euros, almost wiping out the little money I made with this so far. Still, I bought hundreds of dollars of human-made assets like backgrounds, musics, items etc., basically as much as I could like I did with Fattening Office).
Now, you’re free to judge the progress I’ve made on Fattening Office in a year, I won’t say it is particularly good and I know very well it has a lot of flaws. At the moment it’s hard for me to image how a team of professionals (so artists, no AI etc.) could work on a game similar to it and the fact I haven’t really seen similar attempts here is not surprising because it’s quite demanding and likely not profitable. Remember I talk from my country’s perspective (I’m sure for many of you the economic and burocratic aspect will be easier and different) and I only refer to classic japanese-inspired visual novels similar to mine.
That’s why I think there’s space for another visual novel like this. I’m not trying to flood the site with AI slop.
Branching narrative and choices (and NSFW)
I saw games with systems and more focused on choices and agency are more popular but they’re not really my thing unfortunately, even though I’d say I added quite a bit of choices into Fattening Office (way more than I could actually handle) but I understand it’s not actual agency. So I will go for a more linear approach this time as well, even though I’m curious on what choices you’d see fit a similar game. I tend to scrap choices like “feed character A” or “feed character B” because I think most people would want anyone to gain in any case. Instead I usually add choices to enter or not the romance routes of each character. I’m open to suggestions 
About NSFW, consider that Fattening Office hasn’t a single real nsfw moment yet, even though I will add sex scenes at the end of each route (we’re getting there finally). With this new game I could add more NSFW moments even though they usually fit better at the end of stories like the ones I’m creating.
Demo next week!
I will probably release a paywalled demo next week and a free one as well shortly after that.
Let me know what you think! Are you interested in a new multiple-route visual novel with the same if not a bit better visual quality of Fattening Office?
I’m prepared for criticism regarding the use of AI, I’m trying to build a foundation so that I can invest more money into it in the future, but it takes time and support. If you played my games it should be quite obvious I’m passionate about it, what my cultural references are and what I’m trying to do etc.
Thanks for reading and if you decide to try the game 