Well they are the reigning champs. But I may add one more size to them. Since the jam might get extended.
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Minor point, but does buying the cookbook mess up the exp gaining from practising cooking? I can’t seem to level up cooking like I could before…
Also is there a benefit to improving your cooking? I’ve been having success with making food at level 1, so does the food continue to improve in quality or does levelling merely just improve your chances at success?
It should just give 50 exp instead of 25. Shouldn’t affect it at all. I’ll have a suss.
It does. Healthy food needs a level of 6, normal is 4 and greasy is 2.
If your below the level, the chance it will succeed is randomised. 1/6 for healthy, 1/4 for normal and 1/2 for greasy.
So you got lucky 
Interesting. I’ll look forward to see if any further changes get implemented and give it another bash. I’ve got my starting day worked out, now it’s just a case of realising that the secret to hitting the higher weight levels is actually healthy food, to allow for more opportunities to eat during the day. Don’t fall into the grease trap, kids!
I’ll be sure not too since I’m vegetarian
Looked into it. It appears that your cooking skill only levels up when your EXP is exactly 100 instead of over 100. So it works normally if your only doing increments of 25 or 50. But if you buy the cookbook when your at 25 or 75, you can’t level up anymore.
Note: the way I would fix this is to obviously make the check Cooking EXP >= 100 instead of just == 100, but also to replace the Cooking EXP = 0 with Cooking EXP -= 100, so that the leftover EXP isn’t wasted.
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That would explain things. Good spot 
Figure I’d give my full playthrough of Version 1.4 in the spoilers below, this was an attempt to get the girls to max size while still able to beat the game. (If someone could show me how to do that open/close arrow thing for hiding long texts it would be appreciated.)
Like AlexKay mentioned, the main way to get to max size isn’t brute forcing the +kg but managing hunger. A delivered greasy meal will give +7 kg, but you need more than 75 free hunger in order to not throw it back up, so the ratio ends up being about 10.75 hunger points spent per kg. Normal Food has a much worse ratio with about 25 hunger points spent per kg, but Healthy food has a slightly better ratio of 8.3 hunger points per kg. But the absolute best way to gain weight, in real life and ingame, is snacking in between meals. Ordering a girl to just eat gives the best deal of +5 kg for 25 hunger, with a ratio of 5 hunger points per kg. Upgrading this action with better ingredients actually gives it a worse ratio of +8 kg for 50 hunger (6.25 h/kg ratio).
So that’s all well and good, but how do we get back hunger points for the girls to eat? Each girl gets +50 hunger at the beginning of each day and each action they do gives more, (except eating obviously). Relaxing gives +10 hunger, Working gives +25 and Training gives a whopping +40 points. Now the obvious course of action would be to just have the girls train until they’re hungry and have them go eat, while feeding them healthy food during mealtimes. But even this won’t get you to max size. That’s because every action they spend training, they burn 2 kg of weight, which as we’ve established is a pain to get back. So what you actually need to do is have put them to work as much as possible. This not only gives the most hunger points per action at no weight cost, but gives you plenty of money to buy digestives from the store, which will let them spend even more time eating.
Now even just doing this will not provide enough calories to get to max size in time for the tournament, so you’re going to need to switch up your strategy. About halfway through when you have enough digestives, you’re going to need to throw everything I said about hunger ratios out the window. Get the better ingredients upgrade and start making greasy food again, so they bulk up quickly over the last half of the week and get them training so that they can get to a decent level.
Now that we’ve discussed what to do with the girls, now we need to talk about what you need to do. The first morning you’re going to want to work so that you can afford the work training upgrade in the afternoon, which is going to give you the majority of your income. After that your are going to spend the majority of your time cleaning the dorm, since working all day everyday and eating healthy garbage for every meal is going to make the girls miserable. Don’t bother trying to learn how to cook. You need to get to level 6 for it to affect Healthy Meals and, as discussed, regular mealtimes aren’t how your girls going to gain weight. Even a failed healthy meal won’t hurt you because it only requires 10 hunger points to eat. I somehow managed to fail at cooking every single meal in my playthrough but still managed to get my girls to level 10 at max size with this strategy, easily enough to beat the championship.
