Juxtaterrestrial's Total Belly Conversion Mod Devblog (v1-1-0 and earlier)

I think it’s clear my last project died. Biting off ore than I could chew, and a lack of motivation being the main reasons. So much of the next update was half done and i cant bring myself to work on it. Not everything was a waste. I learned a lot of how i want things to work, even if I went a bit overboard. A lot of stuff will be re jigged and brought over over time.

So I’ve started a more ambitious sounds but probably easier in scope project. You’re reading about it right now!

This projects will be me rebuilding a ton of the content from the bottom up.

I didn’t want to post anything about this till i had some things to show - however minor. I’ve decided to post now because i did a big piece of the puzzle in the last week.

  • Re-coded a ton of organ code.

Without going into the nitty gritty details, i basically completely ripped out all the abdomen code and re did it from scratch. Did a lot of new formulas to make weight gain more accurate-ish. The most controversial change probably:

*Digestion now happens once a day at around 1 am.

Fluff wise it’s to create the moment of waking up fatter. But really it was to speed up the whole calculations, and it prevents an old bug. It also cleans up old wonkiness, and in the process i actually made the weight gain significantly more accurate. Like previously, there was this whole weirdness where it would take days to digest a meal and that comes from how the math calculated stuff per hour. I mean it makes sense to break up digestion over time, but it’s a complicated thing to make interesting, and quick, and realistic. IRL pretty much what ever you eat gets processed in the same time. I tried multiple ways to make it better, like adding percentage processing, but that just exacerbated some of the problems.

Anyway

  • food gets digested all at once

  • I super simplified my stomach stretching code to be probably a million times faster, and with the once a day change fixing a bug, you can now use water to stretch your stomach (cool RP change) or just bloat. And since digestion happens once a day you can walk around with a bloated belly without fear of it shrinking every hour.

  • I simplified stretching and digestion and removed throwing up. Instead you simply can’t eat more food past a certain point. No more wasting food because there is no easy or quick or convenient way to check fullness. Figuring out how to do this was a neat little trick.

  • Like i said, weight gain is now more accurate.

Previously the game had two big inaccuracies.

  1. 1 calorie used to make you gain 1 gram of fat. That rate is just wrong - and i don’t blame h.coder, figuring out formulas for this shit isn’t easy. I did the math. Suffice to say, calories make you gain a proper amount of weight.
  2. The way the game handled fat distribution was wonky. Calories would gain you generic.fat, then other organs and bodyparts would take that, do some math and add additional fat based on fat.body_part stats(to represent fat distribution). It would magically add fat too. If you increased fat.belly it would automatically add new fat, and vice versa. Again, the math is hard, and i don’t blame the solution that h.coder came up with.

Now, what it does it add up all the values of the various fat.body_part stats, then determines what percentage of the whole each part represents, then allocates fat based on that. So when a potion or something increases belly fat distribution, it just makes new fat get added to each body part. There are some things I’d like to tweak about loss and what not, but this is good already.

What else did i do?

  • New bodyparts to get fat!
  • Butts
  • Arms
  • Legs
  • back/sides

Example of new description screen and new bodyparts

image

I know there are grammar errors, but they exist because templates capitalize the first letter in them and i don’t know how to make that stop.

I realized I don’t have a butt description there. It will be on my to do list.

But along with those parts i also have measurements for those parts so when you proxy measure themselves you’ll get a bunch more stats than bust, belly, and hips. Fun stuff.

  • Oh! A small thing but long requested feature is in now: round bellies vs bellies with folds. It’s just a simple random stat from 0 - 100 that determines how round or rolly the belly is.

I did not mess with the boob stuff aside from the size calculations because that is an adventure i don’t want to detangle yet.

  • I improved a lot of stuff behind the scenes.
  • I have detailed comments for all my math and formulas.
  • Variable names are easy to understand.
  • things are most standardized now. organ.fat now always refers to the fat volume of the organ. organ.size is now always the distance them most prominent curve of fat is away from attached bodypart. belly.size is how far the belly sticks out fro ma flat abdomen. Breasts.size is the same thing. I don’t do abdomen.anything for belly stuff anymore. It’s belly.fat, belly.weight etc. Also most stats have a organ.total_weight stat to represent organs that can get bigger for multiple reasons(milk + fat for boobs). Now the weight calculation, and measurement stuff is mostly centralized to the abdomen.organ file.

Lots of behind the scene stuff is already out of the way.

  • The world is new

I’m porting the whole game into my Belly Literary Universe. So fantasyish to near future sc-ifi.

