Appreciate the kind words. One of my big fears is getting too deep into this with harlowe and have it just not function as you get deep into the game. I’m assuming you would suggest moving it all over to sugarcube before I get too deep into development? I’ve looked into it and it doesn’t seem difficult but it does look time consuming. I’ll listen to any and all thoughts on this.
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didnt mean to lol just dont burn out tho
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does anything happen on weekend yet?
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Not currently no, next update should include some content to work through during the weekends.
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The only really useful feature you’d be missing out on by sticking with Harlowe for this game is the built-in saving system, so I’m not sure it’s quite worth reformatting an entire game over it. Especially since I know from experience that having to dig deep into a Twine project to do some rewriting can be pretty bad for motivation. As xpn said, don’t go burning yourself out.
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I would love to see some sort of fitness system added in someday. Seeing fitness and general mobility decline as weight changes is beyond hot.
Maybe even other things start to happen like the character has trouble fitting in desks/tight spaces and takes up more of the couch in the common room too. Lots of small flavor text to spice up things.
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Yes this would take the game to the next level. Maybe even a visit to the campus health office 
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@SpecterFA - Appreciate your thoughts and suggestions. A fitness system is in the concept phase along with a place to increase it (A gym). Subtle flavor text would be the name of the game with that. Will definitely be focused on it at some point.
@gamerca - A campus health office is in fact in the works (no spoilers on what’s going on in there though).
I am announcing that after doing a bunch of research last night into what sugarcube can do, I’ve decided to move over the game to that engine instead of continuing with Harlowe. I have listed out the pros and cons of this for my own documentation, but if anyone has questions about that I can certainly go into detail. This will obviously delay development a little bit as I recode everything, not a ton of work actually really needs to be done as I’ve been able to pick up the differences in the language fairly quickly. However, this will delay the next version of the game until I can get it up in running in sugarcube. In the meantime, keep the suggestions and questions coming if you have them, they have been a huge motivator for me in working on this.
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As a fan of playing Twine games I have no preferences between Harlowe and Sugarcube.
As someone who uses the Twine editor and toys with the idea of writing another game I prefer Sugarcube.
From what i got while playing through the game there is quite a bit of branching started but lots of it was placeholder/introducing ideas. That’ll make the conversion quite a bit easier than if you had branches upon branches of functions and statements.
Im looking forward to seeing this flesh out (ha) more. I toyed with a similar concept but am too smooth brained to put it into a game.
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So far from what I’ve accomplished I’ve found it to be way more feature rich and is opening up a ton of possibilities to really clean up code and passage numbers. This will take time but will be worth it in the long run I believe.
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sugarcube also lets you automatically add hotkeys to all the choices so players can do things like hit 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 3 1 2 1 to play the game faster.
in sugarcube there is a script you can use that analysis the webpage after it’s built and adds hotkeys in then, whereas in harlowe you would need to plan them in advance and they wouldn’t dynamically allocate at all.
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That’s really good to know. I’ll see what I can do with that.
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Some sugarcube discussion/scripts TFGames.Site - Information
(It’s a link to a post someone made that links to all sorts of pre-written sugarcube scripts that they want people to take and use if they so desire.)
Although there’s likely 1000s more snippets to look at on github/gitgud
That’s the good thing about sugarcube imo, you can find javascript functionality all over the internet to add to it.
The bad thing about sugarcube is that it is just harder for an author. harlowe is imo designed for writers who want a game of their work to exist and sugarcube is for coders who want to practice amateur writing (although this distinction isn’t official it’s how I think of it in my head.)
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I’ll for sure check this out. Thank you for providing that link! Hopefully the game will be better for it.
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A lot of the stuff people can do with sugarcube is like… very much so unneeded in a visual novel. But? if you want to make some sort of management or simulation game instead? You might enjoy the extra features.
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i love fitness systems.
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I’m pretty sure I spotted a bug in the way the body image clock is reset. (Set: $BodyImageClock to it -1) in the Bed passage ought to be outside the if; I can’t see anywhere else where $BodyImageClock is set.
The way calories in the case where not all food fits in is… very interesting. Consider the case where $UnfinishedFood is 0.25. Then you actually quadruple the calories consumed - highly exploitable… 
I got my character up to 400 pounds in no time
A more conventional formula would be (Set: $Calories to it + <FoodCalories> * (<FoodSize> - $UnfinishedFood)/<FoodSize>)), e.g. for the French toast: (Set: $Calories to it + 1200 * (10 - $UnfinishedFood)/10)).
A few other variables should be reset every day. It might make sense to define a macro in the intro script (or a startup script) to reset the variables you want to reset every day, and call that in both the falling asleep in front of the TV and bed passages.
