Need help thinking of an idea for a game

Ok so I need some advice for a game idea, my game idea right now is “collect food on each level and at the end of each level, you cook the food into a certain dish to gain weight, and each level has smaller or wider holes to make it so you have to have certain weight level to get certain food, and there’s some healthy foods to help you lose weight levels to go back and get through them.” It’s a pretty cringe idea but I can’t seem to mess around with it enough for a project, I just really wanna make a Weight Gain game but my lack of imagination is killing me

P.S the game I wanna go for is like a 2d pixelated platformer, I should probably specify that

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A game like this already exists but no harm making another. Especially to practice making games. Depending on how much you add, this could be a very doable concept, unlike the many grand ideas that get put up here and get cancelled.

Good luck with it and am curious on how it turns out.

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One trap I note that many aspiring developers fall into is to force the kink itself into the primary gameplay loop, sometimes kludging a scenario or premise together in a way that strains suspension of disbelief. What do I mean by “primary” gameplay loop? As in the very thing that a player is doing moment-to-moment in the game in order to achieve some level completion or goal.

Now that’s not to say it’s impossible to make games where eating, growing, expanding etc is baked directly into the gameplay, but these either have have a premise that doubles down on the fantastical unreality of the situation or are fully divorced from reality altogether (think in an arcade sense) - check out Doughball Descent as a great example of this.

So what about games that want to borrow some elements of reality, such as you mentioning cooking? A way to circumvent the issue is to ultimately not force the issue. Make the kink ancillary to the primary gameplay, a by-product or a reaction to what the player is trying to achieve and not the goal itself. There are many examples of this concept found on this site, such as:

  • In Spacethumper, the goal, as stated within the game, is to get off the hostile planet and the player will need to build components as well as defences in order to do this.
  • In Smasher and the Will o’ the Thiccs, you are attempting to find and collect all the mcguffins within a set number of moves akin to golf.
  • In Feed the Crown, the player sneaks through an enemy castle in order to pilfer goodies.
  • In The Burnt, the player assists NPCs in their respective stories to avoid a terrible fate, exploring an abandoned town for spirit energy in a race against time.

I neglected to mention that in both Spacethumper and Smasher the player swells up immensely with fat in the process; in Feed the Crown the goodies you collect are to be fed to a gluttonous queen in a separate feeding scene; and in The Burnt the NPCs each get bigger as their stories progress.

These games (and many more examples like this) sell the player on a more straightforward premise first and foremost, with the fun kink shenangians playing second fiddle to this objective. In some cases they may employ the gaining as a mechanic that impacts the primary gameplay, such as with Spacethumper needing to get bigger to meet higher energy costs, but this is a secondary gameplay consideration that supports the primary loop - the goal (as described by the game) isn’t to get fat, but to achieve your primary objective.

So with that all said, if you are struggling to make an idea come to fruition, maybe the issue is that you’re trying to force the kink into the mix in a way that feels dissatisfying? Perhaps relaxing your grip on the kink elements and focus on making a fun, interesting premise for players to invest themselves in first is the way to go. The kink elements can always be backfilled into the game to support and enhance the experience overall.

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I have no words at all, you guys helped so much. Although I still can’t think of anything good enough to make a game out of, my creativity and imagination actually really sucks

Any idea is worth pursuing, I mean I have three text adventures; first being a demon that fattens people up, a spirit that does the same, and a thief suffering from fatcanthropy (lycanthropy but fat). All featuring people being fattened against their will, yet different ways of doing it.

Just remember that with a concept comes ambition, and believe me, while these three may look simple enough they took at least a few months of coding and writing for each one (the exception being the thief, but that is beside the point). Just write down a ton of ideas, what do you find that is cool or interesting to you, and then figure out which of them can be done in your game.

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It might be best to make a one level prototype that just revolves around getting collectables that make you gradually bigger and making the focus planning out your route a la sneak feast or dice gorge. The idea definitely has potential, some iterative design might be the push you need to really flesh it out.

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Maybe add an extra feature like maybe enemies that drop food and the player’s weight can effect the way you defeat them more weight= more damage but slower less weight= less damage but faster.