Ps - go ready my long, slow paced wg story series here: Kelri's Gain Part 1: Get Stuffed by Juxtaterrestrial on DeviantArt

It’s got a cool timeline, and art, and everything

So I guess this will be a tie in game now. At least, it takes place 20 years after the story series linked above begins. The world will definitely be more belly focused from the bottom up than the original was.

But i felt constrained by the original setting, so I’m doing my take on it now. It still has the framing device of proxies and what not, but it’s justified a bit differently.

Tonight i made a map of the town - not like a physical one, just a node map of the areas. It’s got circles, lines, and shit handwriting.

I also spent tonight stubbing out all the nodes. So you can walk through it all, but there is no content yet.

  • Other big things to note:

  • I cut combat entirely. The engine is absurdly not suited to it, and what i implements was super kludgy and awful to add new monsters to. This world does not have monsters. There is no need to go into the wild and punch animals. If there does end up being combat, it will be narrative based.

  • I’ve completely cut the sex out temporarily. I want to redo it from a different sort of perspective that may take into account mobility and accessibility type stuff.

  • feeding is not back in yet either. I need more characters around for that to make sense. But i may be bale to port that directly? Who knows.

Anyway here is my release checklist:

  • Descriptions for every node/location.
  • Some kind of interactions at places | ways to make money | ways to spend money | fat scenes
  • A variety of foods to consume and get fat off of
  • At least stub out a few notable characters
  • Butt descriptions
  • Tweaks to measurements a bit. I want to see if i can get a sort of proper bra sizing calculation going that includes band size increased due to backfat. I might add calve and lower arm fat as well? But i don’t know how much demand there is for that. I realized i also don’t have a proper hip measurement done yet. So that to.
  • Basic dialogue for getting fatter and what not. But this i may put off for the update after release.
  • Tweak weight loss. There are some oddities that most people would probably never notice and i want to see if i can deal with them. Life for example, if you change your weight distribution it messes with how weight is loss. As it is now, weight is gained and lost from the same body parts proportionally. if that changes, you’ll get to a point where it will try to subtract fat from a part with no fat. Right now it just throws away that weight loss. Which I’m fine with, but it might be nice to find a simple solution. The most accurate way would be to collate that lost lost weight and redistribute it excluding that zeroed weight. But I don’t feel like doing an algorithm to do that. I might do a flat rate weight loss system, where they lose weight from some areas faster than others, to represent bodyparts with stubborn weight gain people complain about. I don’t know for sure what i will do yet

I have a lot of ideas for stuff to do after that, but i think it’s best if i focus on these goals

Thanks for reading my plans.

Seriously though, go read my story series: Kelri's Gain Part 1: Get Stuffed by Juxtaterrestrial on DeviantArt

29 Likes

Well I’m definitely excited to try this out.
Will you release what you had of the previous iteration of the project just for us to try out or see what we can do with? It’d be a shame to let all that hard work go to waste.

No. No one needs to see how for my reach exceeded my grasp. I’ll definitely be taking parts and reusing it though. Already have actually. I did a prototype of the fat distribution changes in that abandon update, and added it in now super quick because i had already done it before.

you got a huge plans of your game

I think it’s a great idea taking combat out. Like you pointed out it was very janky in the original game, so removing it will let us focus on the fun stuff

2 Likes

Of all the large-scale FM mods, I think this is the first that actually attempts to swap out the game world and setting, so congrats on that - that’s a pretty big undertaking in and of itself.

Glad to see you’ve got the digestion and gain/distribution calcs nailed down a bit better too; I’ve been tweaking on and off even beyond what I’ve pushed to my branch, and still haven’t been able to come up with too much that really solves the issues I have without rewriting the body code entirely. Adding entirely new parts to calculate and describe is far beyond what I’ve been tinkering with, though.

Hope I’m not coming across as too pushy, but if the old mod’s kicking the bucket would you mind if I copied and cleaned up the feeding system and maybe some other non-quest stuff for my 0.99 branch? In particular I had some bits I was working on that enabled feeding for certain NPCs if I could detect that the mod was installed, and just having it available by default would simplify things, without asking anyone to download outdated mods.

3 Likes

Uh sure, you can port the feeding system.

To be fair the arms and legs don’t have any mechanics with them. Just size/weight/volume calculations haha.

Today went thought a provided base thematic descriptions for most of the areas. After i finish that I’m going to go back and do hip measurement stuff, and butt description stuff.

Then after that my plan is to hit work place - how to make money. Probably going to do a stripper place, and mushroom harvesting business.

I don’t want to do a whole system where proxies get forced to attend a day job. But it doesn’t make sense for some jobs to make sense as a per day type pay. I figure these two jobs at least make sense because this busy mushroom growing business could use day laborers to harvest stuff, and a strip club might be open to one timers - like karaoke but for exotic dancing.

