Something I’ve quickly realized about our community is that everybody has different tastes when it comes to realism in regards to weight gain. Most everyone I’ve asked prefers a fast and unrealistic weight gain process. But I’m drawn to the slow, realistic weight gain process that occurs in our every day lives. As someone who identifies as a feeder, finding a fulfilling feeder/feedee relationship is hard as hell. So even that slow weight gain process may not be a reality for feeders, which is why I’ve been wanting to emulate it in a game.
Someone on the bbwchan thread mentioned a weight gain idle game, and this is an idea I’ve been mulling over too. Basically a waifu-simulator with a bigger focus on feeding. But the idea I had is to make the weight gain process mirror real life, where you could be casually playing for months and see little progress. If done right it could be really cool, though on the other hand it could get boring very fast.
So the topic to discuss here is: how much realism is too much? Is a hyper-realistic weight gain game even a good idea?
I like both actually. I think the problem with the slower process is: how do you make that into a game that’s fun/engaging/sexy without have to click 7 million buttons?
As someone that tends to swing between feedee and feeder, let me tell you that this particular subject is the biggest pain about role-playing with most of this community. The number of times a character expects to break a chair with their fat rolls from eating one particularly large feast really bothers me. I love to see a more gradual process of gaining, not necessarily pound by pound over the case of weeks, but I prefer there to be at least some measure of time that can track a characters process. While designing Voracious, I’ve been trying to find a nice balance where a player can build their character to gain weight at high speeds, but it would still take at least a week or so of in game time to get to insanely fat levels, and that would be if your character did nothing but eat the fattiest foods and sit on their butt being fed by someone who had put all of their character’s abilities into feeding you. At the slowest, your character could end up gaining as little as 5% fat from any measure of food they ate, which, even when digesting 50-100lbs of food in an 8 hour sleep, would only gain as much as little as 2-5lbs of fat.
Realism in weight gain is a big point for me, and one I’ve been keeping in mind when designing systems for Arrautza. I personally prefer a slow gain, and attempt to model some amount of realism in my systems. Though now antiquated, the game I posted to FA had some of my initial attempts at this. The calories in the food where (at least initially) set to be fairly realistic, the body broke down the various components of the food at different rates (i.e. you digested fats, proteins, carbs, etc. at different rates) and the absorption rate for those (how much was actually placed as fat) was not 100%. Obviously, the main component of the game that didn’t attempt to be realistic was how much you could eat.
I’ve learned quite a few lessons from that, lessons I intend to incorporate in the “Chef Reloaded” game, namely the balance of realism and unrealistic mechanisms. Its my belief that the most enjoyable experience will be a fairly realistic gaining scenario that has items or events that can temporarily make the situation more unrealistic. For instance, I intend to remove the ability for stomachs to grow indefinitely in capacity. The maximum capacity of the gaining target will, in fact, be static. The thing that will change is their appetite and gluttony (when they feel hungry and how much of their max capacity that they’re willing to eat to). However, I will add items/events that will temporarily boost that max capacity, allowing the player to take advantage of it from a short time period. Much much more rare items/events would be used to add a tiny, permanent boost.
I think this will be more interesting in the long run mostly because it makes that chances more “special.” Increasing your capacity in, say, Noone’s game on FA wasn’t that big of a deal because it happened all the time. Same with my old game. If that event was incredibly uncommon, I think that would change. Further, this would strike a balance (hopefully) between realistic and unrealistic gains, at the same time as making the unrealistic parts feel more (again) “special.”
That’s one thing that bothers me about fetish master: That someone can eat so much that they look 9 months pregnant. Maybe ill mod that some time. Either lower stomach capacity or make all the food more filling
I will always be the first to push towards realism in fetish content. I find that, so long as it is at least based in realistic processes it can become all the more stimulating.
Of course, you don’t want to over do it as things can easily become convoluted, boring and restrictive.
I mean as fat as people can get the human body is crazy inefficient when it comes to food processing and digestion. Even if you ate 20,000 calories in a day, you’d probably only absorb a small percent and an even smaller percent would be converted to fat. It’s not really proportional to the amount eaten as there is sort of a cap to the amount one can absorb in a day. So if one can only absorb 3000 calories, the rest just leaves the body as waste.
And of course the body will naturally use the calories we absorb for basic body process and most of the rest is stored in blood sugar or in quick access reserves. Actual fat conversion is much slower and effect an even smaller proportion of the intake mass.
For my game I’ve set up factors that mimic a lot of the human metabolic system, including the way basal metabolic rate and active metabolic rates work and methods to simulate calorie burn. Of course this has the side effect of slowing things way down; an interesting example is the effects of a slow metabolism: the slower the metabolism the lower the BMR, meaning its easier to go over the limit and get fat, but you’ll get fat slower than if you had a fast metabolism because things convert at slower rates.
Although to avoid things getting to brought down by these facts I use the lore’s “nano-machine” excuse to make things extra-humanly efficient for fattening up and processing things at more noticeable speeds that can scale up for extreme batches of calorie intake, but the fact that it still has some place in the realm of realism makes for a sexier experience. At least for me. Not that I don’t mind ridiculous magic fat stuff, but in general, the less I have to suspend my disbelief to get these fanciful outcomes, the more interesting the material is. And “it’s nano-machines” gives me enough room to warp some of the realism to be “well, this is kind of how it works, but not really” and stretch things into the fanciful.
I found where stomach volume is calculated in Fetishmaster and ended up halving it to see how things played. I actually really enjoyed the experience once i did. I think if i was to make it a permanent feature of my mods i’d have to really tweak all the food items for volume and caloric content to make it nice. One other problem i have is that it’s tied to the value of abdomen.max_size which is a soft limit on the max size a proxy’s belly can get. The formula is simply stomach volume = abdome.maxvolume/2 which…really needs to be changed. that means a proxy with a belly as fat as a couch can eat like a million cakes or bottle of milk.
Several years ago, I might’ve said that it didn’t matter either way, but nowadays I much prefer slower gains. In a game, I would like to have to work for my gaining. It provides more incentive to explore the world and do other stuff.
The main problem is figuring out how to do the formulas, and figuring out what all needs to be done to get realistic results without over complicating things. I’ve never been good with math, so it takes a lot of planning and trial and error.
I personally stand on the more unrealistic side of the scale, by my argument now is more related to the game design side of things.
One of the reasons games are rewarding is because they provide instant feedback to your actions. Even when we consider waiting games, we are always making choices that have meaningful impacts in the game world(When you choose not to spend a billion cookies to buy a Portal in cookie clicker in exchange for buying a better Time Machine later), and the effects of our interactions with the game are always very clear(Whenever you buy something, you will see a number go up, and will know that you did something). Doing a realistic “slow” weight gain is not consistent with this idea. Not only the feedback loop is extremely slow, but the results are also not visible most of the time. The result might be a game that feels boring, and where you feel like your actions have very little consequence.
That doesn’t mean it is impossible, just that it will need new and different hooks to keep people interested. I cannot directly help you in this since I do not entirely understand what draws you guys to slow weight gain, but first I would suggest that you guys define the specific experience that you want to replicate, the very thing you find hot, that excites you when you think about slow weight gain, then we work together to find game mechanics that are able of replicating these experiences.