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Would greatly appreciate the community’s feedback on my plan.
Inspiration
A Dark Room, but a little less minimalistic. There’ll be enough “state” to populate a dedicated UI for it. I am not an artist, but if one wants to contribute to the project, I can find ways to integrate it into the UI.
Premise
Your character is afflicted with an exponentially increasing appetite, and your goal is to satisfy it. At the start of the game you are hungry enough to gain 1% of your body weight that day, and if you only meet each day’s needs, you will be 10 times your starting size in a year.
There will be character customization to an extent. For now the character will be female. You’ll be able to choose your, age, height, starting weight, body type (pear/ass, apple/belly, triangle/boobs, hourglass, rectangle), fitness level, and backstory from a series of questions.
Core Mechanics
Hunger = metabolism - consumption.
Metabolism is set at day start given the prescribed weight gain rate and increases intra-day by performing actions other than eating. Traveling is the main metabolism impact in the early game. The impact to metabolism from traveling is derived from your current weight, food consumed, and local inventory (things you’re carrying).
Note on traveling: the world is procedurally generated, so you have to roam about a bit to figure out where everything is.
Overeating (ending a day with negative hunger) permanently changes your weight gain curve. Obvious benefits aside, this increases the difficulty of the game, as food is a limited resource unless you cultivate relationships to ensure your supply.
The hunger stat impacts your available actions, acting as a sort of “sanity” mechanic. Being overly hungry will alter the speech and actions available in a given situation. Where a player will usually be able to have a normal conversation with an NPC, as the hunger stat increases, the available speech options are reduced to those centered around your appetite and food, until all you can do is ask to be fed, or worse.
Hunger also increases the chance of involuntary actions. Examples include ordering more food than you selected at a restaurant, eating food you intended to save for later, or eating ingredients raw instead of cooking them. This escalates into having the option to voluntarily eat increasingly inedible objects, and those can become targets for involuntary consumption as well if the hunger gets high enough. Once an item type is eaten due to high hunger, it can be eaten anytime, acting as a sort of skill unlock.
There will be a toggle for vore in the settings. If toggled on, vore is the final escalation of hunger, and always occurs as an involuntary action first. If toggled off, this may become a bad end, but I’m not 100% sure yet.
All item types have varying chances of causing Sickness when consumed. Notable among these are certain raw ingredients like meat and eggs. Sickness mechanic is a simple percent chance to throw up, reducing the consumption stat by a random amount but having a high percentage chance of resolving the Sickness.
Money
Cash is finite, credit is not. Your character is jobless and their appetite doesn’t let them get one, but they have some savings and an Amex card, specifically. To that end, your credit limit increases each month as long as you pay your balance in full and spend more than the previous month.
Money can be avoided by stealing. Theft can be done stealthily, or by intimidation. Nothing like a drooling 750lb behemoth staring your down to make the pimply-faced teenager at McDonalds not give a fuck if you pay for the hundred burgers you just shoveled down your throat.
The other way of getting cash or more credit is NPCs.
NPCs and relationships
Relationships with NPCs are the macro component of the game. NPCs are procedurally generated from archetypes, and once encountered become a permanent fixture in the world. The stat that ties each NPC to the player is affection, and each archetype has different ways to impact affection.
Once affection is high enough, the NPC is considered recruited and will passively provide food and/or cash to the player. The higher you drive that affection, the more they produce.
Some NPCs will cosign a credit card for you, and others will let you charge things on their cards. The latter is basically free money.
Broad categories of NPC I’ve come up with so far
Your parents are probably going to be the first NPC you build a relationship with because it’s practically automatic. Like you have to go out of your way to break the relationship. Not available if you select the orphan backstory (hard mode), and their already low production stat is cut in half if you select the single-parent backstory. The highest production potential is in the divorced backstory, but you need to help both parents find partners, and then recruit those partners too, as well as mending the bridge between your parents so that all four can work together to keep you fed.
Open feeders / gooners are the easiest NPC to recruit, since they’re actively attracted to the player’s gluttony, but they’re rare to encounter. Maximize initial affection by approaching in a hunger-crazed state and allow them to witness you gorge yourself.
Closeted feeders will be scared away by extreme acts of gluttony, and need to be coaxed into accepting their kink and you.
Normal people will have an aversion to your gluttony and weight, so you need to heavily romance them first. These NPCs are some of the best sources of cash and credit in the game.
Ending?
Immobility will be the approximate halfway-to-2/3-point of the game. At that point you’re entirely dependent on your NPCs to keep you fed, and cultivating new relationships will be a lot more difficult.
Where I’m not clear is how to end the game. I considered that the meta-goal should be to make the playthrough last as long as possible, and there’s no clear good ending, but rather multiple bad endings you’re trying to avoid. Open to suggestions here.
Feel free to share your thoughts on this idea in general. Is this something that actually sounds like fun, not just fap material?