In general for the world i want there to be a secretive belly based world existing just beneath the surface. If anyone has read my series, they know there are forces trying to make bellies and fat in general more acceptable, so i intend for there to be quests where you uncover the fat aspects of the town. I want to tie everything into this hidden world sometimes if you spend enough time there, rather than just have a stripclub but for fat. And a brothel but for fat.

Hopefully, long term i can make the world change subtly as you learn these separate puzzle pieces.

1 Like

Added the math for butt size and hips measurement tonight. Still need to add both to the character descriptions and measurements next, as well as add descriptions for some more areas, then it’s onto the jobs i mentioned

5 Likes

It kind of funny, I started reading your stories because I enjoyed your original mod so much and now i’m excited for your new mod because I enjoyed your stories. Best of luck to you and I hope that you have fun making this.

1 Like

Added the descriptions and measurements.

Take a look:

Scale:

Measuring:

Description:
fm_prev_3

So now it’s pretty much onto the couple workplaces i have planned for the launch. A day labor place as a mushroom harvester. And a strip club job. Not sure if i want to handle the fat part yet? Or how i want to. I intends for there to be a “you’re getting fat” moment that unlocks a special back room strip club for fat strippers, but the problem is the edge cases of what happens if you go there for the first time and are already fat. Do they just offer you the fat job right away? I figure it’s not a super secret place, but you should maybe have to show some initiative to get invited. Maybe you get ‘fired’ from the regular place if you’re too fat, but if you know about the second place you can call them out, or if when you get fired you tell them you want to show off your weight, that triggers them to let you in.

It kinda ties into the themes i want. that it’s a normal town on the surface, but just below the surface there is this fat underground with a bunch of different fat oriented groups and activities.

And then i also want to add things for the player to spend money on: In the short term i plan to make it so you have to buy a bathroom scale and a tape measure. This ties into later things i want to do. i want you to be able to buy new parts of your starting house. I want you to be able to buy a car (which would unlock fast travel to the other nearby towns and cities, or just allow you to travel with less difficulty one I implement mobility mechanics

Anyway beyond that.

One of the other things i want to include for the first update is a pretty extensive ‘help’ menu or FAQ accessible from taking control of your proxy that explains some of the quirks of the setting, and the mechanics, and also offers general advice of what the player should do.

And i just realized i never added the bust measurements to the measurement screen. I’ll get on that a little later lol

4 Likes

I figure I should also outline what features I have planned for after launch updates.

  1. Mobility (or mobility difficulties, really). Basically as you get bigger moving around from place to place will give more and more tiredness. I plan to have an event accessible from every outdoor place. it will include options to rest for a bit, maybe other options like maybe talking to your proxy eventually. There will be other places that will be more efficient for resting, like, a park bench for example. Also beverages, can help, but now with your stomach capacity being limited per day, that is a limited boost.

  2. Personality: truth be told, this is what killed my last update. But i plan on taking what i learned from that to make it easier to implement. Rather than having personality variable that scale i plan on having a few base character archetypes. A normal personality, and then like ‘cute’ and ‘assertive’. That would cut down on the variability of dialog I encountered previously. And keeping thing confined like that lets me start small, and add new personalities as time goes on. So I can add things later like ‘domineering’ or ‘grumpy’.

  3. Skills: I want to make skills more interesting. I want to make everything more interesting and interactive than it was in the base game. Rather than just have stuff added passively without your notice or notification, i want to make skills more of a choice, and of an interaction. Disco Elysium is my inspiration for what i have planned. In DE you have a number of skills, but they’re not just boring things like ‘jump’ or ‘knowledge(nature)’ in something like DnD. They have personalities and talk to you like the cliche angel and devil on your shoulder. That is what i want skills to be: to give you new information. And this is how i will handle fetishes. I’ll let the base character personality have its dialog, then if a fetish skill is developed it will chime in. The ‘feeder’ fetish will be able to help detect which characters have gluttonous predilections already and encourage you to encourage them. Same thing with regular skills. I don’t plan on having nearly as many as DE, but i love how it worked in the game.

I’ll probably include some kind of XP system. Maybe not grind able, but only one time bonuses from discovering new things? New experiences? And then i plan to only have a few levels available. Like 0 - minimally present. 1 - present but only partially. And 2 - a defining part of the characters persona. It would help prevent this sort of super granular skill level. Each level would feel important.

Fluff wise i plan to theme it as you being able to read the proxy’s surface thoughts. You’re implanted in their brain, and can read their surface thoughts and emotions, so to you, these distinct impulses in their brain are more apparent than they would be in a normal person.

