šŸ’œ Insatiable Hearts [v0.1.3D] - A monsterfucker+Weight gain Twine Game

North Wales - Wikipedia in case anyone missed the bit

ah shoot, my bad

hereā€™s another.

Insatiable Hearts V0.1.3B+P3.zip (891.0 KB)

This one is without images however. I tried to upload the images one here and even though its only 15mb the system is saying the file is too large? Anyone had this issue before?

Screenshot 2024-06-06 182712

Unfortunately, I donā€™t have any money to support you. So instead Iā€™ll just leave as good of a review as I can.

This project has a lot of spiritual predecessors in itā€™s past, many of which fell short of being truly amazing for a variety of reasons. Many people want to say Roy and Leupai, and there certainly are artifacts of that present, but the actual originator was, of course, Corruption of Champions, or the infamous CoC.

These earlier attempts at this sort of game also suffered from a variety of different problems. CoC suffered primarily because Fenoxo was a monumental douche and part-time scam artist, and he blatantly built the game to suit his incredibly specific tastes, without caring much about what anyone else thought or did. Rape was omnipresent, futanari was inescapable. Transformations were random and inflicted unfairly on the player simply by losing fights they couldnā€™t possibly have won, making save-scumming an inevitability. There were over two dozen NPCs, but Fenoxoā€™s specific futanari fursona ā€œUrtaā€ received the lionā€™s share of attention and development, starring in multiple full quests while most others barely got an introduction and a scene. I could go on, but itā€™s not necessary. The entire game essentially being Fenoxoā€™s own personal iteration of the ā€œwelcome to my magical realmā€ meme should be enough on itā€™s own.

Royā€™s Leupai projects were a step up from this, both in terms of quality and in technical competence. With Leupai, we evolved beyond ye olden Newgrounds and Kongregate days of swfs and java windows, and began using more modern software like Twine. Roy also cared infinitely more about the fictional setting and the artistic value of it than Fenoxo ever did.

However, much like CoC, the weak link in Revicroix was Roy himself. He was, unfortunately, a self-sabotaging primadonna who constantly accused people of attempting to steal his work, somehow convinced that his plush toy fetish dragons were going to make him rich one day. He was in a constant state of always being about to quit, of always being one step away from throwing in the towel. Most of us have known at least one person like this in our lives, and unfortunately, Roy was that kind of person. Narcissism and paranoia are not an emotional concoction that is conductive to happiness or productivity. So it wasnā€™t really surprising when Roy inevitably melted down, and took all of his projects with him in the ensuing conflagration.

Hopefully heā€™s feeling better wherever he is, or possibly seeking help. But Iā€™m not going to lie and pretend like the drama wasnā€™t all manufactured by him. Because it was.

Those werenā€™t the only two shows in town, of course. There have been other attempts at a CoC-like game, such as the Fatty Text Adventure by Noone, or Tainted Elysium. And Slablands is a 4chan fork/spiritual successor of CoC that focuses more on exploration and monster girls.

All of those games have their good points, with Slablands being the best in my admittedly biased opinion. Though due to being a community effort on an anonymous image board, it updates at a glacial pace.

And then thereā€™s Insatiable Hearts.

If thereā€™s one pet peeve that bothers me when it comes to media of any form, be it games, film, or writing, itā€™s people being unwilling to learn from the successes and failures of others in their industry. Some days it seems like people forget everything thatā€™s ever happened in their sphere of association and interest. Like theyā€™re bound and determined to keep making the same mistakes and errors, even though solutions were already found a long time ago, and the path to success has been clearly publicly demonstrated.

Insatiable Hearts feels like it learned something from everything that lead up to this point, and is doing itā€™s best to not only avoid the pitfalls and mistakes, but to actively collect and polish the best parts of what came before.

You have avoided almost (Iā€™ll get to that in a second) all of the issues of past projects like this, and have combined the successful pieces together into something that will, if it continues to be worked on, eventually become better than all of them.

Great job. Thatā€™s impressive. I would give this a very solid and robust 8/10, bordering on a 9/10. You have very high quality custom art, good writing, the setting is interesting without being pretentiously incomprehensible, youā€™re not allowing any one particular fetish to drown out everything else, and youā€™re doing your best to avoid favoritism among NPCs. The worst part about IH is that there isnā€™t more of it, but thatā€™s certainly a good problem to have.

