Size Desire is a male-centric gay mlm sandbox-ish life sim/text adventure Twine game that’s all about getting big! There’s 5 characters you can interact with, all with weight that may increase/decrease depending on how you interact with them. There’s also a secondary focus on muscle because I like muscle-fat a lot, but if that’s a turnoff, you can avoid most of that stuff by not working out.
Your interactions will change depending on both your weight and the weight of the characters! The characters are technically not romanceable, but you can have flirty and sexual interactions with them.
The game contains images for each character, including yourself at pretty much every stage of weight, including descriptions!
PLAY HERE!
I’m actually looking for feedback as well, so please let me know of any bugs, bad layout, or writing you think is bad/missing! I want to make this better, so I’m incredibly open to feedback and I won’t be offended if you have negative criticism.
I really like a lot of what you have so far, and I’m always happy to see a male-centric game. As someone who has been slowly figuring out a concept very similar to this in twine, I’m always happy to see the genre expand.
The art is all really, really cute. I think you did a really good job there and would love to see more added to it. One of the endings totally caught me off guard, but wasn’t unwelcome.
Based on your own commentary in the releases notes on itch, you have a clear idea of what needs work: a lot of the formatting feels a little messy. If there are specific points I’d have it would be:
This is the biggest one: I’d put the PC weight and the other character weights in a different menu, maybe one accessible at any time. Also, I’d put some kind of .toFixed method on the weights, just because all the decimal points look very messy. Some of the display also seems a little off, David’s weight doesn’t seem to display his fat plus his muscle and base.
2.) You say it’s not a big priority, but I think having some kind of time system would do a lot for the game’s pacing. Some of the changes are very, very sudden and seem to occur just because I cheesed an event over and over. Maybe it’s a taste thing, but I like the flow of a game where I’m nudging a character into a certain habit.
3.) I also think a little bit of extra sign-posting for your own and other character’s sizes might be helpful. I don’t know what your calculation for it looks like, but if you do an event that pushes a character to the next tier, a single line maybe kicking them away until you sleep could convey what the player should pay some more attention towards.
These are all my initial thoughts after one play through to game over, I’m sure I’ll be playing again at some point today and might have more to say. Still, this is very good work in my book!
Omg thank you so much for playing through the game and giving such detailed advice! I’m really glad you liked it!
I think I know the ending that caught you off guard. I had a bit of fun with that lol. If I expand on the story + world a bit (like random stuff like bowling or mini golf with Adam), I may make it so you see him in passing. I will keep it so he isn’t a ‘main’ character that you visit and such though, so it keeps a lot of the surprise when he shows up randomly.
I agree on the formatting being very messy. I kinda just kept putting it off in favour of doing the much more fun writing and art. Definitely need to do some sort of side display or menu. Like a weight button that brings up a menu where you can flick through different characters and their weights or something. The fixed number weight amounts is something I really need to add, too.
It’s good to hear thoughts on adding a time system. I genuinely wasn’t sure if people would want it. I think I enjoyed not having it because it makes play testing super quick when I cheese it. But come to think of it, I do like similar games with time systems that involve having to work around the time like the Curse of Something. I’m bumping it up on my priority list!
I will have to add some signposting and text effects, too. I think I also need to split some of the big giant walls of text. They definitely are not helping on the readability and focus front.
Again, thank you so much for the feedback!!! I believe I will be able to add all of these! It just might take me a fair while, and I may split them into small updates.
Please feel free to give me more advice or observations in the meantime! Even something as simple as grammar errors.
If you want, you can also look through the code in Twine to get insight on how I made it. If you look at it, I apologize in advance because it is the most spaghetti of codes.
I can absolutely give the code a look if you’re comfortable with that! I’m not an expert by any means, but if you’re comfortable with people poking through there I can browse it and give some suggestions.
Also, I agree on the walls of text. I think Twine games look better with shorter paragraphs, and also breaking things up can help show opportunities for adding iteration and more subtle changes.
One question I have, for strategy, is what’s the best way to build muscle and cut down on fat? I’m operating on the “you gotta eat big to get big” principle, and am having a hard time seeing if I should do a cutting/bulking cycle or just ride a fine line. I think maybe having something in that sleep passage that shows in green or red text gains and losses might help there too.
Muscle gain without fat is a little tricky in the game. I wrote it so you gain more muscle per amount of exercise if you have eaten more calories. So a cutting/bulking cycle would make sense. The only problem is that I made it very hard to lose fat. So riding the fine line while spamming exercise may be the way to go for now.
You can lose fat, still though. You can spam sleep and I think that makes you lose fat 0.1 at a time or something very low. I think spamming exercise with no/super low calories helps as well, but it doesn’t do too much either. I’ll probably have to balance this to make fat loss a little easier in the future. Especially if I am adding that time system.
I do have an easy way, but it’s almost kind of a cheat. You can find it by feeding David.
A little bit more formatting will help out a lot, because right now the UI is mostly default. I’d recommend looking at other Twine games for inspiration.
It’s best to keep the menu options in a consistent order on each page, they jump around a little bit. Also there’s large gaps of whitespace between lines on some pages.
Having a little bit of randomness might help the game loop, instead of knowing what will happen when you click the same menu option.
I barely noticed the menu options jumped around in order lol. That should be pretty simple to fix!
Also love the idea of randomizing things and will be adding it to my things to do! It would feel a lot more like a world if you go to a location and it isn’t just the same person/people there.
This already has a ton of potential! I really like where it’s going already!
I think before focusing too hard on randomness, it might be a good idea to make some more granular options. It’s basically impossible to, say, have the other guys get muscular while not getting super muscular yourself. Maybe have options for working out with each guy where you can work out together to each build a little muscle, be their spotter to have them build muscle for themselves, or have them spot you so you can build more muscle. Would help facilitate some differing physiques between everyone, I think. Maybe have some way for characters to lose muscle, even if only a little bit? Maybe a “lazy hang out” option to keep the vague realism of everything.
I enjoyed playing the game. I always get excited when I see new male centered weight gain games on here!
Getting to read the descriptions changing the fatter the characters get is always a lot of fun. I think my one critique would be able to see the character pictured more regularly. I feel as though I have to choose other options just to see some characters’ developments. Like when I bring Adam and Ace to the eating contest.
I got excited to see how large Oscar was initially, it made me wish there was an option to sabotage his progress at gym.
I do agree the formatting for all the guys’ stats could be done better. Everything is pretty spaced out and not fun to read. Perhaps limiting the measurement to the tenths place after the decimal so we don’t get these long trailing numbers.
But you’ve got a good base here! Gonna keep my on on this!
A very interesting game with a great potential.
I agree with what the others said to improve gameplay.
I too would like to reverse role with oscar (and wouldn’t be bad having a fit sprite for him too) as well as a way to defeat the grunt that appears when you turn adam into a blob without becoming immobile yourself .
This was a very nice game to play. There aren’t many male centric WG games out there and this was is very promising. The art and animations were good, just wished I could have made everyone bigger :). I think the muscle gain weight loss function was a bit vague, and I saw it explained in a previous comment, so maybe make a clearer route? And it’s too bad you can’t make Oscar fat agin
I also sent some fan art on your