An example:
(set:$resetDayVariables to (macro:
(set: $FullnessCheck to 0)
(set: $BS to it + $BS_change)
<!-- etc... -->
))
This is equally applicable to Sugarcube, although the syntax differs. And I agree! Sugarcube is much more flexible.
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I’d like a description of the character showering - of course, that might actually earn the game an 18+ rating
When the character is more than 400 pounds - “You shift your rolls around to properly wash yourself” or something similar?
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@namad - I can for sure see that. A lot of functionality so far has been added just because it exists in sugarcube. Currently finished reworking the intro for a first pass in the sugarcube rework (which I will go into more detail in a progress report later today.
@bbwhound85 - Appreciate the bug report and explanation. I actually managed to fix the code for the unfinished food in the harlowe version of the game prior to moving over to sugarcube. Great idea with the defining a macro point. As you can tell I’m not a natural coder and I’m learning as I’m going. I have a feeling I’ll be working through sections and realizing I can make it a lot easier on myself by cleaning up the code. The showering descriptions will come eventually. Kind of low on my priority list for now.
PROGRESS UPDATE #1:
Alright folks, I plan on putting out progress updates periodically on here to keep you informed on where I’m at in putting out something playable for you all. Right now the plan is to keep moving things over to the sugarcube version. I actually managed to develop some flavor text, random events, and a recurring character in the harlowe version prior to the decision to move over to SC. So with that said, when all is said and done and I have everything moved over I will likely put out a release for people to check out.
Alright, documenting progress for what’s been added and fixed thus far, this is long so I’ll hide it from the main post to keep it smaller. Always looking for feedback on any of this, and a preemptive thank you to those who read this ramblings.
Summary
Content Changed/Added:
- Intro has been fully moved over to sugarcube and with that has brought about a few changes to how it progresses.
- Character Creation mostly happens on one page now with dropboxes for things like height, initial body size, hair style/color, skin color and eye color.
- If anyone has suggestions for more character traits I’m all ears
- Character Style selection still occurs after confirming how you look through an initial mirror scene
- Wardrobe selection is now generated from a list of options that the player picks from through dropboxes. This now allows you as a player to sort of fit how you view the style you selected earlier. You can select the color, type, if it has a design on it, fit, and some modifiers to add some spice to the clothing you pick for your initial wardrobe.
- This is both a blessing in that it provides some more added flavor to the start of each new character.
- And a curse because writing flavor text for all of this stuff is going to take some time. Not a worry though I’ll be going at it in chunks and won’t hold back releases because I’m not finished with it.
- Changed some numbers around for how your initial feelings towards your body/weight so they are more subtle to start.
- This is in preparation to the new events that will affect this.
- Revamped how you select a meal plan in the intro. You now can pick from a light, medium, and heavy meal plan.
- This is meant to facilitate the dining hall rewrite which removes the ability to select food and instead gives you a base set of calories to consume with random flavor text on what kind of food you get. This was coded out in the harlowe version but remains to still be transferred over.
- Character Creation mostly happens on one page now with dropboxes for things like height, initial body size, hair style/color, skin color and eye color.
Ideas/things to be reworked:
- With the reworked intro I still have some ideas on how to make it run a little smoother
- First, I think I might move the initializing and randomizing of the Roommate and corresponding variables to the initializing passage.
- What this would do is prevent players from refreshing at the roommate generation page until they get a roommate they like the description of, but it would clean up the code a lot. There might even be a better way than that to clean up the code but I’m still learning so we will see if a better solution arises.
- I’m thinking of moving class selection to one page using the dropdown formula. My hesitation on this is I’m not sure how to make it look nice, and have the second box show up minus the first selection. Will see if I can figure it out. A better solution might come to me too
- I also am still grappling with the clothing system
- Currently I have your clothes (once you’ve customized them) show up as variables such as $Top1, $Bottom1, 2, and 3. Each one of these variables has properties attached to them like $Top1.Color or $Bottom1.Design, meant to indicate what selections players have made. I don’t know if this is the best way to go about it.
- If anyone has ideas on that I’m more than happy to mess around with them. This game is a work in progress and I’m not afraid of going back and reworking things.
- First, I think I might move the initializing and randomizing of the Roommate and corresponding variables to the initializing passage.
That’s all I have for now. Thank you to those who read this and again, any suggestions are helpful. Have a good one!
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I am not sure if this solves your problem but would it make sense to create an object for clothing? Something like:
Top {
Shirt {
Color: xxx,
Style: xxx},
Sweater {
…
And so on. Then another for bottom.
Also, I’m no Sugarcube expert so someone else probably has a better example or method.
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