Now, I did say most. Not all. So this is both a critique and a suggestion. But the worst part about CoC, and to an extent Boundless as well, was the inability to exert any sort of control over your transformations. There was always savescumming, but generally speaking, the big failure of all the transformation genre games like this was that the transformations were both uncontrollable and largely permanent, making it feel less like a fun time and more like trying to disarm a bomb blindfolded when your only tools are a screwdriver and a time machine.

This was also a lot worse in CoC specifically, because so much of that game featured you getting jumped out of nowhere and raped. At least with Boundless/Leupai, there was an element of Willy Wonkaā€™s ā€œmaybe you shouldnā€™t eat the magic candy then, if you donā€™t want weird shit to happenā€ in play.

Now, to your credit, you seem to have mostly copied Royā€™s way of handling it. Minus having a weirdo Mary Sue species. And thatā€™s a good thing.

But mutations are still approximately as much of a crapshoot now as they were back in CoC, when I would have to dedicate a good 30 minutes of my life to scumming the shark-associated item, because I wanted cool shark teeth in my characterā€™s mouth, and not for my carefully cultivated 9 magical fox tails to vanish in a puff of smoke.

By the way: having a built in scum mechanic where you can just page back like itā€™s a visual novel? 10/10 feature, every game like this that doesnā€™t have that feature is now worse because they donā€™t.

What the transformation games in this genre have always desperately needed is a way to control how you mutate. Maybe not to the point of just straight-up changing yourself however you like; you shouldnā€™t be able to just pick what you want off of a list. But they all needed some way for you to roll your dice, see the outcome, and say ā€œno, thatā€™s not what I want. Iā€™d like for this to be a dud so I can try again with another item.ā€

Now, you have implemented something like this, with the more recent updates to Dreamweaving. But my suggestion, what I think you should do, is that this should be the main feature of what Dreamweaving does for the player, and this could also be the benefit to going around and learning other specific styles of Dreamweaving from different factions and cults. Like the Emerald Weaving of the Horned Mother, or the unimplemented purchase option in Laurentā€™s menu. Learning a specific kind of weaving could give you the ability to throw out a result you donā€™t like, if the mutation falls under the purview of that specific factionā€™s themes and associations. Learning Laurentā€™s weaving, for instance, could potentially make it ā€œsafeā€ to consume blob mutation items, if you only wanted them for, say, stomach capacity. Any time something you donā€™t want comes up, you could just say no, and the item is a dud. Or, to give another example, if you want horns but not udders, Emerald Weaving could let you reject all the outcomes of cow mutation items that you donā€™t like, only accepting the results you want to keep.

This is just a suggestion, and it is ultimately up to you. Given the backspace visual novel feature, you certainly have embraced the savescumming inherent in the game type, so I donā€™t think it would be a huge deal if you DIDNā€™T do this. But it would be nice to be able to work towards having that sort of control over the gameā€™s mechanics. It would give people a reason to say, oh man, I really need to go learn that magic spell from such-and-such a person. And it would also give a concrete function and purpose to the various types of dreamweaving in the world.

Also, for some inexplicable reason itch doesnā€™t have a download link anywhere for the game, which is annoying, but Iā€™m not going to hold that against you. It is a bit annoying to play in a browser window, though. Too many overlapping scroll bars.

Overall, 8.5/10, and I hope you add more feeder/feedee content in the future, as well as a way for the player to actually impregnate NPCs, instead of simply being impregnated.

And I legit canā€™t tell if Amelieā€™s quest isnā€™t fully implemented yet or if Iā€™m just missing something very obvious. Feels just like playing one of Royā€™s games, where I feel blind and stupid but canā€™t stop. Great job.

[EDIT]

Also, the decision to make this more like a CYOA game based around scenes and decisions, instead of making every single interaction a combat encounter like CoC or Fatty Text Adventure, was the right call. The game is far better for it. The only thing worse than random transformations I have no control over, is being subjected to them after losing a random fight I also had no control over. Itā€™s like going to a casino where the payouts are exclusively in beatings.