Next we’ll talk shopping. Ignore the cookbook, ignore the entertainment system (If you’re doing your job right, the girls shouldn’t be relaxing ever), buy work training ASAP, buy training equipment when you can and don’t buy the better ingredients too early. The bed gives a useful buff but it only applies on the day of the tournament, so save it for last. What you really want are the digestives. Because going shopping wastes an action, you’re only going to want to make 3 or 4 trips throughout the entire week. First time should be day one afternoon to get the work upgrade, then again when you can afford the training equipment, the ingredient upgrade and as least a dozen or so digestives, maybe one more trip when you run out of digestives before finally the last day when you want to spend all of your money on the bed and maybe the entertainment system if you want.
Oh, right rent. The game has a rent counter that is supposed to go up by 25 every day, but I think it only charges you 100 gold every day. You do need to have the required amount on hand however or else you’ll get dinged by the landlord. Two dings and it’s game over, but that does mean you can just spend all your money on the last day and not worry about getting evicted if you’re in good standing. Also note that you need at least one more gold than what the sign asks for. If you go to the office with just the exact amount in your pocket, you’ll get dinged and one step closer to eviction. Same goes for overeating, if you feed a 75 hunger greasy dinner to a girl with 100 fullness and 175 max fullness, she will throw up, even if it looks like she has enough room. Also as noted before, if you do want to learn how to cook, don’t buy the cookbook when you’re at 25 or 75 Cooking EXP. Because of how the code is handled you’ll go over the max and never level up your cooking skill.
And onto my review of the game itself. Very complex for an RPG maker game and definitely a good start on a management sim. More than a few bugs, but that’s to be expected with a game jam. The art might be a little amateur for more refined tastes but it serves it’s purpose and shows great potential for improvement, certainly good enough by game jam standards. If I had to rank the girls by their art, I would say 1. Giselle, 2. The Middle Fighter in the 3rd fight and 3. Laura.
All in all, an excellent game and one of my top picks for the 2021 Gain Jam.
If the creator is interested in continuing this project, either after the Gain Jam or the proposed extension comes through, I may have few suggestions for improvements:
- Like most games of this type, it can feel a bit repetitive since most players are just going to make the girls do the same thing at the same time. To counteract this, I could recommend adding some light RNG to what happens to the girls to slowly diverge what the best course of action would be given the situation.
- Another way to discourage this “three girls in one” syndrome would be to add what I call “Synergy Mechanics” to the game. For example, say if two girls trained at the same time, they could spar, increasing the EXP gain, but if all three went at once, there wouldn’t be enough room in the training room, reducing the EXP gain.
- Other ideas for “Synergy Mechanics” involving the player: a) if the player is cleaning the dorm while one (and only one) of the girls is relaxing, they could spend time getting to know each other, improving the happiness bonus. b) if the girls are being ordered to eat while the MC is practicing cooking, they could test out the MC’s new recipes, improving weight gained, happiness and Cooking Experience gained. c) the MC could provide help supervision to working girls, improving their productivity if both are working at the same time.
- One more thing that’s more of a QoL thing with me is that maybe instead of using switches to handle the upgrade system, make them key items that can be bought from the store. You just have to change the checks from looking for the switch to instead checking if the party has the key item. That way the player can check what upgrades they have in the inventory screen and not worry about double buying an upgrade.
- Another thing that just bugged me, and maybe only me, was that Lunchtime was after the afternoon and not before. It seemed so weird to have to major meals so close together in the day. If this is a balance thing, fine. I just found it really weird.