As with personalities, i plan to start small with just like ‘feedee’, ‘feeder’, ‘perception’, ‘sensuality’ (like the ability to move attractively), maybe more. The way i have it in mind it would be easy to add more as time goes on.

  1. NPCs: Again one of the things that helped killed the last update. And again I know how i can simplify things to make it easier and quicker to implement. Actually a lot of the basics of this system were pretty much done and working, aside from dialogue and flavor text. But the personality and skill changes would make this a while lot easier to implement.

Basically NPCs would/will be created with a random set of traits and personality type stuff, a job, and hobbies (a lot of this distilled down into skills now) and that would affect where they travel through during the day and how they would interact with you. I need to figure out how you can influence their personalities, but i have an idea for a ‘date’ system. Where they get marked as following you around, and you can interact with them via the constantly present local interaction button mentioned in #1. Then you could go places. And i guess if you’ve interacted with them enough and go to places that would affect a particular personality, some hidden XP would go and level up that skill. So like, spending a lot of time talking about food, showing off your fat body, and bringing them to restaurants could make then break and get a minimum feedee skill. We’ll see once i get there.

  1. Sex. Sex probably wont be in at launch. But i want to make sex more interactive, and take into account sizes and what not. More importantly, i don’t want sex to always be the player being the initiating character. It made sense in the base game if you were a brothel worker for you to be the actor, but IRL sex is more about give and take. And what if you want to visit the brothel as a character and get pleased? I want to account for these things. hah. Maybe i should make it like the combat where sex has turns, then give you the ability to pass your turn to simulate the other person taking control. Will be fun. But it will probably come after the personality stuff above, because i see that as integral to this experience.

  2. Quests. I want there to be quest lines with characters, and choices, and dialogue, and meaning. Factions even maybe. I’ll be laying the ground work for a lot of this over a long period of time, but i don’t want quests to consist just of fetch quests, or walls of text. I want them to have characters, that people care about, and plots that are at least somewhat interesting. I have ideas for a cult line, secretive corporation line, government conspiracy line, as well as lines for building your house up and what not. And all this i want to be accessible from minor local quest lines. Like an office dynamic type place, or a failing business that you choose to help out. Readers of the BLU should have an idea of what i mean. i want everything to be connected.

  3. Oh. Conversations. This ties into NPCs and what not, but i want to change how you interact with characters of note. I want to move away from only getting your proxy’s thoughts when you connect to them, and instead i want you to ask about it. rather than having the proxy randomly talk about their belly over other things, you should be able to ask them about it, as well as other things. I worked on this with NPCs in the last update, and want to use what I learned here.

  4. Character creation. I have a plan to make a character creator for your first proxy using a sort of point system. So you’d be able to spend point to make a random proxy taller or shorter, make them gain weight, change their distributions. Don’t know when I’ll do this. We’ll see though

Those are the future changes i have in mind, that i can remember anyway. I feel like i forgot some. Oh well. This is just to get people excited, as these are all things that I have in my head with ways in mind of how to implement them.

10 Likes

was there ever a compiled release of the newest version of the old one, mods and all?

No, not beside the combat patch.

when do you think your rework will be ready and open to the public?

A month afetr patrons gets it.

And they will get it when I’m confident in the base world of the total conversion.

My checklist is pretty basic.

  • Places exist with flavor dialog and sometimes characters to have basic interactions with.
  • places to make and spend money (food and maybe minor house upgrades and maybe some fat scenes)
  • Body changes and descriptions in a good place (this is mostly done already)
  • Help system detailing mechanical and world quirks.

The math stuff is pretty totally out of the way at this point, so the hard stuff is done. Unless you consider writing all the content the hard part lol.

As for when that will be ready: it will be ready when that stuff is done. Productivity is pretty high right now, but the game jam is coming up, which will keep us all pretty busy, i bet.

4 Likes

Can’t wait, been a fan of the original FM and your mod/s for years now at this point (I feel old)
I’m super pumped!

Oh 1 other thing.

I intend to include some settings at some point. Perhaps a scaler to money payouts for people who want more of a challenge to money income (once i have expensive things to buy).

Other settings i could add would be how rare sexual traits are on spawned characters, how much xp characters gain from experiences. You know, that kind of stuff.

I also want to make the currency kinda in line with real life currency so people can have an expectation for how much stuff costs.

1 other thing - no promises. But with my measurement stuff done, it wouldn’t be that far off to make clothes and what not. That is a rabbit hole that needs to wait till my other stuff is implemented though.

3 Likes

Probably a dumb question, but will there be a way to concentrate growth to certain parts of the body?

With the changes made to the weight gain code - yes.

I don’t know when I’ll put things in the game to actually make those changes. But it will definitely come at some point.

3 Likes