4 Likes

Thank you for the indepth review!

I canā€™t say I did all of this intentionally, I just know what I like and what I donā€™t like and let that lead me. CoC was obviously a big influence on me, a played a lot when I was younger and while it certainly was a great pave stone for me, the focus on ā€œrape or be rapedā€ just didnā€™t really sit well with me, especially as I got older. The randomness too, could be fun, but ultimately one was at odds with the system as you said. Combat just felt, kind of in the way?

For boundless, I really enjoyed its world and the strangeness. There was plenty I adored about it, but ultimately as big and full as it was, it also felt empty. The interacts with npcs were limited and it was mostly just wondering and letting things happen to your player character. Which certainly had its charms but grew a bit dull because as kinky as it was, there really wasnā€™t much sexual content (which to be fair if I recall was the authorā€™s preference regardless). So between the lack of feedist content and the combat and somewhat vanilla kinks of CoC and then the nonsexual but quite kinky content of boundless, it felt like there was little middle ground that suited what I personally desired

I wanted more. Iā€™m into so many kinks, I needed something with weight gain, transformation, monsterous monsters, breeding but still some sweetness and cuteness and more rolled into one.

I have plenty of other inspirations too as you pointed out, like Nooneā€™s game, Tainted Elysium and more, but ultimately as a queer woman into odd stuff who wanted something more for myself, I just had to make something for me. haha
Ultimately thats what Insatiable Hearts has been, a personal pleasure, a little sandbox for my oc junk and its almost an accident that so many people enjoy it. Iā€™m always a little blown away by the support and community its garnered so far and it always makes me excited to keep adding onto this project. I have stories I want to tell, kinks I want to play with and a lot more art haha

now onto your suggestions. I certainly have a lot more planned with the dreamweaving system, not just in how it ties into the narrative but just for the fun stuff too. TF manipulation and unique magic based around the groups and teachers is very much the direction I want to take it. Additionally the TF situation will always be a bit of a pickle, because on one hand, like you said, you donā€™t want to just pick tfs from a list, there should still be some elements of surprise and temptation to them. In particular in the lore and in the game play the dreamworld is supposed to transform the player kind of into an exaggerated innerself. The monster you become based on who you are. Thatā€™s obviously difficult to do without just straight up asking the player ā€œhey what tfs do you want?ā€ and kind of breaking that immersion. I canā€™t just guess and force the player into TFs they donā€™t want either. So a balancing act has to be had. Allowing the player to manipulate tfs with dreamweaving is part of that compromise but ultimately I want a larger system that takes into account the playerā€™s actions. As gluttony, lust and other vices increase, or other behaviors are counted, I want it to manipulate the pool of TFs slightly. Itā€™ll take some fiddling but would be pretty neat, especially with some TFs having subtypes that generate out of having displayed special traits etc

Also, I do indeed plan on more impregnantion all around. Especially as I flesh out the NPCs. Thats for sure ~

As for the lack of a download version. Iā€™ll probably just have to grab a file hosting site and plop some links up on itch or in the OP. Unless Iā€™m missing something about itch, I figured theyā€™d just let players download it haha. So that was a bit of an oversight on my part, but obviously I prefer people being able to play in a way thatā€™s more satisfying for them ~

anyways, thanks for all the words. Was an amusing thing to wake up to haha.

6 Likes

sorry for asking but what twine program you use to make the game? I hear use twine is easter then use quest

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Oh yeah, I use Twine with the sugarcube extension. I like itā€™s versatility and thereā€™s lots of documentation out there to work with ~

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Thank I try to make a game with image and I have trouble find what i should it with and how to upload imageā€¦I use AI art and i post them on Pixiv look. illustration, dragon / ē«œēŽ‹ć‚¢ćƒ¼ć‚µćƒ¼ / June 9th, 2024 - pixiv

If youā€™re using Twine to make your game the easiest thing would be to just bundle an image folder with your game then when you do your html image code in twine point the path to that folder. Remember that file names can be case sensitive - Iā€™ve seen me test my game and it displays fine on windows using chrome but if someone is using Linux and I didnā€™t match the cases it gives the alt text.