- One more idea was to make the Cooking Skill more valuable by having it affect difficult recipes when low, even if only slightly. Now, I notice that if you don’t have enough Cooking Skill for a particular dish, you have a 1 in 4 chance of doing it correctly. Instead of this, how about you set the Cooking Success variable from a random number between 1 and the Skill needed to always succeed (2 for Greasy, 4 for Normal, 6 for Healthy), then subtract your Current Cooking Skill from that number and if the result is 0 or less then the dish succeeds. This makes it so that learning to cook isn’t completely useless if you want to only make Healthy home made meals.
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Ah man. I knew I made a silly mistake somewhere. I’ll get that fixed up and maybe add some extra stuff since we have more time now.
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Oh wow. Never thought someone would make a min/max strategy for the game 
But yeah, I buggered up on the cooking EXP its meant to check if your over 100 and not equal. Must have misclicked.
I was going to add more events, but I had uni stuff to work on and because of the date, I didn’t have time to implement them. But with the extension, I may add a few more “pitfalls” to make it a bit more random.
Those are great ideas Make it more personal at that as well.
Yeah, that’s probably easier to do… Switches are just easy to control I guess.
Well, I went with:
- The first two blocks cover the morning. (I know it says afternoon, but thats my bad naming) So after the morning is lunch.
- Then you have a block for late afternoon followed by dinner. and then the last block before sleep.
Ideally what I should have done is add a breakfast block. Since their “training”, you shouldnt miss any meals at all. So it would end up being Block / Breakfast / Block / Lunch / Block / Dinner / Block
Which having said that, makes more sense…
Hmm, yeah the cooking system was built very roughly. But I do like that idea.
Thanks for the indepth guide! Since we have more time (Well assumed time) I’ll make some fixes.
As for the art, yeah, I’m not great at it. My partner did a lot of the characters. You can tell which ones because mine are much rougher around the edges.
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Great post! I’m also glad you spoiler-hid your guide, since the puzzle of a) getting your team fighting fit and b) max size, essentially is the entire game, and it’s a fun puzzle to be sure!
I like the ideas posited, the synergy idea particularly so as to encourage diversity within the three characters, and I’m pleased to see NickSav share this interest as well. It’s a sign of a good Jam entry when people want to see its continued development outside of the contest. 
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I do like the ideas a lot. In fact, I’m adding some now
I have family stuff tonight and tomorrow though, so might be cutting it fine.
If it’s not ready, I’ll get it to a playable state and upload the changes (and the fixes to cooking EXP + rent payment and the hunger issue (it wasn’t meant to include the amount, just if it’s over)
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Okay, my final update. Took a few ideas from above and implemented them. There’s now random events every 2 days, bonuses and detriments if the girls train together and a bunch of bug fixes.
Enjoy!
I tried version 1.5 but as soon as I start, I get into an infinite loop of all the characters overeating and getting sick before I can do anything.
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Oh shit. I was messing around with some stuff and forgot to re-do the init to how it was. One second!
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Okay, that should fix that!
Well, I’m glad to see my suggestions were helpful and surprised you were able to implement them in such short a time. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a new glitch. On day 2 of my run, the girls enter into an eating contest, which is all well and good, but afterwards, when I tell them to do stuff, nothing that I tell them to do actually gets done and I don’t get the prompt to choose my own action for the timeframe, it just immediately skips to me cooking the meal. And because they just came back from an eating contest, anything I cook for them now makes them overeat.
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Hmm, that’s very odd. I tested each of them extensively. I’ll have a look and see if I can upload a hot fix.
Okay, I think I’ve found the culprit. Its meant to skip time blocks but I skipped one block too many and this caused the issue. The fix is being uploaded now. If you haven’t downloaded the recent version, the v1.51 has it. If you have and just want the fix, just download this map file and override the original one in the data folder inside www.
Map010.zip (3.2 KB)
So, I tried testing out the mapfix, but ran into another glitch, this time with the Oversleeping random event. After the event plays, you tell all the girls what to do and then decide what you’re going to do, the game just stays still on a black screen. You can exit the game through the menu. While checking what went wrong, I noticed that the top left still said “morning” even though it looks like the event is supposed to skip the morning time block.