Juxtaterrestrial's Total Conversion Belly Mod devblog v1-2-0 and later

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

If you like the concepts you read below, please consider donating to my patreon: Juxtaterrestrial is creating Belly focused fetish text | Patreon

Now that I’m done with some initial systems, i figured it would be nice to revisit my goals and lay them out for everyone. v1-2-0 and later are meant to address an important problem. Oh boy it’s a long one so buckle up for some details.

  • How do I make a mod with the Fetishmaster engine that is compelling to play and replay

On a sort of fundamental level creating compelling game play is about balancing rewards with the effort require to attain them. Many games do this with combat systems. Shooting things. Hitting thing. Killing things. You put enemies in the way, and killing them gives you access to the macguffin.

Unfortunately Fetishmaster doesn’t really have an easy or satisfying way to implement an interesting combat system. The one that existed before that i made was super convoluted, difficult to add new enemies, and the game didn’t really offer any kind of progression to make it worthwhile. No loot. No content.

v1-2-0 and beyond are may ways to try and start making the game interesting to play and replay.

Instead of combat I want to lean on character progression, varied simulated personality, and story.

The player does a thing > gets better at the thing > uses the better thing to access new content. That is the fundamental drive I’m going for.

Disco Elysium is the mold I’m using. Go play it. Seriously. Disco Elysium - The Final Cut on Steam It’s on sale currently as of the end of march 2021.

I’ll summarize what makes the game interesting in the context of my plans. DE is buddy cop murder mystery RPG with an interesting take on how you make police work interesting. or perhaps more accurately, how do you make internal monologue interesting in a video game. DE does this with it’s skills. They don’t just represent what you can do, they represent a piece of your character’s personality. Each skill has opinions. Likes. Dislikes. Flaws. And they will chime in during conversations, offering valuable feedback. The more points you put in the skill, the more they’ll chime in. You can’t max every skill and so each play through means you may get entirely different dialogue flows. Its entrancing to sort through the main character’s inner thoughts to solve the problems of the story.

DE has another interesting and relevant system. And inventory of thoughts. The thought cabinet collects those lingering intrusive thoughts. You collect these thoughts, think about them for a time and then it unlocks bonuses and penalties and other content.

And thirdly the way the game handles success and failure with its dice rolls is interesting. failing most checks locks the check. But if you spend a point to upgrade that skill, you get another chance to make the previously failed checks. Its turned out to be a very interesting way to get the player to accept failure. You can (almost)always come back and try again.

It’s these three things that i want to port to Fetishmaster. Things will be rearranged a bit but i think the spirit will remain. Here is how I’d like the gameplay loop to play out:

  1. Find content. This will require your proxy’s skills to mention something or for you to otherwise. For example Perception saying that they noticed something weird that you then investigate.
  2. Content provide experiences. Back at home you choose an experience for the proxy to think about.
  3. After a certain criteria are met, the experience is integrated into the proxy’s personality. This requires time to pass and the player to take related actions (so a stuffing experience requires you to eat to advance the experience)
  4. Completing ‘researching’ an experience may give a variety of benefits. This is how you get skill points(it may grant free skill points, or just directly improve a skill). But it also may unlock skills. This system is how i envision a non fetish oriented proxy getting a fetish. They witness a stuffing contest and it triggers a latent thought. You have them think about it, and experience similar things and eventually it triggers that fetishistic voice in the back of their heads. These integrated experiences also act as modifiers. One of the things I’ve spent months trying to figure out is how to handle the split between self oriented fetishes vs other person oriented fetishes. Wanting to eat vs wanting to watch people eat. this is a perfect solution. You only want to get fat if you have the self feederism experience integrated. You only want to feed other people if you have the feeding other people experience added. It makes it an easy, in game way, lore friendly way for players to chose the content they want to have in the game.
  5. You use the experience gained skill points to level up your skills. This makes them more likely to pipe into conversations and unlock new content. Go back to 1

And i think my favorite part is that i have a solid way to incorporate this into the lore of my mod.

The player is a digitized mind that is allowed to be downloaded into the brains of proxies. My lore justification is that the hardware that allows this has to somehow interpret brain activity, right? So my thinking is that the reason these skills will have dialogue, is because it’s the computer trying to make sense of the brainwaves and express them to you in a useful way. The proxy is just feeling urges, while you, the passenger, is getting a more solid interpretation of what that urge means and represents. The skills rolls that determine if a skill says something is representative of the chaotic nature of the brain. the brain doesn’t always fire in the same way.