2 Likes

ok that good now i need set up the item, place sell foods, and how foods affact the weight and change into next stageā€¦

Iā€™m glad you liked the review, and Iā€™m really happy to hear that impregnation content is coming, along with a more expanded system of Dreamweaving where we can exert some control over our transformations and mutations.

I didnā€™t really think you had embarked on this with the grand intention of right all that others had done wrong, but most people donā€™t. You ā€œlearnedā€ from the other projects, in the sense that you acknowledged what you liked about them and took those ideas, while also rejecting the things that bothered or annoyed you. Thatā€™s refining the idea, carrying forward what works while throwing out what doesnā€™t.

In a better world, this would just be common sense, but unfortunately, itā€™s not.

As to why your own personal version of this has proven to be so popular, I would say itā€™s probably a combination of factors. Part of it, I think, has to do with your respect for the people playing the game. CoC was never anything but Fenoxoā€™s personal fantasy, and he absolutely did not care what anyone else thought about it, not even the people whose money he accepted to specifically commission stuff into the game. If you werenā€™t interested in sadosexualism and violent surprise-sodomy, you were always going to be a second-class citizen in the CoC world.

Likewise, Noone had a firm idea of what he wanted with Fatty Text Adventure, but he had issues with executing it. FTA was supposed to be a game entirely about furries getting fat and voring each other. Yet in spite of that, you started out as a completely normal person with a completely normal stomach capacity, and had to grind for hours upon hours to get your capacity up. It was the hardest-to-raise stat in the whole game, and not only was it extremely difficult to gain weight in the game until you got a larger stomach, you were hard-locked out of all the vore until you had functionally applied a 20x multiplier to your starting capacity.

In a vore game. You were locked out of vore, in a vore game. You literally had to struggle to put on ounces of weight, just to burn it at the gym to convert it into strength and agility, just to be able to earn the right to grind basic wolves and slimes, to get xp and level, because level-ups were the only way to increase your stomach capacity in a reasonable amount of time. Only then were you allowed to survive in the starter area and BEGIN the process of getting fat. Youā€™d have to keep on grinding for hours and hours if you wanted to get a capacity high enough to actually eat a wolf.

Even the basic concept of gluttony in FTA was strangely counter-productive, with Noone insisting on a ā€˜too fullā€™ mechanic that would cause you to nonlethally pop and lose ALL of your progress in increasing your size if you accidentally ate too much. Not only was trying to eat and gain weight difficult, but you were constantly threatened with severe consequences for overeating. A very strange mechanic for a game where the whole point was to overeat to the most extreme degree.

Fenoxo didnā€™t respect the people who wanted to play his game at all, he was extremely selfish and rude about everything. Noone was indirectly and unintentionally disrespectful, in the sense that he wanted you to engage in a tremendous and boring grind just to be able to participate in the sole fetish his game was focused around. Fenoxo didnā€™t respect people, Noone didnā€™t respect peopleā€™s time.

In contrast, your game respects both the playerā€™s time and the notion that they may not want to see certain parts of what the game has to offer. Even setting aside every other metric, like artwork, writing, and what coding system was used to produce it, Insatiable Hearts is already better than CoC and FTA simply because:

  • There is no grind.
  • All encounters are optional.
  • Most encounters with a questionable fetish have a warning saying exactly what will happen, if you turn that feature on.
  • You can roll back to the last page just like a VN and it undoes whatever just happened.

Thatā€™s it. Just on those four little metrics alone, IH is already better than all of those other games from the past. And I think a lot of people have noticed that. Itā€™s a really good feeling. The game isnā€™t a numbing grind, it doesnā€™t feel like a disaster to play. Instead of handling like a JRPG or Final Fantasy game with a fetish mechanic tacked on, it instead feels like an interactive novel or CYOA where the fetishes and the setting are the whole point.

If the game is fun to play, if itā€™s enjoyable, then people will play it. I donā€™t think anyone besides Fenoxo actually liked playing CoC for CoC. People put up with CoC to see a scene or encounter with their fetish in it. Thatā€™s how a lot of these older games were. Some of them were tech demos or engine tests, a lot of them were experiments where their creator got lost in the sauce and never made any meaningful additions. And in 99% of cases, people put up with that for the fetish.

