Forks: A Weight Gain Visual Novel (Cancelled, all assets posted for everyone)

Really enjoyed what I saw from the demo. Don’t have much criticism that hasn’t already been said. Eagerly awaiting more, but I totally understand burnout and being busy and stuff. This is 100% worth being patient for.

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I really like how personal Alex’s story is. I’ve integrated ‘caketime’ into my mental vocabulary and I like how her internal conflict over gaining is different to most other stories. It’s very high quality all round, where it’s complete.

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Is there any work still being done on this game? Seems like it hasn’t been updated in about 3 and a half months. This game has insane potential and is already my favorite weight gain visual novel even with just the short demo provided. I hope it’s still being worked on as it would be a shame to see such great potential not see the light of day. Understandable if it’s no longer being worked on due to busy schedules or burnout, I’ve just never been more hopeful to get an update on a game like this!

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Hey! Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any work done on this for a while. I’ve redone the script, but we’re all swamped in other projects. It’s a case of bad timing for all of us; we’re all in different places than we were when we were first concepting this game. If we were all just a few more years behind in our careers, we might’ve had the time. FoxFire and I discussed restarting Forks recently, and we’d have to:

-Redo all assets, as FoxFire’s improved considerably since this.
-Find a new composer and replace all audio, as Arc is busy with TV jobs.
-Tighten the story’s scope to something we could complete in a reasonable timeframe. The original 3 routes + extras were back when my work schedule wasn’t so full.

All three of us still want Forks to happen, and we’ve all learned a lot about team synergy and pipelines doing this. I’ve practiced working in the helpful feedback; as always I can’t say enough how useful and enlightening it was. All things considered, Forks is going to look a lot different (and better!) if we get around to it.

Earlier, I said I wasn’t going to post anything that wasn’t game-ready, but considering the whole thing would be redone at this point, here’s a fun note to leave on:

This is Alex’s latest progression template, though only the first two were fully implemented. I can now see why so many projects like this never materialize, though I’d like to believe there’s still hope for something. If there is, this place’ll be the first to know!

We’ll have a longer demo too, we had no clue you guys would fly through it so fast :sweat_smile:

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I saw the word music and was like, ‘neat, I used to muck around with retro bleeps back in the day’.

Then I found your composer’s soundcloud. I can’t compete with his Actually Professional quality, lol.

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I’m just glad to hear some sort of update on what’s been going on, I hope you guys get some free time in the future :+1:

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If I’m being honest, I think the intro can be cut down a LOT. It feels like it goes on way, way too long. I’m not normally an impatient dude when it comes to VNs either. The writing itself is fine, but some of the conversations just kind go around in pointless circles. This sounded a little more harsh than I intended, sorry, really it’s great work so far.

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hopefully they will continue in working on this VN and it becomes a full game, it really shows a lot of promise

It’s awesome to see you guys are still working on this! Try not to feel like we, the fans, are rushing y’all tho. This is my favorite vn on this website and I love seeing the updates. Keep up the good work!

I finally got the demo to work and was pleasantly surprised. It was nothing like I was expecting and I’m glad about that. Other than some minor grammatical errors, it seems like a solid concept and I’d love to see it finished so can see what happens to these characters!

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Is this playable on android?

The writing is very unique, but it kinda flows past sometimes. It’s very stream-of-consciousness for the characters, which I think is realistic to how real life conversations are.

Ha, 9 days ago I wasn’t sure this’d get updated, but we learned at our last team meeting that we…somehow have time again 0_o? The stars have aligned, and it’s looking like Forks is back in full development!

First milestone will be an updated and finished demo. This means:

  1. Updated character portraits. Foxfire did the current demo’s in March 2018, and the new ones will match what he’s learned since then.
  2. Previously missing CGs will be included!
  3. Updated UI.
  4. A trimmed and edited script with additional scenes. So far it’s looking to be about a third shorter, with half as much clicking.

I’ll update the main post and download links once it’s out. We’re still doing this in our spare time so I don’t want to commit to a date, but I can say that as of this post, it is coming! I’ll post some WIPs once they’re ready.

Not yet, but we’ll look into it once the final UI’s up to speed.

Thanks! The original idea was to style it like real conversations, I just didn’t realize how long that’d make it.:sweat_smile:. Still aiming to keep it, but everyone’ll hopefully be more concise next time.

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As for me, pretty much the best game I’ve played on here. I’m glad, you’ll be developing it further :smiley: . Good luck!

Super stoked to hear that Forks is back! You can bet that I’ll be among the first to play the next demo

Wanted to post a quick progress report from last week:

Done!

  1. Finished another quick round of edits. In total, I’ve cut/consolidated about 1200 lines from the last demo.
  2. Extended the last demo scenes for Rea/Hannah/Grace to continue the story. Alex no longer stands in the cold wondering what to do next! From here, it’s all new content.
  3. FoxFire finished Alex’s first new character portrait:

Expect other characters to follow this style, as well as the UI once it’s redone. Due to time constraints, we’ve also reduced Alex’s progression from 11 to 7 steps. Portraits will still be displayed waist-up, but the whole body will be drawn to make some nice unlockables :wink:.
4. Ars has made progress on Grace’s theme, which never made an appearance in the previous demo.
5. Rejiggered intro scene to work in the new Alex.

Doing:

  1. Alex’s first stage outfits, as well as her entire progression.
  2. First batch of post-demo route scenes. New demo will probably include up until the next major shared plot point.
  3. Redoing background art to incorporate Ren’Py’s native support for blurred images.

That does it for this week. Probably won’t do these too often until we’re rolling smoothly, but the new portrait style was big news!

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Glad to see the project is still being worked on!

Forgot to ask, has the current demo that we can download been updated?

Are you cutting the last 6 stages or cutting some of the in-betweens?

Not yet, I’ll redo the first post and update the links once it is. That could take a couple of months; we’re going to overhaul quite a bit of the front-end.

We’re cutting 4 of the in-between stages. Alex’s smallest and largest sizes are still intact.

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