And when you level up a skill, its the player taking that thought and urge and amplifying it until the connections in the brain are strengthened. Integration experiences is the same way. You’re taking a nagging thought and having the proxy keep thinking about it.

I love the way this ties things together. It works with the framing device perfectly. And it also represents some real world phenomenon decently well. It represents someone having a weak version of a fetish. it represents people gaining them due to very specific experience like cartoons or meaningful encounters. It allows for a meaningful internal dialog as well that doesn’t rely on endless iteration to account for subtle textual variations.

Anyway, onto the plans for the actual content.

How do I want to structure the content? I want to avoid simplistic quests with walls of text that are essentially meaningless. What i have in mind is a wide net of small events that lead to bigger and bigger things.

So,

Threads > Hooks > Quests > Arcs.

A thread is i guess a very minor quest. Oh your perceptions skill noticed a weird flier on the wall of the alley? I wonder where it leads? They are flavor event to make the word feel alive and to reward player builds. Threads should be numerous but skill gated. You shouldn’t have access to strength based threads unless you’re very lucky or have invested in strength. In some cases you should need multiple completed threads to access the relevant hooks. And the threads should be pretty widely spread. To access a secret belly club maybe you need to overhear a belly stripper talk about her job. but then you also need to learn the secret code words by sweet talking a barista or something. This should, I hope, make the players interested in exploring the world. It also incentivizes players to have multiple hired proxies. A charismatic proxy. A fat one. A strong one.

A hook is a bigger event or a location that makes the player want to investigate further. They should require multiple threads to unlock and have a reward of some kind. Either they unlock an experience, or unlock an interesting location (like the ability to get money for putting on a fat strip tease). Each hook should link to at least one quest line. Hooks should introduce interesting character and locations.

A quest should be where major conversations happen. They should advance the world plot and reveal hidden truths. This shouldn’t be a “fetch the macguffin” things. they should be real quests. Additionally they should require multiple hooks to complete. Even beyond that, completing some hooks should allow the ability for different outcomes to quests.

An Arc should be the culmination of a number of quests. These wont be coming for a long time i imagine. But they should unlock large new areas with new threads and hooks and quests.

That handles story, now onto my plans for the simulated personality I mentioned above.

This hits heavily on the content I was making for my previous mod project. My goal is to have wandering npcs with personalities for you to talk to, seduce, fatten, and or recruit. it was the textual burden of differentiating the personalities that really hindered my ability to deliver. I have a lot of the systems done, but i couldn’t get all the writing done.

So I’ll be taking what worked, and throwing away what didn’t. Rather than trying to a bunch of opinions requiring deep trees of variability for the text, I’m going to start with a max of like 3 personalities. Something like Sweet, Seductive, And Normal. Then I’ll add more in subsequent updates. I wont be rewriting the dialog a million times for each and every response.

But the skills system simplifies the conversation system. My goal is to make it more than just a list of dialogue options. Maybe you have a list of basic topics, but during conversation I will be having the skills pipe in. and based on the skills you have, you may get new conversations options. Subsequently the npc will also have these skills, and that will affect what things they add to conversation.

That’s the plan anyway. NPCs is not a goal for specifically v1-2-0. It requires more build up.

UPDATE SCHEDULE

So when can you expect any of this. I want to keep to shorter bite sized updates like I have so far. But before I lay out individual update goals, i should give something of a more concrete picture.

There will be 4 categories of skills. Sexual skills, Hobby skills, Ability skills, and Job skills.

Each skill represents how good the character is at a thing, but also has a personality related to the skill. A hacking skill should be really nerdy and comment about like network protocols and things. A perception skill will probably be a lot like curiosity core from portal 2.

I don’t have a fully fleshed out set of skills yet but here is some guiding ideas.

Sexual skills includes things like seduction, but also encompasses fetishes. I plan to include feederism(gaining weight), Ventriphilia(belly fetish), Stuffing (eating), Lactation and maybe more in the long run. Sexual skills are unique in that they should start at 0 instead of 1. You should have to unlock them with experiences. Sexual skills are also sort of more of a reward skill as there wont be a lot of opportunities for the belly fetish personality to unlock plot threads lol.