Your game is popular because it is genuinely fun to play. And also has fetishes.

Hereā€™s an example: youā€™ve stated in this thread that youā€™re working on an update that adds combat to the game, along with weapons, clothes, and equipment.

Thatā€™s good. Every other game has that, and itā€™s a good feature.

But you know what else will be good? The option to flee a fight you werenā€™t prepared for. Many of these games have a flee option, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the games where flee ALWAYS WORKED. Generally, it took a stat and rolled dice for it. In a normal video game, that might be good. But in a transformation/vore fetish game, itā€™s better to have Flee just be an immediate ejection button out of the encounter, for obvious reasons.

100% flee respects peopleā€™s time and their potential desire to not be gang raped by minotaurs. Chance to flee doesnā€™t respect the player, and just forces people to grind their stats until they can always either flee or win.

CoC, Boundless, and FTA all had chance to flee. And it sucked.

Several lesser known games, like krishonks Unamed Furry Vore Game, feature a 100% flee mechanic. And the game was much more fun and satisfying to play because of that (although since it was a swf game, you will need the Adobe Flash Debugger matching your OS from the Wayback Machine to reliably run it).

Knowing how youā€™ve made this game up until this point, though, I imagine your flee option will always work, because that matches the way youā€™ve made everything else function. And thatā€™s a good thing.

Either way, Iā€™ll be rooting for you. From the free to play version, because Iā€™m terminally broke, but rooting for you nonetheless! Thanks for sharing your private project with us. Itā€™s actually really good.

7 Likes

Yo I just wanted to say you can actually cheese your way out of the early grind in FTA by drinking water from the well encounter you find in the Hills area. Thereā€™s a chance, (which you can reroll by going back and then forward again), that you will instantly gain 150 lbs. You can do this a few times before you get too fat to reliably run from encounters and have to return to work out, at which point you can pump up your base stats to a very respectable level.
Other than that, giving the cabal in the mountains wyvern eggs has been my go-to to increase stomach capacity.

But, unless the player knows about these fringe mechanics, yes, I agree with you on every case otherwise regarding FTA. Surely, it canā€™t possibly be more telling to have intentionally left a cheat option in the base game because the grind is so horrible that making a new save to test new content without it must have been worse than applying a red hot iron directly to your scrotum.

This game does excellently in the way of (at least currently) having all player progression currently connected to relationships with characters; which is the content players will presumably be here for in the first placeā€¦! It would beā€¦ extremely favorable if the rest of the gameā€™s mechanics continue to follow this trend.

I never ever understood games that have a grind almost solely for the reason youā€™re talking about. Entering the same area, pressing the same buttons, killing the same monsters for an extended period of time until you can go kill different monsters in a different area for a similar (or longer) amount of time.

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swear there used to be a separate HTML download for this game

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For some people itā€™s for their sense of accomplishment. Of course, you donā€™t get that sense of accomplishment, but for them, itā€™s about being able to put a lot of resources and uncomplicated, simplified, gamified work into something and knowing youā€™ll get something out of it. Thatā€™s something you look for in video games when youā€™re not happy with the fact that the work-for-reward exchange doesnā€™t apply cleanly to real life.

2 Likes

sorry about that! I had assumed the itchio version allowed the players to download the embedded but its strangely and either or thing were you can have it play in browser or have it as a downloadable executable or something. Anyways I ended up fixing it by just hosting two files, so now if you press download on the game page it should actually let you download it now: Insatiable Hearts by Owlkaline

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how to get Berrymorph? what needs to be done for this? Is there a list of how to get certain morphs?

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Generally thereā€™s just specific items associated with various TFs. I forget where they are but look for very obviously related berry consumable items (I think swamp has them?)

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thank you I found them, the sad thing is that it is impossible to get 100% morph

The one morph Iā€™ve never been able to find is neferi or something similar. Been a while since Iā€™ve played.

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That was added at some point in the last few months, previously I think it was debug only

IIRC you can get the items in the junk heap. Vine item I think? I donā€™t have these things memorized lol.

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A bit of a dumb question. How do you get the gourmamd tf?

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