In this image, we see exponential difficulty. At best, this works in some arcade game, but overall even in those, it is just frustrating.
However, imagine a ninja warrior game, where failure to complete the course in time, results in 5-10 extra kilo. You gotta get through it within some number of minutes, and each time you make it, it doubles in difficulty.
In the same vein, here is a different kinda fetish game: Inch by Inch by Dare Looks, LevelXProject
You have to make an antidote before you become too small to hold the vials and ingredients. This is combined with a full customization suite of shrinking speed, min and max size, the frequency of your shrinking and a cheat mode if you feel like it.
You can make it too difficult to make any kind of real progress with about 8 steps, each taking minutes to complete at 3 workstations. While you have 2 minutes before you are too small.
This thread is about other game mechanics that absolutely suck the fun out of most games, but are almost perfect for fetish games. Transformation or other.
Sorta related, I don’t like when full-price, non-lewd games take less than 10 hours to complete, but I prefer when lewd games can be completed a bit quicker, since lewd games require privacy, something that isn’t always available.
Closer to the thread topic:
I’m not a huge fan of the appearance changing system (like in the Fable games) being tied to your stats and diet, making all mage characters have glowing face lines, strong characters being giant walls of muscle, characters that eat a lot of food become obese, etc., but that kind of stuff is absolutely great for fetish games.
Automatic “I win, see all content without having to actually play the game” buttons. They’re not exactly common on non-lewd games, but if they were, I wouldn’t use them. They’re great for lewd games, though, since a lot of lewd games are stuffed with filler, padding, and stock RPG Maker assets, so there’s definitely a good chunk of games out there that I don’t mind skipping through for the good stuff.
Easy modes. I don’t usually like easy games that much and prefer my games to lean a bit on the hard side. HOWEVER, I can’t stand hard lewd games, I don’t like having to spend all that time getting good at a porn game, just so I can get at the couple lewd bits that I might not even like.
Well in Panic Diet the game grows increasingly more difficult the more you lose weight and travel (lost weight grants you more speed/metabolism/energy, however it is for each stage, while the distance adds more obstacles on your path from floating candies to burgers that really make you gain fast).
The annoyance is that depending on your luck could determine if you’ll have an easy run or a tough one, as grabbing and using coins will hopefully grant you buffs, all the while the obstacles grow more ridiculous as time goes on.
Prestige systems can be really annoying in other games (Dauntless has a rather shaky prestige mechanic where you lost most of your damage and all of your defense upon reforging), but Seeds of Destiny circumvents this to a degree. And in a weird way, it does kinda work the way Dauntless works–you get your prestige meter maxed out, then you reset it to get items necessary for upgrades. Unlike in Dauntless, however, you can “reforge” very quickly, and you’re not penalized for doing so beyond your belly slam attack, which I don’t even really use. This also lets the player continually see the characters grow and get bigger even when their maximum size is raised.
The Insurmountable Waist High Fence (according to TV Tropes) or, basically, obstacles that should be easy to get over or around but completely lock your progress until the game decides to let you through.
I tend to find it pretty annoying in normal games but it’s suddenly a lot more fun if you’re too fat to take the easier route. Bonus points if you start off thin enough to ignore the obstacle you put on enough weight for it to be a problem.
Bonus bonus points there’s animations for your character uselessly trying to get through the obstacle anyway.
I’m also a fan of stamina meters for pretty much the same reason.
Hell yeah, imagine a good excercise route that you need to be thin to stay on, and when you get just that one bit too fat, you go down the spiral of eventual immobility.
Limiting the number of health potions you can down in a turn based games would feel really annoying and a cheap way to increase difficulty, but suddenly it fills your stomach in a text based belly fetish game and it’s great.
Normally I’m not a fan of any boss fight that you have to lose for story purposes, to the point that I even prefer the kind where you’re required to win but are still portrayed as losing in the following cutscene. For fetish games, I can make an exception because losing is fun.
To me, the limited health meter mechanics, seen in RPGs and Zelda, with the player’s health meter increasing by a limited amount when certain items (like the Zelda series’ Heart Containers, for example) or leveling up until reaching the highest level (specifically in RPGs like The Stick of Truth and Kingdom Hearts) or some other method (like the first two Paper Mario games where the player could upgrade their health meter by five points until reaching the limit of fifty health points) is kind of a downer on its own, but could kind of work in a weight gain game either dependent on the player’s weight or upon reaching certain weights (even past immobility) where the health meter would fluctuate depending on how many pounds are gained or lost.