Hobby skills, should be sort of secondary skills around to give flavor to the proxies. This is things like cooking, drinking, or trivia. Hobby skills should be largely about personality. But they should also have solid threads connected to them. Why not untangle a conspiracy because that guy at trivia night knows too much.

Ability skills, represent nonphysically representable aspects of the character. They’re sort of a fundamental part of who the character is. Strength will get no skill because I’m handling that with math. But Endurance will because it will be difficult to find a mathematical way to handle endurance. This will include endurance, perception, Empathy, Composure and probably other things. These should be heavily relied upon to advance threads and hooks. You need to notice things after all.

Job skills, are the things you train to do. So this is criminality (sleight of hand and lock picking and stuff), hacking, Drama (ability to tell and detect lies). Its things like that. Like ability skills these should be workhorse skills

Update schedule for real this time.

For v1-2-0 i want to have mostly systems and example stuff up. So you need to be able to unlock a few experiences, level up a few skills, and have a few skill checks in place that lead to content. My goal is to have Perception, seduction, stuffing and maybe ventriphilia in for the next release. Then i want to have a few threads, leading to the first of the hooks. I will probably have a few sort of barebones experiences just so players can level up a bit.

v1-3-0 will build on the previous update and add more skills , experiences, and hooks. This might include endurance and see be integrating that with v1-1-0’s fitness stuff.

Once I have a decent range of skills later on, v1-?-0 will add the basics of npcs and personalities. I don;'t want to put this off too late. Id rather have too few skills to make interesting npc conversation than be faced with the task of doing all of them at once. But still, I don’t know which update this one will be, so i wont specify.

I want to keep with relatively rapid updates but i can’t guarantee v1-2-0 will be out in the same timeframe as the previous one. I hope i can manage that. But no promises.

Read the story series about the world where the mod takes place in here: Kelri's Gain Part 1: Get Stuffed by Juxtaterrestrial on DeviantArt

Again support the mod and my writing on my patreon. patrons get any free content I post a month in advance of the public release. Join here: Juxtaterrestrial is creating Belly focused fetish text | Patreon

Join my email list here so i can notify you of major story and game updates. And only major updates. Juxtaterrestrial Fiction

12 Likes

Very nice summary of how to structure the game, and I like how you made the term, Ventriphilia. I’ve always wanted a term for it, or word I guess lol.

1 Like

Are the only two jobs at the moment harvesting mushrooms or stripping? And is it ever possible to do anything on the main menu besides rest? (aka when you’re not uplinked). edit: I get that it’s a work in progress and you stripped out the base fetishmaster content, I just want to make sure I’m not overlooking things.

That is correct. Like i said. Barebone haha

could you make a barebones version of the mod that just adds the wg features, and overwrites the old mod?

I will not be doing this.

1 Like

Quick update. There will be no patreon update next month.

The work on the next update will require roe time but i hope people on patreon will still stick around.

I haven’t updated much because there isn’t anything exciting to update. My current action is planning out the skills - their personalities, and coming up with a list of checks. I want to get a lot of it organized before I write code. I want to have at least like 5 fluff checks for each skill (things like ‘you notice the smell of flowers’ type stuff. Content that helps with immersion) and then i want at least like 5 thread related checks (checks that lead to other content). And then i want to have some hooks to build the groundwork for later quests.

This is a very light spoiler, but one of the early hooks/quests i have in mind involves discovering and uncovering a sort of hidden belly underworld to the town. So threads will be things like noticing that Myre’s Ice Cream has a woman with a big belly as the logo [ a very easy check]. Then once you’ve completed a bunch of those threads you can get a check to notice a stripper on break who has a belly. Talking with her allows you to learn about a hidden belly focused area of the strip club where you can unlock and experience that can be used to unlock ventriphilia skill.

On the longer term there will be a whole underworld questline for the game. Why is there so much feederism stuff going on in this town?

So planning is what has been happening.

2 Likes

I just took your survey, and apparently there is both a belly mod for fetishmaster and a total conversion belly mod for fetishmaster and you made both and they’re not the same thing?

But I can’t find them existing as two separate things here on weightgaming… anytime I search for the bellymod I get the total conversion belly mod instead… any chance you could explain because I’m super confused! I assume the bellymod predates the total conversion? But if so why can’t I find it?

For that matter it’s kind of hard to find the most up to date version of either… I’m not sure the version of the total conversion I’ve downloaded and played is the most up to date one. (In fact I’ve only played 1.0.0 so it’s clearly not as up to date as 1.1.0 or 1.2.0 would be)…

You can find my old belly mod here: Belly Mod release(current as of 7/1/2017)(combat and office patch)

But it’s abandon for various reasons outlined in other posts. Its not compatible with my current project.

As for the total conversion mod, v1-2-0 is not available yet., v1-1-0 is available here: Total Conversion Belly Mod v1-1-0 (currently out!) - #2 by Juxtaterrestrial

1 Like

Lost a week and a half of any productivity due to a painful tooth extraction recover. Dry socket is hell.

Anyway i don’t have a lot to share. Most of the work I’ve done is planning which is not interesting.

image

These are the skills i have in mind as sort of a minimum. I’ll probably add more as the mod expands back into familiar territory (like pregnancy and boob fetish stuff, as well as sex skills). For the initial release of this content I’m planning on focusing on ventriphilia, perception, and seduction. The idea is that you need perception to notice stuff in the world. Ventriphilia content gives something for character to notice (why are all these fat bellied people around?) and seduction gives you a way to interact a bit with that content.

My primary goal for v1-2-0 is to get the systems working so i can iterate on content. More skills. Quests.

So right now I’m working on getting outlines for the content i need. I want to have a bunch of fluff checks in mind for each of the three mentioned skills. Then i want to have checks that tie into threads, and maybe a couple hook based checks for each skill that unlock something in the world. That way there is enough content to explore the systems a bit.

Thanks for your support!

3 Likes

That’s rough, I had my wisdom teeth pulled recently and it sounds like dry socket can really suck. Also keep up the good work.

Question the Legacy Mods it mentions " **Content from these mod’s mainly outdated or/and already integrated in the main game module" that implies that’s already in the main fetish master game itself?

Where did you read that? Did i write it, or was it on the FM main site?

So i’ve been busy. I’m releasing a weight gain Novella on amazon.

Cover here: Weighted Grades (Out now!) by Juxtaterrestrial on DeviantArt

Read the first chapter here, then pre-order: Weighted Grades Chapter 1 (Out now! Link below!) by Juxtaterrestrial on DeviantArt

Beyond that, I don’t have much in the way of content update info. I’ve mostly been figuring out structural stuff. Setting standards for skill checks. That sort of thing.

I figured to let you know stuff is happening I’d explain some of the structure i have in mind.

So one of the things i hate having to do is have repeated math in events in the game. if i break a small thing and replicate it, then bugs get shifted through the whole mod.

So one of my goals was to minimize the code that deals with checks in the actual events.

the solution i came up with was to handle all skill checks in an organ action. The game uses this functionality to handle lactation and stuff. But i can use it in a different way.

In a given location I’ll have blocks of code like this (in pseudo code)

{
proxy.setStat(check_id, perception_1)

proxy.doaction(check_id)

return = proxy.getStat(check_text)
}

all the math and text gets set in one bit of code for each skill. It will make making broad changes to check difficulties and text super easy.

I mean this is pretty normal code stuff, but I’m happy i figured out a way to do it with this engine.

I’ll be relying a lot on personal and global flags to manage all the skill checks, but it’s sort of a trade off I guess.

In the actual organ code it will be a series of if statements to check the ID of the current check. Within that code I’ll have it make the dice roll and determined success or failure, and then assemble the output text. Ideally, i will have an option in the game to include or exclude detailed check readouts. (so you see failed vs seeing failed because of all the modifiers you have).

Now, one of the things Disco Elysium does that i want to replicate is chain of skills having conversation. I can do that in a few ways. I may use both depending on the situation. If rolls are required, i can have a section of code set a success flag, then in the event code it will run the next check (and also check for eligibility against the previously set flag). If not, then i can just have the skill back and forth handles in each block of math.

Beyond that there is a question of how to handle conversation checks when i add NPCs. But i have a few ideas of how to implement that.

2 Likes

So i wanted to leave a quick update.

I’ve started work on the actual code for the skills system. Its taking a bit because i really want to nail down a format, so i can just copy and paste a skeleton and just fill out the content. I don’t have anything to show of that because it’s only party done. But that’s where I am!

Related - i actually bought a piece of art for the game from @clinko_clinko

Its amazing. So far this is the only art for the project? At least it’s all the art for now.

Besides that, go buy my book. It’s very good. if you like my mod or stories, it will definitely appeal to you. There are reviews now, so you don;t have to take my word for it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0979H18LZ

4 Likes

Sorry for the slow progress. Honestly it’s been a rough year. Good in some ways, but definitely rough.

So progress has been slow. Thankfully I’m on some new (old) adhd medication so i hope to get ahead of things.

Anyway, i have the template for skill checks set up.

image

Its coded in a way that should make adding new checks trivial difficulty. I just have to change a few names, add content, and the skill check call.

Now in Disco Elysium, you can hover over a check to see the breakdown of modifiers. I played around with how to do it here, but decided to just put the details into the CMD line.

image

Now before i work on content, i want to get the level up mechanics working. Should be easier I think?

5 Likes

No pictures this time but progress has been made. Implemented a bunch of fluff oriented perception checks. Having the template completed makes it very easy to iterate.

I’ve gotten like half the experience system implemented as well.

And I’ve been doing a lot of outlining for skills, threads, and hooks, as well as outline conversation trees loaded with skill checks.

6 Likes

Not complaining, but at this point its no longer a mod, its an entirely new game. The finished product, based off of what I’ve seen so far, looks like it will be a sight to behold. I’m very excited.

Heh, that’s why I’m calling it a total conversion mod

Small progress update. Got a bunch of the interface/ underlying systems done for leveling up skills, updating skills, and displaying level up information to the player. More below the screenshots.

I have it all coded so that iterating for new skills will require minimal variable find/replacement. Will just have to change one variable, and add the required text.

Getting the systems lined up has actually re arranged my priorities a bit. My goal is to have a bunch of skill in the game for the next update even though there won’t be a ton of content for most of them. The reason for this is because I’ve been planning out conversation trees with some fixed NPCs. Mimicking Disco Elysium would be kind of crap if there wasn’t a bunch of skills chiming in for conversations. So even if i don’t have main line content available some skills, I want them to be able to chime in on other content.

It will be easier to create this web of skill interactions from the get go, rather than trying to backtrack and add things.

So next up is to get the level up infrastructure done for the other skills i have planned.

Then after that, I need to finish up the experience system(the way to gain skill points). I don’t have the interface for that started yet, but I have the underlying math functioning. I’ve explained my goals earlier in this thread and it pretty much aligns with what I’m building still. Each experience unlocked with have a research time in hours (with most probably lasting days weeks or months). Once per day per character in the world, a script checks the current experience and counts down 24 hours from the timer. I already have differences accounted for. For example I want some things that happen to affect the rate of change of certain experiences. Maybe if you interact with bellies in significant ways then belly related experiences will be researched faster. Alternatively I can apply penalties. Maybe working out makes it take longer for feederism experiences to finish researching.

So what does the roadmap work ahead look like? This list is in nor particular order.

  1. Add more skills to the skill infrastructure
  2. Complete the experience infrastructure.
  3. Content - Conversations that utilize skill check (tutorial character, some fetish content oriented character, some conversations with the proxy, rework mushroom guy, probably some other side characters as i develop content.)
  4. Content - fluff checks - threads - hooks - quests - experiences
  5. Content - Some rewards( Need to make some belly related content. Big thing I have in mind is a secret belly oriented strip club unlocked through a series of threads/hooks)

And that’s basically what I want done for the next release. The release after that will be more skills and experiences, more fluff, threads, and hooks, and something else. Maybe I’ll start on getting random NPCs walking around and talking? I want NPCs around with skills of their own before I try to tackle the sex system remake.

I guess I can make this post longer. Who will stop me? Ultimately I want to make the system into something with more back and forth. When i have NPCs hanging around with their own skills (and fetishes) i want sex to be and back and forth activity, with options presented based on the fetishes of people involved. Should be fun. I really want to aim for making the partners feel… Interesting and distinct? I want the player to feel pursued at times, or to be able to feel seductive. I want give and take.

TL;DR: Stuff is happening

5 Likes